1972: Discovery of an Ancient People.
Flat Rock Trek: Williams, Arizona
It was a walk along a basalt cliff on a sunny late December afternoon and not looking for any particular thing, but a route up to the top of the cliff. Suddenly, right in front of me I saw an animal figure and strange symbols etched on the south face of the basalt cliff (Left: The sketch I made that day). I certainly wasn't the first to see these as the local people knew about them for years, but I was excited about it. Those mysterious symbols would launched me into many years of inspiration and discovery in the search for 'rock art' and the mysteries of the ancient peoples on the landscape of the Colorado Plateau.
I learned that these people were called the Cohonina. They roamed the mountainous volcanic area east of the San Fransico Peaks from 500 to 900 AD. At the same time another group of ancient people claimed the territory west of the peaks and were called the Sinagua. Both groups were primarly hunter/gatherer's and interacted on many levels. Both constructed and lived in pit houses, produced a distinct pottery. I found a very distinct orange pottery shard on Three Sister's Mountain a couple years and it was years later that I found the orange clay used to make it two feet below the ground while digging a foundation wall for a gravesite in the Williams Cemetery.
Flat Rock is just a couple of miles north of Williams, Arizona. Bill Williams mountian is the highest elevation at 8,000 feet. In those ancient times the drainage from the winter snow runoff formed a large lake in the plain below and was teeming with wildlife. In the early 19th century mountain man Bill Williams and his comrades roamed this area trapping beaver and hunting and thus the name of the town and the mountian.
The areas from Williams to east of Flagstaff many ruins can still be found today. The foundations of pit houses, forts, and petrogylph's and pictograph's tell you of their presence throughout northern Arizona.
The first book I found to help decipher the symbols was 'The Rocks Begin Speak' by Lauan Martineau. He had recorded many different symbols and attached a discriptive interpetition to each.
Lower left illustration shows the symbol discriptions in Martineau's book. I returned in the spring of '73 to try following the interpetational directions but found nothing. However the top of Flat Rock would be a perfect site for a signal fire and/or ceromonies, or it was a good hunting place above a game trail.
I had heard there were many petroglyphs on top of Three Sister's mountain which was just 4 miles west. In the summer I drove over there and parked at the north side of the taller Sister for the hike to the top. Along the way I saw cougar scat, elk droppings and the closer to top were volcanic extrusions shaped like pillars. The 'glyphs' at Flat Rock made sense as I gazed across the panorama from the top.
Next: Three Sister's Trek: Williams, Arizona: The Shaman's Cave.