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<< Our Photo Pages >> Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park - Rock Art in Canada

Submitted by Andy B on Wednesday, 10 October 2012  Page Views: 11829

Rock ArtSite Name: Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park Alternative Name: Writing on Stone Park, Áísínai’pi
Country: Canada
NOTE: This site is 27.072 km away from the location you searched for.

Type: Rock Art
Nearest Town: Lethbridge  Nearest Village: Milk River
Latitude: 49.081944N  Longitude: 111.616944W
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
no data Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
no data Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
4
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Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park
Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park submitted by bat400_photo : A petroglyph from Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park, Alberta, Canada. Date: 31 August 2005(2005-08-31) D. Windrim - Original uploader was Denni at en.wikipedia Permission(Reusing this file): CC-BY-SA-2.5. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license. Site in Canada (Vote or comment on this photo)
Rock Art in Alberta, Canada.
Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park is located about 100 kilometres southeast of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada or 44 kilometres east of the community of Milk River, and straddles the Milk River itself. It is one of the largest areas of protected prairie in the Alberta park system, and serves as both a nature preserve and protection for a large number of Indian rock carvings and paintings.

It has been nominated by Parks Canada and the Government of Canada as a World Heritage Site.

Writing-on-Stone Park contains the greatest concentration of rock art on the North American Great Plains. There are over 50 petroglyph sites and thousands of works.

There is evidence that the Milk River Valley was inhabited by the Blackfoot people as long ago as 9000 years. These natives probably created much of the rock carvings (petroglyphs) and paintings (pictographs). Other native groups such as the Shoshone also travelled through the valley and may have also created some of the art. These carvings and paintings tell not only of the lives and journeys of those who created them, but also of the spirits they found here.

The towering cliffs and hoodoos had a powerful impact on the native visitors, who believed these were the homes of powerful spirits. The shelter of the coulees and the abundance of game and berries made the area that is now the park an excellent location for these nomadic people to stop on their seasonal migrations. While the greatest use of the area was made by those in transit, there is some evidence, including tipi rings and a medicine wheel, that there was some permanent settlement here.

More on the site at Wikipedia.

Note: Attempts to repair Rock Art vandalism, see comment.
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Nearby Images from Flickr
Sweet Grass Hills over Ancient Stones
Golden Hour
Police Coulee
Golden Hour
Battle Scene
Humphrey coulee writing on stone park

The above images may not be of the site on this page, but were taken nearby. They are loaded from Flickr so please click on them for image credits.


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Nearby sites listing. In the following links * = Image available
 94.7km NNW 348° Fincastle Grazing Reserve Bison Kill Ancient Mine, Quarry or other Industry
 121.1km ENE 57° Stampede Site Ancient Village or Settlement
 140.4km NW 325° Sundial Medicine Wheel* Ring Cairn
 162.9km WNW 296° Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump* Ancient Mine, Quarry or other Industry
 176.6km NNW 341° Majorville Medicine Wheel* Round Cairn
 178.4km S 178° First Peoples Buffalo Jump* Natural Stone / Erratic / Other Natural Feature
 241.2km W 263° Crystal Lakes Golf Course Stonehenge* Modern Stone Circle etc
 252.2km NW 317° Big Rock (Alberta) Rock Art
 283.7km S 185° Megaliths Of Helena* Natural Stone / Erratic / Other Natural Feature
 285.9km NW 323° Ootssip'tomowa Look Out Hill* Hill Figure or Geoglyph
 388.7km W 264° Priest Lake Pictographs Rock Art
 442.4km SE 146° Pictograph Caves* Rock Art
 457.1km WSW 254° Indian Painted Rocks (Spokane) Rock Art
 463.0km SSE 153° Valley of the Shields* Rock Art
 478.4km S 172° Obsidian Cliff* Ancient Mine, Quarry or other Industry
 497.1km NE 43° Wanuskewin Heritage Park* Museum
 503.5km SW 227° Cooper's Ferry Archaeological Site* Ancient Village or Settlement
 503.9km NW 315° Cataract Creek Petroglyphs* Rock Art
 507.3km SW 235° Red Elk Rock Shelter* Rock Art
 510.9km SSE 151° Petroglyph Canyon (Cowley)* Rock Art
 524.2km S 169° Yellowstone Lake* Ancient Village or Settlement
 533.4km SSE 164° Mummy Cave* Cave or Rock Shelter
 550.0km SSE 148° Bighorn Medicine Wheel* Stone Circle
 563.4km SW 224° Snake River Archaeological Site* Rock Art
 576.7km W 264° Balance Rock Omak* Natural Stone / Erratic / Other Natural Feature
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"Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park" | Login/Create an Account | 2 News and Comments
  
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Alberta park's vandalized ancient etchings undergo repairs by bat400 on Wednesday, 10 October 2012
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Efforts are underway to repair vandalized native art at Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park in southeastern Alberta — an important endeavour that could determine the park's future as a world heritage site.

