Some panels are high on the cliff wall, surrounded by swallows' nests.
The artists were determined to get good exposure for their work, or to
protect it from later improvements by others, contemporary or modern--but
how did they get up there?
Animals and human figures are recognizable. The meshwork designs
in the first panel (top of this page) are less easy to make sense of.
A close-up shows how deeply the designs have been gouged into the sandstone.
Most of these are petroglyphs--images pecked into the stone itself.
This pictograph is worked in pigment, and the overhanging cliff has protected
its vivid color over the centuries. A woman I met here taught me
a Hopi blessing (Lo Lo Ma--all is good) and gave me some blue cornmeal
to sprinkle. I sang a little song to accompany my cornmeal sprinkling.
Nearby I found some large pieces of mother-of-pearl, far from any waters
that could have produced them.
Some people think this pictograph records the supernova of 1054 that was observed by Chinese astronomers. The Chacoans were dedicated sky-watchers and would have seen it too. In this interpretation, the star-like object is the supernova, which was 10 times as bright as Venus in the sky and visible during daylight for 23 days (and over 650 nights!). The crescent moon represents the phase of the moon on the date the supernova was brightest in the sky, and the relative positions and sizes of the moon and supernova are approximately those of the real objects at dawn on those days (if you stood with your back to the cliff, as you would to see the sky too). Thus the image is a pretty accurate rendition of the 1054 supernova as it would have been seen from this location. The hand image is taken to mean the site is sacred. The cliff is located near the pueblo of Penasco Blanco. All this evidence is conjecture, but it still grips the imagination to think of ancient astronomers recording their data here.