Situated about 40 minutes from Moab, Utah, Canyonlands National Park is the largest and most remote of all the National Parks in the state. Covering 337,589 acres, the park is split into three major districts by the Colorado and Green rivers known as the Islands in the Sky, The Needles, and The Maze. The Park is also famous for being the location where the two rivers meet, and home to many ruins and artifacts from ancient peoples who lived there thousands of years ago. Despite the area of the park being famous for its natural wonders, the creation of the park was a long and arduous process that included many controversies and compromises.

Serious consideration for creating the area into a National Park grew in the early 1960s after the election of President John F. Kennedy and his appointment of Stewart Udall as Secretary of the Interior. Udall believed heavily in conservation and was enthralled by the beauty of the area when he visited in 1961. Recruiting Utah Senator Frank Moss as an ally for the project, the two set out to preserve the Canyonlands area as a National Park. Immediately, Udall and Moss ran into opposition from other local legislators including Utah Senator Wallace Bennett. While Bennett was not completely opposed to the idea of a National Park in the Canyonlands region, he wanted a much smaller protected area in order to keep most of the region open for commercial use. Bennett thought that much of the area was better suited for mining, drilling, and grazing.

Senators Moss and Bennett fought for a few years before a final proposal was sent to the United States Congress in 1964. This proposal included most of the area that Moss and Udall wanted to have protected, but removed a portion from the north side of the park for commercial developments at the wish of Bennett and other local people. Moss continued to fight to protect more of the land around Canyonlands for the rest of his tenure as senator in Utah and is a large reason that the park is enjoyed by thousands today.

For more (including 4 images) view the original article

The Great Gallery itself consists of a ~200-300 foot stretch of a rock wall on the side of Horseshoe Canyon in Canyonlands National Park in southeastern Utah. It features approximately 80 figures created with a red ocher-tinted paint. The pictographs and petroglyphs have been attributed to the Archaic people, a civilization that lived in Horseshoe Canyon over 7,000 years ago. These pictographs are similar to a variety of other rock art found in the Four Corners region but their influence and prominence in studies as well as the multitude of similar artwork in the canyon led Polly Schaafsma in the 1970s to name this entire strain of rock art the Barrier Canyon Style (as Horseshoe Canyon was previously named).

Due to the ancient nature of the rock art, no single interpretation of the Great Gallery is guaranteed to be true. Many ethnographers have suggested that these murals were created for a variety of purposes such as hunting rituals, illustrating myths and traditions, recreation, or shamanistic magic. As for what the symbols themselves mean, the majority of the tall angular figures without appendages are thought to represent people. Some of the larger, more decorative figures are understood to be shamans. Their special decorative heads represent either the headdresses the shamans wore or the spiritual power these shamans possessed. Other figures included are those of animals or plants important to the Archaic people.

Evidence of the Archaic people has been found in Utah dating back to 6,500 BC. They were a hunter-gatherer culture that migrated throughout the desert climate of the Colorado Plateau. This culture’s most recognizable and distinctive features include their rock art, twig figurines similar to the figures seen in the Great Gallery, and the baskets they wove. They used a spear thrower called an atlatl in order to hunt down their food and grinding stones to crush seeds to eat, allowing for a varied diet.

As stated before, the Great Gallery is a particularly important selection of Barrier Canyon Style rock art. In fact, the Great Gallery pictographs were deemed so important, that a faithful replica was commissioned in the 1940s under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program the Works Progress Administration. The mural, created by prominent Utah artist Lynn Fausett, was originally placed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City before being moved to Denver during WWII for safe keeping and then traveling around the country until it finally settled at the Utah Museum of Natural History in 1969. A variety of methods have been used to date the art including radiocarbon dating and superposition, but these often do not help form a consensus. For instance, in 2014, a team of scientists led by geologist Joel Pederson used a method of rock dating called optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) used damage from a rock slide to determine that this section of the Great Gallery must have been created between 900 and 2,000 years ago. Other scientists maintain that radiocarbon dating of other artifacts in the area that look almost exactly like those in the pictographs support a much earlier dating. Time will reveal the answers to these mysteries as we understand more about the Great Gallery.

For more (including 3 images) view the original article