N.B. The term Algonquian (also spelled Algonkian) refers to one of North America’s largest indigenous language families. Individual tribes or First Nations like the Innu, the Micmac, the Algonquin, the Ojibwe, and the Cree all speak a version of Algonquian. (See here for a primer.)
A one-hour drive from Peterborough and the Canadian Canoe Museum and we were approaching the entrance to Petroglyphs Provincial Park. It is a day-use-only park with hiking trails but its real reason for existing is the 90′ x 120′ outcrop of gently sloping white marble (limestone) in the center of the park.
In 1954 a prospector, Everett Davis, sat on this rock face as he surveyed the area east of Eels Creek and north of Upper Stony Lake. He had been here before but had never noticed anything special; this time the sun’s light hit the rock just right and the images came out of the rock – some recognizable as humans or animals and others more abstract or fantastical. As he pushed away the leaves and moss covering some of the rock face, more and more petroglyphs were revealed. He did not know it at the time but he was standing on one of the largest petroglyph sites in Canada.
(N.B. That is not Everett Davis in the image! It is also not how it would have looked like to Davis, who found the site overgrown and covered in places with grass, shallow-rooted plants and deadfall. Not clear is what makes the petroglyphs pop out as they do. Have the cavities created by the original carvers been filled up with sediment over time or were the petroglyphs coloured in even before the Vastokas team used charcoal crayons to make them more visible?)
Since 1954 – and especially since the late 1960’s – the site has seen increasing numbers of curious visitors. Wild theories popped up to explain the nine hundred or so marks and images – many of them difficult to see – hammered out of the rock face. Who put them there? Phoenicians, Vikings, Celts – these were just some of the suggested answers. As entertaining as they may have been, the explanations of people from far away do not stand up to any serious examination of what we know about those cultures and their iconography.
The answer lies much closer to nearby Stony Lake. The territory lies on the southern edge of the Canadian Shield and before the arrival of the Europeans it was in the cultural transition zone between Algonquian-speaking communities (the Anishinaabeg) to the north who lived in small mobile hunter-gatherer (foraging) bands and Iroquoian-speaking communities (the Haudenosaunee) with their larger and more advanced agriculture-based villages to the south.
The answer to who hammered out the images on the relatively soft limestone rock face can be traced back to one of these two Indigenous Peoples, and since there is no evidence – for example, common iconography at other sites – connecting the Iroquois with the petroglyphs, we are left with one of the Algonquian-speaking peoples.
A number of the images on the rock have parallels with pictographs at other sites on the Canadian Shield which are known to be Algonquin or Ojibwe or Cree. Thus, placing the petroglyphs in an Algonquian context fits the evidence best.
Since carbon dating a petroglyph is not possible, the discovery of other datable material at the site helped set a rough parameter for when it was used. Found in the crevasses of the rock were bits of pottery – the remains of small offering bowls? – which were dated back about 1000 years, placing it in the Woodlands Period of pre-Columbian archaeology. At the very least, this puts the creation of the petroglyphs before the arrival of the French in the 1600s.
In 1976 the Ontario government of the day created a new park – Petroglyphs Provincial Park. Since 1990 Ontario Parks has managed the site along with members of a nearby Ojibwa First Nation whose ancestors first moved into the area in the late 11700s Their present community is found on Buckhorn Lake southwest of and above Burleigh Falls.
It is about a forty-kilometer hike and paddle from the petroglyph site to their community though they may have lived closer to the site before the lumbermen, farmers, and miners started arriving in the 1850’s. While the Ojibwe community has no direct link to the petroglyphs, the 2015 Park Information Guide informs us that –
Today the local First Nation of Curve Lake acts as a steward of the petroglyph site providing Ontario Parks with guidance in this culturally significant and ceremonial place.
This guidance is presumably because the current “spiritual caretakers” of the site share some cultural traits with the creators of the petroglyphs, in particular, a mythological worldview that they can use to explain the meaning of the images. The ongoing mystery about the exact meaning of the petroglyphs shows how tenuous that cultural connection really is.
