cc >> Norman Gilliland: Welcome
to University Place Presents. I'm Norman Gilliland.
If you spend any time at all in Wisconsin it's likely that
you've seen some of the state's many effigy mounds.
It's far less likely that you have had a chance to experience
some of the state's rock art, which is also very prevalent,
but tends to be in out of the way places.
What does that rock art mean, who put it there, and, for that
matter, what is its likely future?
Joining me today are two experts on Wisconsin rock art.
They are Robert Boszhardt, better known as Ernie, who's the
president of the Wisconsin Archeological Society, and
also Geri Schrab, who paints watercolors inspired by the rock
art of Wisconsin. And welcome to
University Place Presents. >> Thank you.
Thank you. >> First, we should have some
notion of what we mean when we say rock art.
Now, I have seen paintings on private property in an
undisclosed area of Wisconsin. Is it all painting or are there
other forms too? >> Ernie Boszhardt: Actually,
there are other forms, and paintings are the least common
form of rock art. There's three basic kinds
of rock arts. There's paintings or drawings,
which we call pictographs, and then there are carvings which
are more common, which are called petroglyphs, and that's
usually done in sandstone in caves and rock shelters and
places like that. The other kind of rock art that
we don't usually talk about is portable rock art.
Things like carved pipes and pendants and things like that,
made out of stone, and the portable rock art is important
to archeologists because those are found in context which allow
us to date the site and date those styles and the images and
the iconography easier than carvings or paintings
on the walls of caves and rock shelters.
So dating rock art is a problem for archeologists, but portable
rock art helps us with that. >> Is there that much portable
rock art around? You don't hear about people
just picking it up. >> It's not extremely common but
there's been thousands of pipes, for example, found in Wisconsin
over the past 150 years of doing archeology.
And there are pendants, in fact there's a late prehistoric
culture called the Oneota culture which has large tablets
about a foot in size that are made out of pipestone from
Minnesota, the red pipestone called catlinite, and there's
amazing intricate incising that are done on those tablets which,
again, are bison and birdmen, and things like that.
What kind of time frame are we talking about when we're
talking about the whole sweep of this rock art in Wisconsin?
It's a bit of a problem in terms of how old it is.
We certainly know that the Native Americans were carving
art in Wisconsin for at least a thousand years.
Probably going all the way back 13,000 years when people first
came to the state that we know of.
The earliest known rock art in the Midwest is about 5,000 years
old in Minnesota. So it's probably all the way
through time, but, again, it's very difficult to date the rock.
You can't use carbon-14 dating, for example, on stone.
It has to be organic. >> Geri Schrab: The rock art,
the carvings in Wisconsin are sandstone, primarily,
which is very fragile. >> That's right.
And so many of the carvings may have fallen off the rock
face, and that's one of the concerns now for preservation.
And what sort of things do we find over this course of these
many years of rock art? What kind of images?
Well, Geri and I have a series of sites that we can show
you that is sort of a sample of Wisconsin rock art sites
beginning with one of the earliest ones which we call
Samuel's Cave. And the quick story of Samuel's
Cave, it was found in 1878 by a farmer's boy named Frank Samuel
who followed his dog into a small opening in this hillside,
and he went home and got some lanterns and went into this
cavern and saw on the inside the sandstone, it's about 30 feet
deep, all sorts of carvings and paintings on the wall.
And it the news made it back to the nearest city, which was
La Crosse, and within a few months lots of people have come
visited this site and open up the entrance, and they started
carving their names on the walls of Samuel's Cave.
So when we first went to Samuel's Cave in the 1980s, one
of the things they did back in the 1870s is they actually made
rubbings of the carvings so we have examples of some of that
original art, the pristine art, and that's in this picture in
the lower left-hand side. Those are actual drawings and
the original rubbings from 1879. When we went to Samuel's Cave in
1984, there was all sorts of graffiti and most of those
images had been obliterated but some still remained.
So we did a detailed mapping and documentation of what remained
in Samuel's Cave, and that's shown in the lower right of this
current picture there. And then from that point we can
show you some of the actual images and how they're preserved
if you want to move forward. >> And that's right from the
get-go then, the problem, sort of the mixed blessing with
finding this art is that unlike, say, effigy mounds, which tend
to be a good deal less fragile and subject to modification,
let's say, as soon as the rock art turns up somewhere it's
likely to get compromised. >> Yes.
Well, and when you first went to this site, wasn't it within a
day or two you went back to record it and some of it had
already fallen? >> Yes.
There's two problems with rock art.
One is that people automatically will carve their names.
If they see glyphs they assume, sometimes they don't recognize
what it is and they'll start carving their names and dates on
top of it. So you get graffiti.
And this picture shows Samuel's Cave, one wall of Samuel's Cave
that shows there's actually a human image in the center of
that, but all those other lines are letters and numbers and it's
graffiti from a hundred years. And then off to the right side
you can see a white area, and that's a collapsed wall.