"It's a bit like plastic surgery,” archeologist Jannie Loubser said about the painstaking work that requires hours and hours of scraping and drilling to restore the priceless pictographs and petroglyphs that go back hundreds of years.

Loubser is on a team of experts and volunteers in Writing-on-Stone looking to remove graffiti and repair the hundreds of vandalized etchings on the park's sandstone walls and hoodoos.

Much of the damage, done over time, is initials and other markings carved into the rocks.

Loubser says the park's rock art is some of the best on the continent, and it’s a shame it was damaged.
"We learn a lot about the art — what it meant it to the people — literally look into the minds of people that are long gone," he said.

Alberta Parks is overseeing the remediation, but according to provincial parks employee Aaron Domes, some of the art is beyond repair.
"There are definitely some panels where it’s very complex, where you might have significant rock art with a lot of vandalism scratched over top or in between ... and those are the most difficult for Jannie and his team to work on," he said.

Part of Writing-on-Stone's appeal is an interpretive centre set up to explain the ancient etchings. Guided tours are also available to see the stone and hoodoo etchings first-hand, as they are now blocked off from park visitors for protection.

For more, including photographs, see ca.news.yahoo.com.
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Millenniums of human history engraved in Writing-on-Stone by Andy B on Friday, 16 May 2008
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Yvonne Jeffery , For the Calgary Herald; CanWest News Service

Bonnie Moffet uses her stout walking staff to point toward one of the stick figures carved into the sandstone cliff that is radiating heat out into the prairie afternoon.

"Don't touch the cliff, but look closely," she says. "Can you see the pink?" I hold my breath and lean in. Sure enough, the rectangular torso of the centuries-old petroglyph, or rock carving, shows a faint rose tinge that's just different enough from the stone to show up, even in the sunlight that's baking southern Alberta's Milk River Valley.

It's likely red ochre -- made by mixing crushed iron ore with water or bison fat -- and used to paint the rock art here, carved up to 3,500 years ago primarily by the Blackfoot people.

That it still exists, even in a faint echo of its original hue, is a trick of the dry climate, a protective overhang, and the provincial government's designation of Writing-on-Stone, 50 years ago, as a provincial park.

At the opening last month of the park's first permanent interpretive centre -- an environmentally low-impact building incorporating natural lighting, local stone and water conservation techniques -- politicians, architects and archeologists mingled with park staff, First Nations representatives in full regalia, and ranchers in sweat-stained cowboy hats.

Leather, linen and feathers symbolized eloquently those who, over the decades, have helped to protect this special place -- the largest concentration of rock art anywhere on the North American plains, now an archeological preserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a National Historic Site. Moffet, who heads up the interpreters, is in her 15th season of guiding visitors here.

She can name the orange-scarlet mallow that blooms amid the spiky prairie grass in this arid region, and tell you how the glaciers melted so rapidly 10,000 years ago that meltwaters carved the coulees through which the Milk River now flows.

She even has a provincial licence to study her "little friends," the elusive prairie rattlesnakes that are an integral part of this grassland ecosystem.

Most of all, Moffet offers an insight into the lives of those who turned this valley into Aisinai-pi, or "where the drawings are." "The Blackfoot have used this valley for a very long time," she explains, adding that other groups were here as well, including the Cree, Assiniboine, Gros Ventre and Shoshone. "It's known that this area was used for hunting for up to 10,000 years," she says.

Her wooden staff points from figure to figure, her words giving life to the pictures etched into the cliffs. Warriors holding large round shields were likely carved before the coming of the horse around 1736, she explains, because those shields were too big to be used on horseback. An arc of radiating lines around a person indicates an aura of power. Animals that first appeared with canoe-shaped bodies eventually became more stylized.

Moffet then asks our small group to look away from the cliffs, across the valley to the once-volcanic Sweetgrass Hills rising in the distance. Despite whisky traders and the North West Mounted Police, the valley has maintained its timeless appearance. "This is how the Blackfoot knew it," she says. Meadowlarks dip and dive above the tall grass, and a warm breeze brushes our faces with the scent of sage.

Then Moffet sums up the intention at the very heart of Alberta's provincial park system, a combination of preservation, recreation and heritage. "Our wish here is not just to talk about rock art and rock art preservation," she says. "It's to share with people the fragility of this place . . . and to change attitudes forever toward First Nations people."

IF YOU GO:

- Getting there: Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park is approximately 45 minutes south of Lethbridge, just 10 kilometres north of the Alberta-Montana border. It offers day-us

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