Petroglyphs are synonymous with the Southwest, and can be found all around Arizona.
However, there’s a hidden gem near the border of Glendale and Phoenix that’s celebrating a milestone this month while paying homage to ancestral Indigenous peoples who once inhabited the Valley of the Sun.
“We’re definitely a well-kept secret, not intentionally,” acccording to John Bello, assistant director of the Deer Valley Petroglyph Preserve. “You can see the neighborhood. We get community members coming in from over there, and they’re like, ‘I’ve lived here 20, 30 years, and I never knew this place existed.’”
This 47-acre site is nestled in the Hedgpeth Hills of north Phoenix.
It’s where archeologist J. Simon Bruder and a team of eight crew members — including two high school volunteers — spent 36 days documenting more than 1,500 unique petroglyphs in 1980.
These rock carvings were discovered by workers with the Maricopa County Flood Control District and Army Corps of Engineers while looking to build a dam along Skunk Creek to protect Phoenix residents and homes from monsoons.
But the tale of this land actually began some 10 million years earlier.
“There was a fissure volcano, so the land split open,” Bello said. “The lava oozed out and over the million years since then, it has dried and cooled and turned into, you know, these andesite basalt boulders before us today.”
Then, beginning about five millennia ago, Bello explained that the Western Archaic, Patayan and Hohokam peoples came and left their mark in stone upon 579 glyph-bearing boulders spread around the modern preserve.
The Western Archaic were the first to emerge in 5000 B.C. They disappeared in 300 A.D. and were followed by the Hohokam and Patayan until 1450 A.D. Bello characterized this spot as “a respite along the way for communities as they were traveling to the urban centers at the time.”
Walking along the quarter-mile trail from the preserve’s visitor center, Bello highlighted a few of his favorite rock carvings, including the iconic “kissing deer” that came from the Hohokam.
“One of them is defined by its age, our oldest petroglyph here,” he said, adding that it was chiseled by the Western Archaic some 5,000 years ago. “And so it’s an atlatl and then on top of it, there’s a goat.“
Whereas the newest petroglyph — a human stick-figure carving from the Patayans — is only about 500 years old, with Bello stressing “it’s an opportunity to dispel myths about archeology. People think, you know, some of these spaces were built by aliens.”
They weren’t etched by extraterrestrials.
But why ancient peoples decided to chisel what they did into these volcanic rocks remains a mystery to Bello and his contemporaries. He believed the only way to truly know “would be to get a time machine, go back and ask them.”
“The best thing we can do,” Bello added, “is work with descendants to sort of find out what it means to them today.”
Aaron Wright is trying to accomplish that.
He’s a preservation anthropologist with the Tucson-based nonprofit Archeology Southwest and will oversee a re-inventory of petroglyphs at Deer Valley as early as February, funded, in part, by grants from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and National Endowment for the Humanities.
“The quality of the data was relatively poor,” said Wright, adding that “it’s largely, in part, because the work was done so long ago that the technologies are antiquated.”
“These important resources have not been looked at or assessed in detail in over 40 years, so we have no real idea of their condition, how they’ve changed.”
Unlike the previous inventory conducted some four decades ago, Wright is centering Indigenous informed questions, like “how do tribes want us to do this work?" So, he’s hiring consultants from the Four Southern Tribes — Salt River Pima-Maricopa, Gila River, Tohono O’odham and Ak-Chin — to help out.
These O’odham communities are descendants of the Hohokam, who are credited with constructing miles of ancient canals that cut through the Sonoran Desert. Wright has also worked to engage with Yavapais because they’re historically tied to the Patayans, but says he’s been less successful in doing so.
“Because it’s the Phoenix Basin, [the ancestral tribes are] predominantly Akimel O’odham, and therefore Gila River and Salt River,” Wright elaborated. “Deer Valley Petroglyph Preserve is located in, of course, ancestral O’odham country, but it’s also located in ancestral Yavapai country, and so there’s an overlap.”
Tribally informed archeological research essentially didn’t exist until Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, more commonly known as NAGPRA.
This federal law requires cultural objects and artifacts, including human remains, to be returned to tribes. Arizona Congressman Mo Udall introduced the act that President George H. W. Bush signed in 1990.
“So you’ve had a generation or two of archeologists turn over, coming up in a NAGPRA environment,” added Wright. “People have to work with tribes. This is not a foreign concept. There are structures in place to facilitate it.”
At the recent reception for a new preserve exhibit titled “Tales from the Land,” Jacob Moore agreed. He’s Tohono O’odham and the special advisor to the president on American Indian Affairs at Arizona State University, which has co-stewarded the site alongside Maricopa County since its official opening on Dec. 10, 1994.
“There’s really an important link and role between universities, public lands and tribes in protecting these areas,” Moore said. “Not only the history, but traditional knowledge and understanding that, you know, is beyond just contemporary, and in some ways even can challenge Western science and what we understand about the world around us.”
Also in attendance was Bobby Stone, a former lieutenant governor of the Gila River Indian Community. Like Moore, it was his first time visiting the Deer Valley Petroglyph Preserve.
“This is new for me,” Stone admitted. “I like to travel around, especially the petroglyphs, and it’s always humbling. I’m still learning, but we gotta share and keep that circle of knowledge going for all of our children.”