So freeze/thaw will actually collapse a rock art as well and
destroy it. But in doing that detailed
documentation we brought in bright lights into that cave.
We've actually found new rock art.
And on the right side of this picture is actually a painting
that had never been recorded back in the 1870s that we
discovered in the 1980s. We call it the Bubble Man
because it's a human form that has sort of like a dress on the
bottom. It's probably a spirit of some
sort, a human spirit, but we call it the Bubble Man because
if you look carefully over the abdomen, bubble is carved in
graffiti right over the middle of it.
That's why you call him Bubble Man.
I didn't know that. >> I wondered where that title
came from. >> Right, it's because of the
graffiti, unfortunately. >> All of these, or virtually
all of these, and how many of them are there?
Rock art sites in Wisconsin? When we first started in the
1980s, and most of the rock art is in the unglaciated driftless
area in southwestern Wisconsin just because there's rock
exposures there. When we first started looking in
the 1980s, there's was about 20 known rock art sites.
Now, because of the intensive work that's been done in the
past 20 years, there's 150 rock art sites known in Wisconsin.
Each of those sites may have one glyph up to several hundred
glyphs. And, again, most of them are
carvings or petroglyphs, but one cave I'll show you later on,
Tainter Cave, is full of paintings or charcoal drawings
and that was a recent find and a spectacular find.
How many of them visible to the public?
One. >> One.
One out of 150. >> Roche-a-Cri State Park, north
of Friendship, has a rock art site in petroglyphs, which are
the carvings, and pictographs, which are the paintings.
And we have pictures of those further on in the presentation.
We'll get to that a little bit later and see how that's
fairing in terms of holding up. What are some of the other early
sites that were found in the 19th century?
Well, Roche-a-Cri, for example, was first recorded in
the 1940s. So there wasn't a lot of sites
actually recorded in the 1900s. Archeologists were primarily
focused on mound research in the 19th century, into the early
20th century, and every once in a while they would come across a
pretty obvious rock art site. But there weren't many found, it
was Samuel's Cave and a few and then in the 1940s and '50s
there's a little bit of a surge. There's an article in the
Wisconsin Archeologist from 1950 that talks about 15 or so sites.
But then there was another hiatus until about the 1980s,
and that was a worldwide phenomenon in the 1980s where
rock art research just exploded. People started looking at it and
documenting it. Just a quick story of myself is
that I got into archeology in the 1970s, and I've always
worked in Wisconsin, but I never wanted to get into rock art, and
I didn't want to get into rock art because you couldn't date it
so you never knew how old it was and interpreting the meaning was
always a problem. It was just like what does this
stuff mean? Most of the glyphs are abstract
symbols. And so I tried to avoid it.
Well, working in the driftless area, it's there, and so you
can't avoid it. But over time finding more sites
and studying them and analyzing them, we've built up more of an
encyclopedia and we also have new dating techniques.
So now we can understand the age and we can understand some of
the meanings at least. >> Right.
Now, are most of these in caves or are also some in
exposed areas? >> Rock art sites are found in
all different kinds of environments.
I've been going to rock art sites for 17 years.
I've only been in one cave, which was a challenge for me
because I don't like dark and small spaces, but I've seen them
up in the Boundary Waters around the waterways when you're
paddling our canoe out there. >> Yes, I've seen them out there
too. You can paddle up to them and
see them which implies the water level must have been higher.
I don't know. >> Some of those are up pretty
high. >> Yeah, I'm not sure what it
implies, but I've seen them up there.
Jeffers petroglyph site in southwestern Minnesota is on a
rock face that's exposed, completely flat facing the sky.
I've seen them in high desert like Chaco Canyon.
Boulders, just placed out rock shelters along waterways,
wherever there's rock. >> Now, you mentioned, Ernie,
that a lot of these are just symbols, but are there recurring
symbols, recurring figures if we look at Wisconsin rock art?
Yeah, there are. There's a lot of abstract
symbols but there's repeating ones.
There's things like grids, just crossed lines.
There's an oval with a dot in the middle which is oftentimes
interpreted to represent a female symbol of some sort.
And you see there's hundreds of those.
There's things like a turkey track which is just a
three-prong with a leg like a bird print in mud.
Those are fairly common across southwestern Wisconsin and
beyond. So there are reoccurring
symbols. And, of course, the easy ones
are things that we're, obviously birds, obviously buffalo and
humans and things like that, but a lot of them are abstract.
And sometimes you find combinations of things.
Like you'll find turkey tracks inside of a human, and what does
that mean sort of thing. >> It's always hard to tell.
Maybe the human was there first and somebody put the turkey
track on top. It could be two different
artists with two very different purposes.
Right. Right.
Like the Gullickson's Glen there.
Lots of times the symbols are carved on top of each other, and
it gets very complex. And it's very difficult to
distinguish, not only the petroglyphs from each other, but
also the petroglyphs then from the natural fissures and cracks
in the rock face itself. And one of the things that I do
in my paintings is, and my paintings are art.
