petroglyphs gallery
Texas USA
  

Hueco Tanks Historical Park is located about 30 miles east of El Paso. Here an igneous outcrop of syenite has been exposed and eroded into three mountain-like formations. Water is trapped and held by numerous hollows (the "huecos" for which the park was named), and the cracks, fissures and overhangs of the formation provide shelter for a surprising variety of plants and animals. Humans have been coming here for over 10,000 years, drawn by this desert oasis.

There are over 3000 paintings on the stone (pictographs) left hidden in shelters, crevices and caves by the different people who lived here or visited the area. The Desert Archaic people (6000 B.C. to A.D. 450) created abstract designs and hunting scenes including animals and humans with shaman-like characteristics. 

The Jornado Mogollon people (A.D. 450 to 1400) are responsible for the majority of the rock art here. Most significant may be over 200 painted masks, which seem to document a cultural turning point as influence from Mesoamerican gods combined with the animistic concepts of the Desert Archaics. A new religion of masked spirit beings was created, with a figure of a masked dancer showing beyond doubt a connection to the kachinas of the present day Pueblo peoples, where the masked dancer becomes an intermediary between spirit and human worlds.

After 1500, tribes such as the Mescalero Apache, Kiowa and Tigua paused long enough to create pictures of snakes, dancers, handprints, ritual celebrations and at least one narrative of events in the area. This continues to be a sacred landscape.