For almost thirty years after the discovery of the site, it received only the minimum of attention from authorities. At first, it was completely open and one could walk over the rock face. Eventually concerns about the deterioration of the site – and a few examples of graffiti left by unthinking visitors – motivated officials to erect a series of fences, increasingly serious, to keep people away from the sloping rock face while still permitting it to be viewed. In the mid-1960s Joan Vastokas (then of U of T) and Romas Vastokas of Trent U in nearby Peterborough began their study of the site with their students. Among other things, they used a charcoal-coloured crayon to enhance some of the petroglyphs so that they could be better seen. Their findings were eventually written up in Sacred Art of the Algonkians which was published in 1973. Forty years later it remains the definitive study of the site. It is also a difficult book to get a hold of – sellers at Amazon have used copies available for $175. U.S.! The Toronto Public Library system does not have a single copy and I have yet to read it.
Other than the various hiking trail options, there are three other activities available to visitors. It begins at the Learning Centre and its various poster displays, continues with a brief 18-minute film overview of Ojibwa culture, and concludes with a visit to the site itself. I’ll take a look at each of them in turn.
1. The Learning Centre
The Visitors’ Centre, also called The Learning Centre, opened to the public in 2002 and is where the visit to the site begins. While the building has a small gift shop with various souvenirs and a movie theatre with seats for perhaps 80 visitors, the main attraction is a colourful multi-panelled poster display. We spent some time reading our way through the various snippets of text. I had expected an introduction to the petroglyphs and their meaning to be the main focus but it soon became clear that there was something else being presented here.
The wall in the photo above, nicely decorated with Norval Morrisseau-esque spirit lines emanating from the sun symbol, sums it up. “A culture is a living thing”. What the folks responsible for the exhibit have done is use this space to present an updated version of indigenous spirituality, an adaptation felt to be more relevant to the late 1900’s than the paleolithic original. Pretty much absent is any reference to the animistic beliefs that ruled the lives of the actual people who created the petroglyphs.
In its place, we have the myth of the “Ecological Indian” and the 1970s-penned wisdom of Chief Seattle mixed with various environmentalist concepts. I didn’t realize it at the time but this spiritual version of environmentalism as a defining feature of being aboriginal is a widely held view. At the Assembly of First Nations website, for example, I found this statement –
Indigenous peoples are caretakers of Mother Earth and realize and respect her gifts of water, air and fire. First Nations peoples’ have a special relationship with the earth and all living things in it. This relationship is based on a profound spiritual connection to Mother Earth that guided indigenous peoples to practice reverence, humility and reciprocity. (see here for source)
It left me wondering where a non-indigenous person fits in. Presumably not as a “caretaker” since (s)he lacks “a special relationship” and “profound spiritual connection to Mother Earth”. This race-based approach has parallels with the stance taken in many of the world’s religions – also built on the notion that this one particular people group of people has a special relationship with the Great Spirit. In the Tanak (the Jewish “Bible”), for example, this relationship is called a covenant and the ones making it with the Great Spirit are His Chosen People.
Having established this special relationship, the next step is to claim possession of some sacred text with the very words of that God in it. Or, if not a book then for pre-literate societies, at least some sort of special knowledge. In the case of the Algonquian-speaking cultures, it is referred to as traditional knowledge supposedly not accessible to “outsiders”.
While the original purpose of the site can be guessed at –
- vision quests?
- initiation rituals for young males (and perhaps females)?
- initiations for shamans?
- the shamans’ source of medicines or guidance from resident manitous? –
the Learning Center repurposes the petroglyph site for interested Anishinaabe as they live their lives in 2015. Culture is indeed a living thing and it changes to suit new realities.
The above poster alludes to the possibility that the Anishinaabe (i.e. Ojibwe) once lived on the shores of the Atlantic at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. From details of the various accounts told by members of the Midewiwin (the shamans’ exclusive medicine society), some scholars date the migration westward towards Lake Superior somewhere around 1350. They connect it to the arrival of the Black Plague along with European fishermen on the eastern shores of North America at that time.
Changing one’s worldview in response to changing times is not uncommon. It is also not uncommon to reinterpret and repurpose older cultural expressions – like the petroglyphs – which you did not have a hand in creating and which you can make no special claim to understanding. While the sentiment expressed in the poster above is laudable and may well be true to those who now visit the site, there is no basis for the claim that this is what the rock was all about.
The Learning Centre reveals surprisingly little about the meaning of the petroglyphs we are about to see. The primary focus is on Mother Earth and how we should treat it – perhaps given the difficulty of saying much about the petroglyphs, the hope is that this environmentalist focus will give visitors an acceptable alternative lens through which to see the images on the rock face.