My paintings are not meant to be scientific renditions of the
rock art sites. My paintings are meant to
address the emotional and that kind of mystical nature of the
rock art site that's timeless. And when they're very complex
panels, I will pull out certain elements and just focus on
those. So, okay, like right now up on
the screen there's Long Ago Deer.
That's from Gullickson's Glen. And that's a site, I started
painting in 1994, and by the time I had started painting this
site that's up, Long Ago Deer was already gone.
It had already fallen. >> It was already gone?
It was already gone. Had already fallen off the rock
face. And a friend of mine had lent me
a number of her pictures so that I could paint images that had
already disappeared. And so my collection of
paintings from Gullickson's Glen consists of paintings of
petroglyphs that are still there, petroglyphs that were
gone before I even started painting, and also now I've
learned that one of the paintings I've done since I
started painting, that petroglyph has actually fallen
off the rock face and doesn't exist anymore.
Do we have a sense that this is something that's
accelerating? It seems like an awfully fast
disintegration. >> It's hard to measure because
so many site have been found only so recently.
But a lot of the sites in Wisconsin are relatively shallow
rock shelters, and so they are exposed to freeze/thaw.
Tainter Cave, for example, later on which we'll go to, is a deep
cave. It goes in 300 feet, and there's
constant temperature, constant humidity so the freeze/thaw
isn't a problem there but graffiti is.
Even back 300 feet? >> Yes.
Yes. >> Okay, now we have Larson Cave
here is another, would you call it rock shelter?
Rock shelter, small cave, rock shelter.
Yeah, and this panel is right at the very entrance to that
rock shelter. And it's a very beautiful
multi-colored sandstone. And this painting, I'd like to
talk about this a little bit because this painting
illustrates why I feel rock art is important as far as studying
it maybe from more perspectives than just the scientific.
When I came to painting rock art, I had no experience as an
artist. I had no archeological
background. I had no, I'm 100% German
American, I had no awareness of American Indian history in this
country. I was basically a blank slate,
and this painting, based on the site at Larson Cave, is in a
sense, now looking back, I did this painting in 1999 when I
just started doing this and I didn't really understand the
significance. It is kind of a pictorial
narrative of what rock art did for me, which is through the
rock art learning about the ancestors, the past of this land
through the rock art because once I started painting the rock
art I started reading about the history of this land, I started
understanding the transition since European contact.
And so it taught me about cultural awareness, it taught me
about respect for that ancient history.
It taught me about respect for the land,
and all of those things. So that painting, to me, it
shows how rock art can open up our awareness to many things
that we're not necessarily aware of here in Wisconsin.
Let me ask you kind of a pointed question then, Geri.
How good of an artist do you have to be in order to derive
the benefit you've described from rock art?
If we're talking about symbols in a lot of cases, relatively
simple figures and that kind of thing, is this the kind of
experience that would be accessible to what we'd call a
non-artist or an amateur artist? >> I was not an artist when I
started to paint. Really, I'd have to say the rock
art taught me how to paint. I was so intrigued by the
subject matter, that is what taught me how to paint.
And, quite frankly, one of the things that I do is I do an
educational program with elementary students to help
teach them about the rock art, and I have them do paintings of
Wisconsin rock art sites and they can do these paintings
because they don't have to be perfect.
They're stick figures. Anybody can do them.
But it also gives them, through those programs and painting
their own rock art pictures based on Wisconsin sites, an
ownership, a feeling of ownership for those sites, an
identification with them so when they get older and they see a
rock art site they're not as likely to go and damage that
rock art site because they've had their own experience with
it. >> What's the actual medium for
the painting? What do they use for the paint?
The Native Americans? Well, there's ways that we can
now chemically analyze that if you can pick off a little bit
of pigment, which we haven't done yet in Wisconsin.
But there's two basic colors: black, which is almost certainly
charcoal from a charred stick or a charred bone,
and then red, which is red ocher which is an iron-enriched
pigment of some sort, lots of different potential sources for
that. It's usually thought that that
pigment is then mixed with a grease or a fat or something to
make it more pliable and adherent, but we haven't
actually analyzed the actual pigments from Wisconsin yet.
But just to give you an example, in Tainter Cave, the charcoal
drawings, they are absorbed into the rock itself, and I can maybe
talk a little bit more about that.
Oh, because it was sandstone and is porous.
Yeah, just absorbs. >> It makes a blessing though
because it was easily able to absorb this pigment, it also was
easily deteriorated, the sandstone.
The sandstone tends to form a hard surface, a casing, and if
the casing is in tact, the sandstone will last a long time.
If you break through that casing, the sandstone is very
soft, and you can rub it with your finger and grains of sand
will come off. So as long as that casing is in
tact and, for example, Tainter Cave and Samuel's Cave where
those paintings are preserved, it's on that hard casing.
But if you get behind that, then it will start just blasting off.
What's the distribution of this rock art in Wisconsin?
