At many places covered by this reconnoissance there were found
interesting collections of engraved figures of ancient date cut on
bowlders or vertical cliffs. These are generally situated in the
neighborhood of ruins, but sometimes exist far from human remains. They
generally have geometrical forms, rectangular and spiral predominating.
Associated with these occur also representations of human beings,
birds, and animals, and figures of bird tracks, human hands, and bear
claws. There is a remarkable similarity in all these figures which
sometimes occur on the stones composing the masonry of the buildings
which indicates they were contemporaneous. They were pecked on the
stones with rude stone chisels, but as a rule show no indication of
paint. None of these figures could be regarded, without the wildest
flights of the imagination, as letters or hieroglyphics, and there
is no indication that inscriptions were intended. Their general
character, as shown in a cluster (pl. 33), indicates rather clan
symbols; in some instances spiral forms were probably made to indicate
the presence of water. The incised figures on the walls of buildings
were probably decorative in character, the first efforts of primitive
man to embellish the walls of his dwellings, an art which reached
a very high development in Mexico and Central America. There are,
however, indications that these figures were covered with plaster and
were therefore invisible, so that we might suppose them to be masons’
signs, indicating the clan kinship of those who constructed the walls.
Perhaps the largest group of these pictographs occurs on an eroded
bowlder near the mouth of the Yellow Jacket Canyon, just below the
great promontory separating it from the McElmo, on the surface of which
are the remarkable dwellings composed of slabs of stone set on edge.
Another large cluster, the members of which are of the same general
style as that already mentioned, was seen in Sandstone Canyon, a few
miles south of the road from Dolores to Monticello. There are several
groups of pictographs in the neighborhood of the large towers elsewhere
described. The most noteworthy of these is situated at the head of
the south fork of Square Tower Canyon on a vertical cliff below the
ruined Tower No. 4. The face of the cliff is very much eroded, and the
figures are in places almost illegible. They consist of bird designs,
accompanied with figures of snakes, rain clouds, and other designs,
portions of which are obliterated and impossible of determination. As a
rule, these pictographs resemble very closely those in the cliff-houses
of the Mesa Verde and add their evidence of a uniformity of art design
in these two regions.
In addition to pictographs cut on the surface of the cliff, we also
find in sheltered caves others not incised but with indications of
color, showing the former existence of painted figures. Some of these,
however, are not ascribed to the Indians who built the towers, but to
a later tribe who camped in this region after the house builders had
disappeared. They were probably made by wandering bands of Ute Indians,
and are not significant in a comparison of the different kinds of
buildings described in this article.