Rock art of the Chumash people
The Chumash have lived in the present-day counties of Santa Barbara, Ventura, and San Luis Obispo in southern California for 14,000 years.
No one is absolutely certain about the meaning of the Chumash Rock art, but scholars generally agree that it is connected with religion and astronomy.
In his research of southern California rock art, Grant recorded numerous sites from different areas that were all close to a water source.
He found twelve painted sites in the highest parts of the mountainous Chumash territory, the Ventureño area.
The most easily accessible example is at Painted Cave State Historic Park, which is located in canyons above Santa Barbara.
[1] The interior alcove of the horseshoe-shaped rock features pictographs by Chumash, neighboring tribes, and non-Native Americans.
The Burro Flats Painted Cave petroglyphs are located in the Simi Hills in Ventura County.
They are on the private land of Rocketdyne's Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL), which has protected them from public harm since 1947.
The Chumash considered caves, rocks, and water sources quite powerful, and the shamans saw them as a "portal to the sacred realm...where they could enter the supernatural."
[6] Chumash rock art depicts images like humans, animals, celestial bodies, and other (at times ambiguous) shapes and patterns.
The Chumash made paint from a mixture of mineralized soil, stone mortar, and some kind of liquid binder like blood or oil from animals or mashed seeds.
Orange and red paint contained hematite or iron oxide, while yellow came from limonite, blue and green from copper or serpentine, white from kaolin clays or gypsum, and black from manganese or charcoal.
Representational images include squares, circles and triangles, zigzags, crisscrosses, parallel lines, and pinwheels.,[7] Grant noted that in settled villages, abstract paintings were prominent, while the areas occupied by bands of hunting people reveal representational images.
In the early 20th century, non-Natives began studying California rock art, including a number of archaeologists, such as Julian Steward and Alfred Kroeber.
Since design elements and style are grouped in limited areas, the primitive artist must have made the inscriptions with something in mind.
The site at Painted Rock (San Luis Obispo County, California), has an arborglyph that looks like a lizard with what seems to be Polaris, the North Star and the constellation Ursa Major.
[11] In 2006, an arborglyph on an oak tree in the Santa Lucia Range in San Luis Obispo County was discovered to be Chumash art.
[12] Concerning the age of the paintings, Grant says "a radiocarbon test on pigment from a Santa Barbara area pictograph site showed that the sample was 'not over 2,000 years old.
