Petroglyph Rescue

In a desolate gorge of the Columbia River 85 miles upstream from Portland, Ore., a rescue party was working last week to save one of the most interesting relics of America's distant past. Water, backed up by the great new dam at The Dalles, will soon cover the strange rock carvings in Petroglyph Canyon. No one knows who carved the animals, sunbursts and strange, maplike designs in the hard basalt, or when or why they did it. But the fascinating mystery will never be solved if deep water is permitted to cover the evidence.

A contractor paid by the National Park Service is beginning to drag to safety some of the carved stones that are not too big to load onto trucks. Other carvings will be quarried free from the solid rock. A public campaign has been organized to raise money to supplement the Park Service's meager ($8,000) appropriation, but not all the carvings can be saved from the water. Next best is to copy them accurately, and Sculptor James Hansen and his wife Annabelle are doing this by making impressions in melted wax.

According to Anthropologist David Cole, who is photographing the carvings, modern Indians of the Northwest have no traditions about the ancient people who made the rock carvings. The carvings themselves cannot be dated by any known method, but carbon-14 tests of an organic material from a nearby mound show that the region was inhabited 9,000 years ago. Presumably the rock carvers depended on the Columbia salmon, as later Indians did, but where they came from and what happened to them no one knows. The mystery may be solved by study of the carvings-- if they are saved in time.

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