BD Pictographs, Emery County, UT. A great and somewhat frustrating site containing prime examples of
BD Pictographs, Emery County, UT. A great and somewhat frustrating site containing prime examples of Barrier Canyon Style rock paintings, dating back to the archaic period, meaning these images are between 1500-4000 years old. I’m always blown away by the ingenuity of the Ancient Ones, painting on a rock surface using only natural pigment and materials, exposed to the elements for thousands of years, and still these images remain. It’s just mind-boggling. This particular panel shows the unfortunate results of outlining the images with chalk, a once-common practice (HARD eye roll). The chalk outlines are said to be from the 40′s and attributed to a man named John Simonson, who incorrectly outlined multiple figures to create the dragon-like image from Slide 1, which this canyon is named after. For a while the dragon image was considered to be a possible depiction of a pterosaur (a winged dinosaur), leading young-Earth creationists to claim this was proof of human-dinosaur co-existence. Luckily science put an end to all that when, in 2015, an x-ray fluorescence gun and DStretch were used to enhance and isolate the pigments in the panel, showing the presence of at least 5 separate images (I’ve outlined the 3 main images in Slide 2). All this because some dude thought he saw a dragon on the wall and decided to outline it in chalk. Even though this panel no longer provides proof that The Flintstones was based on real-life, this is still one of the more impressive Barrier Canyon panels in all of Utah, in my humble opinion. -- source link
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