We decipher that rock art here as a sky map of the heavens reaching from the stars of Serpens Cauda at the far left of the pictographs to the stars of Aquila at the far right, i.e. a full 360° "round" of the starry sky.
The stars are represented as anthropomorphic and other figures of various kinds. If the left and right edges of the sky map are both seen to correspond to the Winter Solstice line (colure), then this sky map would appear to date to ca. 1000 B.C., around the time of the emergence of the Early Basketmaker Era II, the begin of the Post-Archaic Period marked by the introduction of cultivated squash and maize.
Why do we focus on the left and right edges of the pictographs? One must always assume that the ancients had a reason for depicting a specific portion of the sky in a particular manner, and we have found that it generally relates to calendric considerations, especially the marking of Solstices and Equinoxes or similar astronomical parameters in a given era.
Utah St. George Ivins Anasazi Ancestral Pueblo Rock Art
A Sky Map from Serpens Cauda to Aquila ca. 1000 B.C.
at the Emergence of the Early Basketmaker Era II
i.e. one circuit of the stars of the heavens
(click on the graphic to see the image in larger size)
The above decipherment finds support in our next posting which presents our decipherment of rock art from British Columbia, Canada, which has some similar notation as above, and has simplified virtually the entire above sky map into elementary stick figures of the type found above for Gemini.
We are particularly pleased that the enabling source (where we first found the rock art) for the next decipherment was attorney John J. Ensminger at the Dog Law Reporter, Reflections on the Society of Dogs and Men, in Berkeley Anthropological Records and the Dogs of the West Coast Tribes, Thursday, April 12, 2012, who, however, we do not know personally and who may not agree at all with our forthcoming interpretation. In any case, Ensminger is surely right that dogs, especially in their importance to hunting, were viewed as very important by the ancients, and hunting rituals may have found their way into descriptions of the stars.
We need here only to refer to our posting Roosevelt Washington Columbia River Rock Inscriptions Now at Horsethief Lake State Park are a Splendid Sky Map ca. 750 B.C. in the Shape of an Animal's Head, or see our postings at http://ancientworldblog.blogspot.com/2013_12_01_archive.html where we write inter alia:
"As I have previously written at Megalithic World:
"[T]he Arabic Bedouins in Egypt, instead of a dragon, saw a circle of camels at heaven's center that was being attacked by hyenas. We can thus understand why the Arabs have a heavenly “"wolf" Al-Dhib (Thuban) where Ptolemy places Draco the dragon. The Arabs did not originally have either dragon or falcon as symbols for heaven’s poles but rather visualized dog-like animals. Thuban (al-Dhib) did not belong to Draco, but rather marked the Arabic center of heaven as either a dog, wolf, jackal or hyena....
The name Edasich for iota-Draconis comes from the Arabic Al Dhih as well as Al Dikh, the dog-like hyena. It is a word which is easily confused with Al Dibh "Wolf" and also with Hebrew Da’ah "falcon-like bird". In the Bible, the same Hebrew word is translated as dragon, snake or jackal."
Those are the main historical representations of heaven's center of stars."
The Great Mound, Petroglyph and Painted Rock Art Journey of Native America
Anasazi Ancestral Pueblo Rock Art in St. George Ivins Utah as Astronomy: A Sky Map from Serpens Cauda to Aquila ca. 1000 B.C. at the Emergence of the Early Basketmaker Era II
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