2. The Teaching Rocks
We moved on from the poster displays to the movie theater. My brother and I were the only two there that afternoon but the Park Ranger – I did not get his name – graciously set up the film for us to watch. Entitled The Teaching Rocks, the nineteen-minute documentary-style film dates back to 1987. The Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources commissioned the cinematographer Lloyd Walton to direct the project; Fred Wheatley, an Ojibwe language teacher at Peterborough’s Trent U as well as an Ojibwe elder, did the narration.
The following week I would google my way to a copy of my own. The film is available for online viewing or for download at the Vimeo website (click here to access). The brief synopsis of the film reads like this –
A visually arresting film, concentrates on the native art of the Ojibwa tribe. Much Ojibwa history and philosophy has been related through the rock carvings and paintings which are featured throughout this work. The voices of the Elders are heard in the film, describing the tales of creation and existence that mark the group’s iconography. A sense of mystery informs this evocative film as the realization strikes that no individual can expect to penetrate the mythos of the Ojibwa.
The film begins with a scrolling text which tells us that “the precise meaning of the petroglyphs are carefully shrouded in mystery” thus putting a positive spin on the difficulty of entering into the minds of those who put these images and markings here some time ago. Given that the documentary is meant to teach us about Ojibwe culture, it makes remarkably little use of traditional Ojibwe myth and legend.
Missing is any discussion of Thunderbird and Mishipeshu, of Nanabush and the Giant Beaver…what we are offered instead are musings and platitudes on Mother Earth. Walton does combine some nicely filmed scenes of the rocks and water of the Canadian Shield, as well as shots of pictograph sites at Agawa Rock on Lake Superior and Lake Missinaibi, and I think a couple of seconds of Mazinaw Rock.
On top of close-up clips of the animals of the Shield country – the moose, beaver, bear, and heron – the narrator provides a commentary which emphasizes the same environmentalist ethos presented by the displays in the Learning Centre. The narrator – he speaks as an elder – tells us that –
We were put on this earth to look after our mother , the earth … Every blade of grass has a right to grow and whenever you set your tipi up, or your shelter, don’t leave it there for long because you will kill the grass if you leave it there. That’s why the Great Spirit has given you a strong body to be able to do these things…
Given that the narrator was an Ojibwe language teacher at Trent University in Peterborough with a classroom in a large concrete block on the banks of the Otonobee River, you have to wonder just what he was seriously advocating other people to do while he showed up for class in his grass-killing structure.
Elsewhere he says this –
It is up to us to go back to our traditional ways and to try to warn the white man before he has poisoned the whole earth. Don’t contribute to the mess that’s being made…
Consider the usefulness of this elder’s “wisdom” for today’s young Ojibwe as they try to find a meaningful role for themselves in the world being poisoned by the ignorant – or downright malicious – white man. Romanticizing the past – advocating a return to an indigenous past that never actually existed – surely is not the answer. And just what does “traditional ways” include? Electricity? Cell phones? Snowmobiles? Boats with kickers? Modern medicine? Hip-hop music? Smokes? One house that you live in all year ’round?
To emphasize the harmonious nature of life before the coming of the white man, Wheatley tells us of the annual month-of-May Ojibwe “meetings with the Sioux on the south shore of Lake superior to exchange medicines“. The word “Sioux” is Ojibwe in origin and had the uncomplimentary meaning of “little snake”. Also known as the Dakotas, they were a neighbouring tribe who lived at the west end of Lake Superior. When the Ojibwe moved into this area from further east around 1650 to 1700, they battled with the Dakota for control of this land. For generations there were back and forth raids and battles between the two tribes for control; the Ojibwe won out and the Dakota moved further west.
For generations, the Ojibwe were also at war with the Iroquois tribes. This is in the historical record; what Wheatley presents is a pre-European-contact paradise which never existed. This may suit his purpose but it gives those watching the film a false idea of the way things actually were.
(Access a pdf copy of George Copway’s 1851 book The Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation here and check out chapter 5 for an account of those wars. Copway was an Ojibwe from the Trenton area to the east of the petroglyph site. He was born in 1818.
See also this article – “The Ojibwa-Iroquois War: The War The Five Nations Did Not Win” for a comprehensive and well-researched summary.
