Mesa Verde National Park: Rock Art

A cairn found in Cohab Canyon, Capitol Reef National Park.

Frank and Anne's Canyon Country Hiking and Camping Notebook.

Mesa Verde National Park

Campsite

This page contains a discussion of the rock art found within Mesa Verde National Park. All photographs are from our our personal collection. If you'd like to see more rock art from this location, or if you'd like to see higher resolution or larger images, send us an e-mail message and we'll see what we can do.

Rock Art

Over all of the times that we have visited Mesa Verde National Park, we have only seen these two samples of rock art within the Park. I am sure there must be more. Perhaps we have focused our attention on the cliff dwellings and other ruins and have simply failed to notice the art work. Also, there are not many hiking trails within the park, and much of the rock art that we have "discovered" in other areas has been away from the more frequented areas.

All of these photos have been resized and manipulated in Photoshop to give the best representation of the image. Some color distortion is inevitable. If you would like to see higher quality versions of these shots, or if you would like to use these images for any purpose, please contact us and we would be glad to help if we can.

For more information on how to preserve and protect these priceless historic treasures:

See American Antiquities Act of 1906.
See Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979.
Archaeological Resources Protection Act Hotline: 800-227-7286.
See Archaeological Site Etiquette.

This panel is from one of the cliff dwellings. If I remember correctly, it was actually a wall of one of the ruins. These are petroglyphs, and there appears to be some later scratchings that have cluttered the surface. If I remember correctly, this panel is about six feet tall.

Rock art panel in Mesaverde National Park.

This piece of work is on a single stone that was inserted into a ruin on the mesa top. Either the stone was placed and then these swirls were added after, or the stone was cut from a larger piece that already had the swirl. I suspect the later because of how the swirls leave the edges of the stone, yet continue on on the other side of the block.

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This page was last updated Friday, June 12, 2009

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