Obviously we're talking about rock so it would be in areas
that are fairly blessed with rock, but does it have a
geographical pattern other than that?
95% of the rock art in Wisconsin is in the unglaciated
driftless area. So this is a picture of Bell
Coulee Rock Shelter in southwestern Wisconsin, and
there's thousands of these sandstone and limestone
exposures in that part of the state.
You just don't get them in eastern and northern Wisconsin.
The Door Peninsula is limestone and has lots of exposures, and
there's a little bit of rock art known up there.
But Milwaukee area, Madison area, there's no rock exposed
here, there's no rock art right here.
So 99% or 95% of it is in the southwestern unglaciated
driftless area in places like this.
It just invites the rock art. >> And what we just saw there
was surprisingly exposed. A casual hiker, I would imagine,
could come across something like that.
That's right. Just real quick, so one of the
things you have to realize about the driftless area in southern
Wisconsin in general is that there's lots of trees here now,
but 150 years ago this was a much more open landscape because
of prairie fires and things like that.
But, also, a casual hiker, unless you're looking for it,
lots of times you're not going to recognize what you're looking
at unless you're looking for it. And sometimes you can be looking
right at it or looking for it and not necessarily see it.
So this is Bell Coulee, again just as an example, the left
slide is a photograph, and Bell Coulee was only found in the
late 1990s. It's a relatively recent
discovery. And I was on the day when it was
found. It was taken out by a gentleman
who lived in the area, knew rock exposures, and was like, let's
go out and look. And we came across this little
rock shelter, and the wall was just carved with glyphs.
That must have been extremely exciting.
It was extremely exciting. >> To be right there when it was
found. >> Exactly.
There's a thrill of discover, absolutely.
And then, of course, what do we do with it?
We have to document it and then we have to try to work towards
its preservation. But it's the kind of place that
when you go to Bell Coulee, depending on the cloud cover,
the time of day, the images come out and fade away again.
So you can go to a rock art site 10 different times in different
conditions and see 10 different things.
Yeah. And it's amazing.
I've gone to sites and taken photographs and looked at the
photographs and painted from the photographs and then gone back
to the same site and taken different photographs maybe a
couple years later of the same site and go to paint it and all
the sudden it's like, wow, there's an image right there I
had been looking at to do the previous painting and I didn't
see it. Now, Ernie was talking about
Bell Coulee, now the painting to the right of the petroglyph
site, in that piece, there's something about rock art when
you sit there and you take the time to experience it.
You're in the outdoors, it's a beautiful setting, and you take
the time to slow down and actually look at the rock art
and I like to say feel the rock art.
And you think about the person that was actually standing there
maybe 500 years ago or a thousand years ago carving on
that rock face, and it can be very powerful and very moving.
And what I like to do with the paintings that I think maybe is
something that science can't quite address is I like to try
to capture and convey that timeless and intangible quality
of the rock art on the rock against the landscape and kind
of how the rock art crosses the boundary.
Now, like in that painting, I'm sorry, could you go back
one? Is that possible?
No? Anyway, I try to show how the
trees go up into the rock and they interlap with each other.
Now, you mentioned, Ernie, preservation.
Right. >> A key part of that, I
suppose, is keeping the location secret, isn't it?
It's the number one line of preservation.
I should say defense. But it is and it's a state
policy for the State Historical Society, which manages
archeological resources in the state of Wisconsin, when a rock
art site is found the first thing we do, unfortunately, most
of them are on private property so you have to work with the
landowner to become stewards or try to have them work with you
to become stewards of that property and that resource, but
yeah, we just can't promote the location of the sites.
And it's very unfortunate and the one example that set all
that up was the place called the Gottschall Rock Shelter which we
don't have pictures of here. But that was an amazing painting
site found in the 1980s, and it was promoted in National
Geographic, and within a year somebody had gone up there with
a mason saw and tried to carve out some of that glyph.
Front page picture in the paper on that occasion.
That's right. It created, the state
legislature passed a law to protect rock art sites based on
that incident. >> And in the painting, when I
started painting these images, I had no idea of the cultural
significance, I had no idea of the fragility and all of those
issues, and I've had to learn and through my work I've had to
walk a really fine line of being able to show the public and let
them know that this history is here through the paintings and
yet absolutely not in any way let people know where these
sites are or expose the sites to danger though talking about and
showing the work. I like to, as far as showing the
paintings and letting people know about the rock art, I feel
like people are not going to take care of and preserve
something they don't know about, so I like to use the paintings
as a way to allow people to experience the sites without
necessarily endangering the sites.
It is a catch-22, isn't it? Because how do people get
interested in these works of art and support their continuation
and they can't ever actually see them.
And it's the seeing and the experience of getting there as
well that, unfortunately, Wisconsin is not set up to have
that public access yet except for Roche-a-Cri.
Except for Roche-a-Cri. >> Which we can talk about a
little later on because even that, there was a problem with
that as well. >> Is that common in other
states too? Or are other states just blessed
with so much more rock art that they don't have to worry quite
so much? >> There is vandalism
everywhere. There's vandalism everywhere.