The petroglyph site is presented as “The Teaching Rocks”, a place where select young people were taken as a step in the initiation into becoming shamans. Using the images on the rock as teaching tools, the young person would learn some of the truths that he would need to become a medicine man in his own right. It may be that the creators and original users of this rock face also used it in this way. However, more likely is that we have here a modern repurposing of the rock face to fit in with the reality of a contemporary Ojibwe culture being swamped by external forces and an attempt to create a focal point for cultural revival three hundred years after the deluge began.
3. The Petroglyph Site
As we approached the petroglyph site, another sign reminds us – yet again! – that given the sacredness of the site, no photography is allowed. Given the cellphones with cameras that almost everyone has these days, this must be a tough one to enforce. I think back at pix I’ve taken on Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Sistine Chapel in Rome, or more recently at the most sacred Buddhist site in Myanmar – the Shwedagon Pagoda – with its gold-plated stupa and relics said to be of the Buddha himself. The Myanmar site even has free internet access provided on the temple grounds for visitors! The reason for the “no photo” rule here escapes me. More than anything else, it feels like politics. Having let the folks on duty know my view on the matter, I did abide by it.
We walked through a gate in the fence which I assume rings the entire site and separates it from the rest of the park. The photo below sets the scene as you approach the site. The structure covering the petroglyph site was built in 1984. The glass walls reach a height of about 40′ (12 meters) and let in a fair amount of subdued light.
Not far from the site archaeologists – perhaps the Vastokas team – found gneiss rock hammers which the creators of the petroglyphs used to peck and grind out the images. Somewhere nearby there are two smaller petroglyph sites. The 1977 Master Plan for Petroglyphs Park provides this information –
One of the smaller sites is directly north of the major concentration, while the other site is 250 m to the northwest.The second small site consists of 23 distinct glyphs. In addition to these sites, there are a few glyphs scattered through the peripheral areas of the site.
Not everyone is happy about the building covering the site. Joan Vastokas, mentioned above as one of the authors of the still-definitive study of the site, has said that the structure itself is the biggest act of vandalism which has been done to the site.
At the end of the post is a link to a paper written by Dagmara Zawadzka of Université du Québec à Montréal which gives a negative assessment of the Ontario Parks solution to protect the site. I did photograph the information board – see below – in which the Park officials present the reasons for doing what they did. My overall impression – while the building may not be perfect it is still the best solution to the realities of the soft limestone rock and the need to protect it from the impact of visitors.
Once we entered the building itself, I obviously did not take any more photos. For study purposes, it would have been nice to have a set of images which I could examine in more detail at my leisure. We did have the benefit of having the park official – the same young man who had set up the movie for us – as a guide. We had him to ourselves for about forty-five minutes and he gave us a fantastic tour of the rock face, taking us from one end to the other and pointing out key petroglyphs and some of the meanings given to them and their supposed relationship to others nearby. Only two other people – a young couple – came in while we were there and their, at most, five-minute visit left us wondering why they had bothered coming all this way.
As you enter the building, there is a rack with pamphlets available; they explain the overall significance of the site, as well as a few of the dominant images. The tone of the pamphlet is more like what I had expected at the Learning Centre. Also on the wall was a 24″x36″ or so drawing of the rock face and its many petroglyphs. I’d imagine it is from the Vastokas book mentioned above. At the end of the tour, the park official was good enough to take it off its wall hook and bring it outside the building where I took a couple of photos of at least parts of it.
While this Wikipedia entry tells you that there are 1200 petroglyphs at the site it – an unlikely high number – it does not go on to say that maybe 200 to 250 of them are still recognizable.
In the above drawings, there are a few images which jump out, probably because our minds can find some sort of meaning in them. Human forms and animal forms are definitely there, as are objects like canoes. Some are fantastical and others are more abstract geometric forms.
The photo below was shot in 1970 and is one of a dozen that can be found at Jim Werner’s website. Serpents, turtles, a “rabbit-eared” human figure, the 56″ long crane, the attention-grabbing triangles…obviously while the charcoal crayon which Vastokas’ students used to colour in the petroglyphs helps us see them better, we are seeing the site in a manner not thought of by the various people who hammered their images out of the rock. One could characterize the colouring in of the cavities as an act of vandalism in itself.
This is where you ask the question – what does it all mean? The first thing to recognize is that the images were not all put here at the same time. It is more accurate to picture the site as one to which the image makers – the shamans? – came over a period of generations to leave their mark for whatever purpose.
