Utahtea, that's exactly what I thought, and we were both wrong! This particular symbol was etched into the rock below an overhang in Canyon del Muerto, the northern section of Canyon de Chelly National Monument, which is one of my favorite places in all the world.
Here's another petroglyph from the same site, more recent, and much easier to interpret:
https://www.roadtripamerica.com/blog...k-DSC_3842.jpg
Hunters after a deer, and because they are on horseback, it had to have been done after the arrival of the Spaniards, which makes it Navajo, as opposed to Hopi or Anasazi. ....
....In January of 2014, just two months after we were there, the Navajo Tribe changed the rules, and permanently banned privately owned vehicles from touring inside Canyon de Chelly (on the canyon floor). You can still go, but you have to travel, not only with a guide, but in a vehicle provided by a Navajo owned tour company. There were a number of good reasons for making that change, but I'm most certainly glad I got to do what I did while it was still possible! ....
"Looks kind of like a fish bone," I said, pointing to the symbol etched in the sandstone of the canyon wall.
"No," she replied. "This one here is like the world. Way down there before humans were ever made, before life was ever made. This is the Black World," she said, pointing to the lowest horizontal line. "Then, the Blue, the Yellow, and the White World. And then the one on top right here is the world that we live in; and so that’s the 5th world. This is supposed to be a ladder going up from one place to the next. So this is our world, where we live, and when we die we go up into the next world, which is the spirit world. This is the 5th world, and they call it the Glittering World, because we have a lot of different colors here. They call it the Glittering World because everything glitters like when it rains, the water gives off a sparkle and when it snows, it does that too, and then during the summer you’ll see the leaves give off a shine. Even for us humans, we give off a shine through our pores; even our eyes, they glisten."....
....Whew! So much for the fish bone theory! And it's a very good illustration of just how much we
don't know about the Ancestral Pueblo people who carved those symbols in the first place. The Navajo didn't originate in the region where they live today. By the time they arrived in the Southwest, the Anasazi, as we call them, were long gone from Canyon de Chelly, so there was never any overlap between those people and the Navajo, never a direct connection, but even so, I have no reason to doubt Sylvia's interpretation of the signs on the walls of her canyon. When she was a toddler, she lived here:
Rick
(P.S.: your turn!)