And we went passed a slide way back at the beginning but
Samuel's Cave, the first rock art site that Ernie had been in,
when I went in to see, and I've been to rock art sites all
across the United States, that is probably the worst vandalized
site I've seen anywhere. Although vandalism is
everywhere, that's probably the worst I've ever seen.
And one of the things I like to do when I paint is paint the
images without the vandalism just as a way to respect the
sites and to honor the sites and to, in some small way, restore
it to its original beauty or maybe what was originally there.
I would think there would be some value in that as a form of
recreation of what it originally would have been like.
Do we have a sense, though, that over the course of the years
that the artists themselves from one generation to the next were
adding things on fairly indiscriminately to what had
been there first? >> The Native American artists?
Other than Gullickson's Glen, which is a palimpsest of glyphs
on top of glyphs on top of glyphs which actually, from an
archeological standpoint, creates rock art stratigraphy,
so you can start to get earlier versus a little bit later, but
most of the rock art sites in Wisconsin it seems that they're
not going on top of original glyphs.
They're going alongside or in different areas.
Roche-a-Cri is pretty.. . >> Overlapping.
That's right. >> Which would make it even more
difficult, I think, to interpret the meanings of these symbols.
What did it mean for the first person, what did it mean 100
years after that or 200 years. >> Meaning is a problem.
Meaning is a problem. We laugh about that,
what's the meaning? >> And one thing we can get into
a little bit later on perhaps is that Geri and I, we're
Euro-Americans in descent. I'm an archeologist and she's a
rock art painter, but we do work closely with the Native American
descendents, the peoples today. So, for example, Bell Coulee
which is up, again, this is a buffalo, clearly a buffalo
archeologically, meaning that the depiction of a buffalo tells
us that that is almost certainly done by the Oneota culture which
dates to 1300 AD to 1650 AD in western Wisconsin, and that's
because we find buffalo remains on Oneota habitation village
sites, and you don't find them on earlier cultures.
So that's a time marker for us, but we brought Ho-Chunk
representatives, for example, to this cave, to this site.
And they help us. Sometimes, not always, but
sometimes they'll share stories. And that just opens our minds
up. >> What kind of a story would
you get from a Ho-Chunk? >> Well, for example, in Bell
Coulee there was the buffalo and there's a series of buffalo on
one wall, and on the opposite wall there appears to be a human
being sitting down with a zig-zag line coming out of his
head which is often interpreted as a power line or a shaman's
kind of speech line. And so the Ho-Chunk looked at
that context and they said this person over here is telling the
story of a buffalo hunt that's depicted on the opposite wall.
So that sort of thing. >> I can't help wondering if I
see an image like this one which we're about to bring up if some
of these things haven't just been buried by nature, and if
you were to excavate some of the caves of Wisconsin you'd find
all kinds of things that have been preserved.
That would be ideal. And it almost certainly has
happened. This is Tainter Cave and the
opening of Tainter Cave, as you can see in this winter shot,
it's about three feet tall and 20 feet across.
It's not a very large opening. And yet, this cave goes in 300
feet. It opens into three connected
rooms. It's huge.
And it's filled with rock art and graffiti, unfortunately.
But there's probably caves, almost certainly, Samuel's Cave
is an example where it's almost completely closed off except for
enough for a dog to get in initially in 1879.
But there must be caves like that that the entrances are
sealed, and those are then pristine and preserved and won't
have graffiti, and when we find one of those caves it will be
like a Lascaux discovery in Wisconsin.
It'll be that important. It'll be a dramatic find if we
can do it right. >> Lascaux being one of those,
probably the premier example in the world.
It's in France and goes back maybe...
25,000, 30,000 years. >> 25,000, 30,000 years.
Beautiful art, though. That's the wonderful thing about
some of these sites that were unspoiled.
You have to wonder, though, if a lot of the sites were not places
where people would just practice before they got good enough to
go to the prime places? >> Well, yeah.
Wisconsin, the rock art tends to be stick line figures, and
that's the style they used. I've asked artists, and Geri can
maybe address this a little bit, why would they, why 25,000 years
ago do you get these naturalistic paintings in places
like Lascaux, and Wisconsin you get these line drawings like
this headless human with power lines coming out of his head and
the arms. But the artists reply, well, it
doesn't take, you do what you need to do to express the
message. And so they said a smiley face,
two dots and a thing sends a message.
Right. >> And that's all it takes.
So you don't have to do more than that.
And so in Wisconsin we have what we have, and we don't have these
three-dimensional multi-colored renditions like that.
And I'm not sure, do you think sandstone would have been
able to facilitate that? >> I don't know.
I don't know. [LAUGHTER]
Maybe not. >> And what have we here?
This is a painting, this is from inside of Tainter Cave, the
one we just looked at with the very small entrance.