Having said that, it is important to resist the very human impulse to take two adjacent images and create some sort of “story” that explains their connection. Chances are they actually have nothing to do with each other. So – what is the key to unlocking their meaning?
There is no Rosetta Stone; there is no “grand theory of everything” which we can apply here. However, the images are the product of a particular culture with its set of myths and stories developed over time to explain all that they needed to explain. And what culture? As already indicated – the culture of an Algonquian-speaking people like the Algonquin or Ojibwe seems like a safe bet.
An interesting feature of the site is the number of crevasses and cracks in the rock face. One, in particular, goes diagonally across the entire rock face. Even more significant, there is a stream that passes underneath and at least in the past one could apparently hear the echo of the moving water. The sounds were given a spiritual twist and taken as voices of the manitous who dwelt in or under the rock. A parallel Ojibwe belief would be in the maymaygweshiwuk who lived in underwater caves associated with rock faces where shamans would leave their ochre images as a part of the ritual of obtaining favour or medicine from these spirits. A number of my posts on pictograph sites on the Canadian shield have images of such rock faces.
Another interesting feature – and one that some people feel uncomfortable dealing with – are the holes at different places on the rock face. The Parks site pamphlet mentioned above discreetly omits this petroglyph from the discussion even though it may have been one of the first to be put there. Apparently, a seam of reddish iron oxide runs right through the figure and is thought to symbolize menstrual blood. The drawing can be seen directly above and an internet- sourced image on the left makes it all clear – the creator of the image has incorporated the hole as vagina. On the upper body, one can make out a breast. On the day we were there a small amount of tobacco sat on top of the outstretched right arm of the female figure, presumably left by someone as a part of a petition or of thanksgiving ritual.
In the third drawing above, a figure below the female figure has been interpreted as a camel! Notice the humps. “Aha” the “reasoning” goes – so the Phoenicians really were here! A less fantastical and more likely explanation – one that comes from traditional Ojibwe iconography is that it is a representation of Mishipeshu. He is the underwater lynx who is seen as a counter-force to the Thunderbird (Animikii)) who is second only to Gitchi Manitou (the spirit above all other spirits) in power. The famous pictograph of Mishipeshu at Agawa Rock bears similarities to the animal depicted here.
Also very common on this rock face are depictions of snakes. Unlike the Christian spin put on the snake – Satan the deceiver in the Garden of Eden – for the Algonquins and Ojibwe the snake, often depicted with two horns (Mishikinebik) is a positive force associated with the medicine and wisdom that a shaman would have come for. The Park pamphlet puts it this way – “Because snakes live and move between the spirit worlds, they are often viewed as messengers from the underworld and protectors of the springs.” Look at the first photo of the drawings – not having any photos to double check I am assuming that whoever drew the images did so accurately! – and you’ll see three different snake figures with the double horns indicated. There are apparently thirty or so snake images at the site, with some of them incorporating the crevasses and cracks of the rock face.
Another animal figure which figures prominently on the site is the turtle Mikinak. It is seen at pictograph sites across the Algonquian world and represents the messenger who brings the manitous’ communication to the shamans. At this site there are a dozen turtle images – one of them is depicted in the image to the left. One interpretation has the dots as eggs which symbolize new life. There was even an explanation for the number of eggs – 13? – which I have forgotten. It is probably best to take many of the explanations with a touch of skepticism.
One unusual image that provokes puzzlement is the one to the right. It seems to show the lower part of a human body and then a sun symbol on a vertical line which could be the upper body. The park pamphlet writes: “This large central figure near the centre of the site is thought by some First Nations to be a carving of ‘Gitchi Manitou’…it may also represent a shaman who has been given powers by the creator.” Given the transcendent nature of the Great Spirit, it seems highly unlikely that such an image would be made. It would be as if the Hindus were to depict Brahman, the God beyond all gods. I have yet to read of or see another example on the Canadian Shield of such a depiction. (Let me know if you can think of one.)
Looking at the photo another answer comes to mind – perhaps we are looking at two different pictographs, one on top of the other and not actually related or even done at the same time by the same person. The fact that we link the two says more about how the human mind works than it does about what the rock carvers engraved in the rock face.
