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| I was surrounded by fish. There were fish above me, fish below me, and fish to either side. It was a bewildering sight. So was my vantage point. Instead of looking down at a marine reef, I was halfway up a rocky bluff that rises sheer from a desert floor studded with large cardon cactus. Ten miles from the Gulf of California shore, the fish had been pecked or incised into the sun-warmed volcanic rock by a determined person wielding another rock. Art by percussion, peck by pounding peck! And these artists did not stint on size. One ray had a wing span of three and a half feet.
Rock art is the term applied to all images created by native people on stone, be they painted (pictographs) or incised (petroglyphs). Piedras Pintas, near Mulegé in central Baja California, Mexico, is unique in the global annals of rock art. Nowhere else has such a large and varied encyclopedia of marine life imagery been discovered. Along with dolphinlike figures and marine turtles, nearly 1,500 fish images adorn the fractured rocks and boulders that comprise the bluff. And these are not just generic fish forms; many are detailed down to the family and species level. I see hammerhead sharks, bat rays, and sailfish. This is a stone aquarium surrounded by a sea of sand. Obviously the people who created these images had a thing about marine animals. But who carved these petroglyphs, when, and why? This mystery set me on a search that led to many interesting discoveries about rock art elsewhere, but not, ironically, to answers to my basic questions. I was first introduced to this marine menagerie in 1992 while attending a meeting of Baja California historians in Santa Rosalía, some 45 miles to the north. John Hendricks, director of the Sherman Library in Corona del Mar and an organizer of the conference, arranged a visit to Piedras Pintas. (The name means “painted rocks” in Spanish, despite the fact that the images are incised rather than painted.) After a hot, bumpy ride over desert roads, our four-wheel-drive caravan came to a stop at a nondescript bluff. Only as I reached the base of the bluff did images of fish begin to materialize under the relentless light of the desert sun. As I ascended, rock by jagged rock, more emerged, like stars slowly appearing in a darkening sky. We didn’t stay long, and I did not realize how extensive and detailed these images were. I did notice and was intrigued by the fact that most of the fish were in a vertical position. I knew I wanted to return. This place was so strange—a desert celebration of the living seas. WESLEY MARX, author of The Frail Ocean, writes frequently on ocean issues. E-mail him at wmarx@globalcrossing.net. The full text of this abridged article appears in the print edition of Coast & Ocean. |
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