And that is the cave, when I went into that, I would tell you
I was terrified. It was shortly after we had
first met. Because it was pretty narrow and
pretty dark. And this is a charcoal drawing.
On the left is the actual site, and on the right is my painting
of it, and I don't think this was quite in dark zone yet.
This is right at the back of the first room.
So in order to see this you have to have artificial light.
So you have to have a flashlight or prehistorically we found
birch bark torches rolled up on the floor.
So it is at the transition from where light enters the cave to
where it's pitch black. >> And this figure, it's human.
Again, there's those wavy lines that are oftentimes called power
symbols or... >> Speech lines sometimes.
Speech lines sometimes, yeah. >> But things like the upturned
arms is almost always interpreted as a shaman in rock
art. >> Do you see hunting pictures,
hunting scenes? >> We do and I think in the next
series from Tainter Cave here. So this is Tainter Cave.
Now, Tainter Cave was found in 1999.
That's hard to believe, isn't it?
It's very recent. A deep cave.
The picture on the left is from a panel 150 feet into this cave.
It is absolutely pitch dark. You're sensory deprived when you
get back there. You have no idea if there's--
I've been in there when there's a thunderstorm going on outside
and you don't hear it. >> Another world.
It's pitch black, no sound, no light, it's amazing.
So this, the picture on the left, was mind-blowing to me
because trying to understand the meaning of rock art.
Here's one where we can start to decipher because what you have
is charcoal drawings on a wall with a horizontal crack.
And the charcoal drawings above that horizontal crack are all
birds and feathers and bird feet.
So it's all sky symbolism above. Below that crack there's deer
and there's human bow hunters. And so it's an Earth scene.
And many Native American tribes, in their clan structure and
their world view have an upper world, middle world, and lower
world, different symbols and different spirits and such like
that. So this was a clear rendition of
an upper world, lower world, middle world scene.
The interesting thing about the lower, the hunting scene for us
was that the bow hunters tell us time because the bow and arrow
comes into Wisconsin about 700 AD, so this can't be
any earlier than that. So we know this is probably tied
into the effigy mound culture because of where it's found in
the world. And the other thing was that the
deer, these are just stick figures but the tails on some of
them are up. So that's a whitetail deer and
not an elk because elk don't do that.
Just a little line. But some of the deer have baby
deers in side of them. >> Yeah, I noticed that from one
of the pictures. And the significance of that,
well I know we're not speculating too much on
significance, but do you have a sense of what that would mean?
Well, we get to the point where we can start to speculate.
[LAUGHTER] Which is the fun part now.
It's very fun, yeah. >> But a pregnant deer, all deer
rut in November and they drop their fawns in May.
So that's a winter scene, a pregnant doe.
And so that rock art, the hunting scene probably depicts a
winter hunting scene which is the period of starvation.
And there's a whole bunch of hunters surrounding those deer
and it may have been yarded up, and it probably, that's the time
of starvation so it may represent a hunt that either was
successful and enabled that group to survive through the
year, or maybe they're painting that scene in advance of a hunt
hoping. >> Wishful thinking.
To get the power to go and have success.
When you say that some of these places were discovered as
recently as 1999, how do you go about actually looking for a
place given that virtually all of them, with the one exception,
are on private land? >> Well, how we survey for rock
art is like how we do for most archeological sites.
The easiest way to find rock art sites is to ask people who are
on the landscape all the time. Hunters, farmers, they know
their land. You focus on places that have
the right kind of bedrock. So sandstone exposures and
there's good geological maps of Wisconsin.
You can take valleys and you can say if there's going to be rock
art, it's probably in this area. And then, ultimately, you go out
and you look. You get on your foot and you
climb bluffs and you get out there.
Should I even ask where you would expect to look next?
There's certain valleys that I would go to, again,
in southwestern Wisconsin. There's a lot down
in Vernon County, for example. In La Crosse County.
Just south of the Wisconsin River there's a fair amount
known in Iowa County and that, but you get into Lafayette
County and Grant County, there's lots of places that need to be
looked at, and there's got to be rock art there, and there's
hardly anything reported. So it has to be there.
Is there sort of a holy grail of rock art?
A thing that you think this just seems like there should be
something like this out there, where might it be?
Boy... >> I know I've thought of the
reverse. It's like I'll see this
beautiful rock face in a place that seems like it should be
really significant. >> Why didn't somebody use that?
And I'm thinking of some up around the Baraboo area.
It's like there's got to be rock art here.
And I'll look and I'll look and I'll look, and I don't see it.
But I can't imagine... >> I think the holy grail for
me would be, and I've thought about this, is a sealed cave.