Another image commented on in the pamphlet is one of what may be a shaman or “medicine man”. The object in the figure’s right hand “may possibly be a turtle rattle used in ceremonial practices. The cone-shaped hat over the person’s head may indicate his/her connection to the spirit world and the power of healing.” The shaman figures I have seen further west share some common elements with this one. Like this one they are always standing figures who hold something in an outstretched arm. That “something” is interpreted to be an otter skin medicine bag. This image from the Bloodvein River is typical –
While the Artery lake figure does not have the conical hat, he does have what could be interpreted as a spirit line coming out of his head. Perhaps there is a parallel there? Here is a drawing from the Smithsonian Institute’s anthropological archives. It depicts a medicine man with a ritual object in his left hand which he seems to be spinning or shaking –
A physically large petroglyph is that of the crane or heron that you see in the image to the right. It measures some 56″ from top to bottom. According to the Park pamphlet the crane “is a common totem bird among the different Algonkian peoples. Playing a relevant role in the world of shamanism, signified as helping spirits that aid in revealing prophecies, and they are receptacles of the souls of the dead, as birds can read the future. Members of this clan traditionally are the speakers at meetings.” (Someone at Parks Ontario needs to rewrite this passage!)
Also in the above image, you will find two images associated with Nanaboozoo or Nanabush, the rabbit-eared “trickster” of Ojibwe myth. The next day we would see a similar ochre pictograph at Mazinaw Rock – a human figure with two large “ears” protruding from his head. In all of southern Ontario – everything from Sudbury to the Ottawa River on down to Lake Ontario, there are really only two aboriginal rock image sites – Mazinaw Rock at Bon Echo and this petroglyph site. Interestingly, both are the biggest sites of their kind in Ontario – and maybe in Canada. See here for our visit to Mazinaw.
The walkway takes you right around the site; every few meters there is an information board with an explanation of particular images. Normally I would have taken photos of them and reread them after the visit. The pamphlet deals with most of the ones I’ve covered above. It also has a bit to say about the canoe images, the Thunderbird, what looks like large arrowheads but which could be a shaman’s spirit (the pamphlet’s suggestion) or Christmas trees (a silly suggestion made in that Milwaukee Journal at the start of the post). I haven’t seen anything like it in all the pictograph sites I have been to – or seen images from.
More time and access to photos of different parts of the site would add more substance to my analysis. So would reading the Vastokas’ book!
If you want to see more images of the petroglyphs, the best collection I have found on-line belongs to Jim Werner; the photos were actually taken by his uncle Robin L. Lyke. His website has an excellent discussion of the site and twelve images; you can access it here.
The drive to Petroglyphs Provincial Park took us about an hour from Peterborough. We had spent the morning at the Canadian Canoe Museum so we got there about 2:30. I am glad we took the time to finally check it out. As is often the case, we left with more questions than we had arrived with – but isn’t that why we travel and check out things we don’t know about? We came expecting to see the physical structure over the petroglyph site; we left wondering about the ideological construction undertaken by some members of the Curve Lake Ojibwe community.
This post was my attempt to grapple with some of those questions. I have a feeling that in the coming months I will be returning to this post – rethinking, revising, researching, and replying to comments of those who may or may not agree with my view of things.
Useful Links For More Insight:
The 1977 Ontario Government “Master Plan” for Petroglyph Provincial Park is worth skimming through. You can access it here. I also took pp. 32-36, the section on the history of the site, and put it into a 1.2 Mb pdf file which you can download here.
Among the statistics in the report were the annual visits for 1974 (14,227) and 1975 (13,613). The most recent statistics I could find were for 2010 (13,254). If the stats are all measuring exactly the same thing, it would seem that fewer people are visiting now than forty years ago! If so, I wonder why?
Due to the site’s uniqueness and popularity, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) implemented measures to protect and conserve it, as well as to transform it into a tourist attraction. One such measure was the construction of a building directly on top of the site. In the following paper, I demonstrate that this building thwarts the understanding of the meaning inherent in this sacred Indigenous site, and that less intrusive and culturally sensitive conservation measures might be more suited for transmitting the spirit of the place.
Robert Burcher has developed the argument the petroglyphs should be attributed to the Celts. His book The Leather Boat fleshes out his theory as to how people from Ireland came to carve images into the limestone in the central Ontario wilds some 2000 years ago. Like me he is a WordPress blogger; unlike me, he has a book for sale. See here for details! Alas, no copies in the Toronto Public Library system!