It's a place where you find a cave and it's sealed, you open
it up and you go in there and literally there's baskets and
pots against the wall and the torches are there and the rock
art doesn't have any graffiti. And that, to me, would be the
holy grail. And, again, that adds to that
encyclopedia of images and now datable techniques that we have
to put this stuff in perspective and then to take some Native
Americans into there and watch them and see if they'll share
stories or not. >> And I think that's really
important. Again, the science is so
important to preserve it but there's the oral history and
respecting that that oral history has value and we can
learn about some of that through the rock art and talking to the
Native Americans. So, again, that's an extension
of the rock art that I think is very important that it's
explored and appreciated. >> So if we're talking about the
creators of this rock art, we're talking about a recently direct
line between those people and the people in Wisconsin now so
that there would be a sense that there would be a knowledge as to
what some of it means and where it comes from.
Certainly with the Ho-Chunk in western Wisconsin.
The Menominee are an indigenous tribe for eastern Wisconsin, and
they may not have created rock art in the driftless area per
se, and there's certainly groups that were in the driftless area
that historically migrated to the west, the Iowan and groups
like that, but they're affiliated with the Ho-Chunk and
they share stories and cosmologies and things.
And then in northern Wisconsin and the Boundary
Waters, that's a little bit out of our area, that would be more
Ojibwa. And I've always found it very
interesting, in addition to as I'm doing my paintings, is to
read stories, the stories that are out there from their
perspective and learn that way also.
There's a lot of written ethnography of the Native
American tribes. It helps.
That would have been collected early on, you mean?
Late 1800s or early 1900s, that's right.
Yeah. So stories recorded then
that may not be told today. >> And we're looking here at?
This is the panel at Roche-a-Cri State Park that we
were talking about. And Roche-a-Cri is kind of
unique because it's got pictographs, which are the
paintings, and petroglyphs, which are the carvings.
On the left is the pictograph panel.
That's probably the most well-known panel at Roche-a-Cri.
And then to the right is my painting of it.
Now, Ernie, do you know about the JSF?
So Roche-a-Cri had been known since the 1940s, and below these
pictographs is lots of carvings. And it's really a jumble.
It's hard to make out. But there's turkey tracks and
there's a couple of people and there's chevrons and canoes and
things. >> Huge, huge crescents.
Right, crescents. >> Crescents.
Like a quarter of a moon or slice of a moon sort of thing.
You would not see those elsewhere?
In some places there are canoes with people in them but
not always. It varies some.
Maybe they're pulling your leg!
[LAUGHTER] 700 years ago, let's see what
they can make out of this one. >> Yeah, that's true.
[LAUGHTER] >> But in 1987 we went to
Roche-a-Cri and for the first time saw these red
paintings above the carvings. Nobody had ever noticed those
before or reported those. And, unfortunately, this face,
it's the south face of Roche-a-Cri bluff which is this
outlier rock near Adams-Friendship.
And there's a history of it there was a Civil War encampment
there where they mustered troops in and they did target practice
on this. So there's bullet holes, lead
balls hitting it, and lots of graffiti.
And JSF was carved right over the top of these red
pictographs. And it is what it is.
It's about 10 feet up above the ground so it's high.
Pretty high. It's pretty high.
And has that, as the one place out of this roughly 150
that we know of in Wisconsin, Roche-a-Cri, has that remained
in tact since its discovery in the '40s?
Well, the rock itself has remained in tact, I believe.
There was some vandalism on it in either 2004 or 2005.
Somebody spray painted black. >> They climbed up 10 feet to do
that? >> No.
Well, actually the petroglyphs start at the base of the rock,
and then it goes up and that pictograph that we had seen is
actually up on the top. But someone had come in and
spray painted black spray paint symbols over the petroglyphs.
Here it's the only publicly accessible site in Wisconsin,
the DNR had built a wooden walkway up to and a platform
with interpretive signs, and yet somebody had jumped over that
fence and gone up to the rock with a spray paint and sprayed
their names and hearts and I love somebody.
And it was like, so what do you do?
Do you close this one down? What do you do?
So it's a problem. >> It's a problem.
Get out the Plexiglas. >> Well, there were all sorts of
things. You can plant noxious weeds, put
up security cameras. >> Lots of poison ivy.
Exactly. Yeah, yeah.
Which is, now on this next slide here, these are some of
the things I consider an important part of my work.
Education, especially of children, is something I've been
interested in to try and help avoid in the future some of this
vandalism because I'm sure a lot of it is probably done by
younger adults now a lot of times not knowing what they're
doing or understanding. So, like I said, I've done
artist in residence programs with primarily third and fourth
graders to help them understand and feel an ownership for it.
Then I also created, on the left-hand side of this slide is
my coloring book of rock art sites from all across the United
States, and they're all publicly accessible rock art sites.
And so that is meant to teach the youngsters about what these
sites are, and I talk in the book about respect for the sites
and then I also give a list of publicly accessible sites all
across the United States so when the family, the whole family,
goes on a road trip they can go out and they can experience one
of the public sites and learn about it and teach their kids
about it. The Rosebud magazine up in the
upper right-hand corner, that's a literary journal, and I find
that interesting that they incorporated my petroglyph
paintings throughout these short pieces of literature throughout
the magazine, and I find that very interesting because it's
incorporating the old stories that they left in the rock art
along with our modern stories and kind of interweaving
literature, for lack of a better word, of the two times together
in one body of work. And the bottom is an
archeological publication actually out of Missouri on the
Northern Ozarks where it's an archeological publication but
they included the art on the cover.
And then it's the joining of those two through processes,
perspectives, which I think is important.
Well, if we get back to this notion of preservation even
after some harm has been done, you mentioned, Ernie, the one
that had been cut or somebody had attempted to cut that out,
literally had cut a panel from it, or even the spray painting
at Roche-a-Cri, what can be done under those circumstances?
It's impossible to monitor all the sites or even a handful
of the sites. You have to work with the
landowners to watch the sites as best they can and somehow give
them incentives to participate in that stewardship of them.
At Tainter Cave, Tainter Cave which had 400 pictographs, more
than any other site in Wisconsin, the deer hunting
scene and the human with the power lines coming out, we built
a gate on that cave. We got the American Cave
Conservation Association, we got a small grant, and we lugged up
20-foot beams of steel. And we had a welder up there and
we cut it and welded it into place.
And it's environmentally friendly, bats can come in and
out but people can't. And that's an extreme example,
but you can't gate every cave in Wisconsin.
So a lot of it's education. It's just awareness.
And, as Geri pointed out, most people who vandalize rock art
sites have no idea they're doing it.
They don't see it. >> Right.
They don't recognize it because there's so much graffiti
out there already, they're just adding their name.
Yeah, and once there's graffiti then there's more
graffiti on top of that and there's more graffiti on top of
that, and it just continues on. >> Is there a penalty for
defacing rock art in Wisconsin? >> There now is because of the
law that was based on that cutting, that incident.
Yes. Had they caught the person who
was literally trying to cut that, it's a thousand-year-old
painting and they tried to cut one of the images on it to sell
on the black market. And a thousand-year-old
painting, to us it's as if somebody went to a Rembrandt and
cut out a face of an image on that.
It's so unique. It's so rare.
And so there was no penalty, though, had they caught that
person, other than trespassing. So the state legislature, now
there is a penalty for defacing, intentionally, private property
that way. >> Did you want to talk about
this slide, Ernie. >> Sure, real quick.
This is an exhibit that, I used to work at the Mississippi
Valley Archeology Center at the University of Wisconsin
La Crosse, and after 25 years we put this exhibit up.
And the only point of having this is that it was featuring
archeological finds from sites, but, also, we included Ho-Chunk.
So we had historic pictures of Ho-Chunk and Ho-Chunk baskets,
and then we established a room where Geri's paintings from
Samuel's Cave actually were depicted in there as well.
And we actually had modern artists, Ho-Chunk artists, as
well. And so I just wanted to bring in
the collaboration that Geri just mentioned between archeology and
the artists but also with the Native Americans.
So Geri and I are collaborating with a Ho-Chunk member,
Chloris Lowe. We've done a series of programs,
public programs, where the three of us get up and talk about our
various perspectives. She has a perspective, I have a
perspective, and Chloris has a very different perspective too.
But the audience really enjoys those different perspectives,
and so we're talking about collaborating on a book to bring
that out a little more. So hopefully that will come out
in the next year or two. >> So, what do you see as the
future of these rock paintings? More people are going to know
about them, but, on the other hand, they're going to require
more protection as more people know about them.
What's the prospect for the future?
Well, there's protection but also you can share, also,
through the paintings and photographs and public programs.
So, for example, this program. So when we find a rock art site,
the first thing we do is we map it and photograph it so we have
a record of what's there in case it's gone tomorrow.
So we can at least share that. Sharing the sense of place,
that's the hard part. And if we can find more places
to take people to that are secure that don't damage the art
or the floor of the site itself because even walking on some of
these places will disturb things.
So we just have to work toward finding more places.
Some people have suggested that we make replicas and sandstone
quarries in western Wisconsin that you can go in there and you
can carve examples and study the erosion over time.
I think it's challenging because a very valuable part of
the experience is being in the environment.
Being outdoors amongst the trees and the elements and everything
is part of what makes it such a special experience.
It's a dilemma. >> It is a dilemma.
And what I do is, people ask me, well, where are these, and
number one, I don't remember because I forget when I leave a
site. I have my husband drive
and I forget where they were. >> That's convenient!
But I'll direct people to Roche-a-Cri, I'll direct
people to Jeffers petroglyph site in southwestern Minnesota.
I'll direct people to sites that are open and publicly
accessible so that they can get a taste of that and have the
opportunity to experience it. >> Well, thank you for helping
to spread the word and share some of your experience with me
today on University Place Presents.
Our pleasure. >> Yeah, thank you so much.
My guests have been president of the Wisconsin
Archeological Society, and that would be Ernie Boszhardt, and
also an artist in watercolors inspired by Wisconsin rock art,
Geri Schrab. I'm Norman Gilliland and I hope
you can join me next time for University Place Presents.