Carol Diaz-Granados and James R. Duncan have edited a collection of papers in The Rock-Art of Eastern North America: Capturing Images and Insight (2004). Chapter 16 – The Peterborough Petroglyphs: Native or Norse? – is a contribution by Joan Vastokas. The teaser blurb begins –
This chapter discusses the ongoing debate over the Peterborough Petroglyphs and whether they were created by Native Americans or Norsemen. First, a history of the debate is covered positing the various theories. Then, forms of writing that have been compared to the Peterborough Petroglyphs are addressed and their similarities and differences explained. Throughout the chapter, I present evidence that concludes a Native Ameri-…
And they leave it at that! Given the author, we can guess what the conclusion is. Most of the chapter (except for three pages) can be read here at Google Books.
Charles Lock is currently a Professor of English at the University of Copenhagen but for twelve years (1983-1995) he taught at the University of Toronto. He has a 15-page paper in a 1994 issue of Semiotica (special edition on Prehistoric Signs) entitled “Petroglyphs In And Out Of Perspective”. It is available here. While written for an academic audience and occasionally an obtuse read (just like this post), it is worth the effort. He uses the Peterborough Petroglyphs to illustrate some of the points he makes about how and why modern scholars study “primitive” art. Here is a brief sample from the article:
Unlike prehistoric artefacts in Europe , but like mediaeval ones, the petroglyphs of North and Central America are still, or have become again, the focus of cult. The most famous petroglyph site in Ontario — near Peterborough — was discovered in 1954, and the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources undertook to preserve ‘this important part of our national heritage … for future generations of Canadians’ (Sweetman 1955: 108). Fences of increasing seriousness were built to protect the site from visitors — not only from wear, but from the graffiti that graffiti always invites — until it was recognized that the main damage was caused by the weather. Before their discovery the petroglyphs had been well protected by moss and undergrowth. In the late 1970s the Ministry built a large structure over the entire rock surface; the atmosphere inside is now fully controlled. In 1976 the site was designated a Provincial Park . I first visited the petroglyphs in 1984, and my thought then was that as the petroglyph would not go to the Museum, the Museum had gone to the petroglyph. Sometime between then and my next visit in 1990 a wooden sign appeared, on the path between the car-park and the site, and visitors are now informed that this is a sacred place, honored and used for ritual purposes by Native Americans; non-Natives are asked to behave with respect. Native people are now the guides and wardens of the Park, and there is talk of the Ontario government ‘handing back’ the petroglyphs to Native Americans.
The way we view these petroglyphs has changed radically. No longer a museum, ideologically neutral and spatially homogeneous, the structure belongs to others and is to be entered on sufferance. Should one remove one’s hat? One’s shoes? Voices are lowered. And one certainly gets a ‘romantic thrill’ from seeing on that great rock, at a discreet distance from any carving, the traces of a tobacco offering. Visiting in 1992, however, I noticed not only tobacco and feathers and stones, but also red, yellow, and white ribbon. These ribbons are traditional and authentic, but my aesthetic sense inwardly protested that the effect was tawdry. With petroglyphs as with icons, offerings must be placed in contiguity with the object of devotion, and thus become part of it; one cannot open a site to cultic devotion and then ask that offerings be left elsewhere, to the side. As a visitor, one knows that one’s aesthetic protest would be, if voiced, a mark of disrespect. In a museum, of course, complaints are expected.
Here we have a rare and spectacular instance of a prehistoric artefact which is now serving what we might call a ‘first-order purpose’. Obviously there has been no continuity of cult; the Ojibway Anishinabe band, who now revere the site and care for it, do not pretend that it was ever associated with their ancestors. Whether the contemporary cult is the same or similar to that practiced in prehistoric times is of course unknown; indeed, not everyone is agreed that these petroglyphs ever had sacred significance or were at any time the site of a cult. Probability certainly favors the Ojibway, and whatever the authenticity of the present cult, it must be considered ‘first-order’: there is a consensus among Native people which legitimates the cult, and the ritual has nothing to do with ‘second-order purposes’, the aesthetic and cognitive practices of non-Native viewers. Viewers, spectators, scholars, helpfully raised on the ramp that encircles the rock, prevented by railings from falling (or straying) onto the rock, we notice the little gate through which Natives may pass: the way in, not for viewers but only for participants.