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<< Other Photo Pages >> Pictograph Caves - Rock Art in United States in The Northwest Mountains

Submitted by bat400 on Wednesday, 15 July 2015  Page Views: 17511

Rock ArtSite Name: Pictograph Caves Alternative Name: Hieroglyphic Caves, Indian Caves, Inscription Cave
Country: United States
NOTE: This site is 80.043 km away from the location you searched for.

Region: The Northwest Mountains Type: Rock Art
Nearest Town: Billings, Montana
Latitude: 45.737000N  Longitude: 108.4317W
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
2 Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
3 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.
4 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

Internal Links:
External Links:

I have visited· I would like to visit

mfrincu visited on 21st Jun 2015 - their rating: Amb: 4 Access: 4 Unfortunately when I got here the cave was closed due to some rock slides. It was due for reopening by mid July. Hopefully the cave itself was not damaged.

bat400 visited on 1st Jan 1989 - their rating: Cond: 2 Amb: 4 Access: 4 See the site listing. It's not possible to get close to the pictographs, so bring binoculars.



Average ratings for this site from all visit loggers: Ambience: 4 Access: 4

Pictograph Caves
Pictograph Caves submitted by Flickr : Image copyright: Oceanic Wilderness (M. Little), hosted on Flickr and displayed under the terms of their API. (Vote or comment on this photo)
Rock Art in Yellowstone County, Montana. This Montana State Park features a group of three rock shelters or shallow caves in a limestone cliff. The paintings range from those pre-dating European contact by 2200 years to historic period paintings featuring coup sticks and rifles.

The caves are named Pictograph Cave, Ghost Cave, and Middle Cave. The first two may be viewed by the public from a trail immediately by the edge of the overhanging rock. Binoculars are necessary to get a better view of the white, black, and red painted figures, animals and designs.

Excavations in the early to mid 20thC found burial sites, stone tools, household basketry and ceramics. Carbon dating has indicated use going back 1300 years, but stone tools from much lower strata indicate habitation 9000 years ago.

Pictograph Caves State Park is a National Historic Landmark, but that designation was nearly taken away in the 1970's because of the vandalism taking place at the site and generally poor control of visitors. I visited the site in the late 1980's, after improvements made by the state and the city of Billings put an end to teenage beer parties and bonfires. The condition of the cave paintings is not especially good - compared to photos taken in the 1930s they are dramatically faded. However, painted figures are relatively rare in North America, and this is one of the few easily accessible public sites where such paintings may be seen. I also remember the area as being particularly scenic, with many birds and small, unseen mammals scurrying about in the brush.

The location is general for the entire site, not a particular cave or pictograph.

Official Park web sitewith detailed information.

Note: Montana’s Pictograph Cave reopens after lengthy repairs, see the latest comment on our page
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Pictograph Caves
Pictograph Caves submitted by Flickr : Pictograph_Cave_09 Image copyright: koloth440, hosted on Flickr and displayed under the terms of their API. (Vote or comment on this photo)

Pictograph Caves
Pictograph Caves submitted by Flickr : Map of the site Image copyright: evodevo_mike (Mike), hosted on Flickr and displayed under the terms of their API. (Vote or comment on this photo)

Pictograph Caves
Pictograph Caves submitted by Flickr : Appears to be a bear Image copyright: las.photographs, hosted on Flickr and displayed under the terms of their API. (Vote or comment on this photo)

Pictograph Caves
Pictograph Caves submitted by Flickr : Looks like horses, or antelope, something dark with a rounded rear Image copyright: las.photographs, hosted on Flickr and displayed under the terms of their API. (Vote or comment on this photo)

Pictograph Caves
Pictograph Caves submitted by Flickr : Information Board Image copyright: las.photographs, hosted on Flickr and displayed under the terms of their API. (Vote or comment on this photo)

Pictograph Caves
Pictograph Caves submitted by Flickr : Pictograph Cave Image copyright: koloth440, hosted on Flickr and displayed under the terms of their API.

Pictograph Caves
Pictograph Caves submitted by Flickr : Image copyright: evodevo_mike (Mike), hosted on Flickr and displayed under the terms of their API.

Pictograph Caves
Pictograph Caves submitted by Flickr

Pictograph Caves
Pictograph Caves submitted by Flickr : Pictograph Cave, Montana Site of ancient paintings. Image copyright: Ron Sayles, hosted on Flickr and displayed under the terms of their API.

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"Pictograph Caves" | Login/Create an Account | 6 News and Comments
  
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Re: Pictograph Caves by Anonymous on Tuesday, 28 July 2015
First of all the caves are in Cretaceous Eagle Sandstone, not limestone. The Sandstone is relatively soft and sloughs off on a regular basis thus eliminating the painted layers of the cave interior. There are diagrams of cave art from many years ago which are now invisible. The deterioration of the drawings are not due to vandalism, but rather to nature. Just recently another section of sandstone fell within the largest cave which is a natural occurence and the way in which the caves came to be in the first place. To see similar Native American wall paintings, I suggest people go to Graybull, Wyoming and hike along the Big Horn River south toward Basin, Wyoming. The paintings there are amazing and all still quite visible.

I, by the way, live in the area and am a watercolor artist. I have painted in the cave area for the past 61 years and seen many transitions. Pictograph cave is an amazing camping area of our ancient North American ancestors. The many artifacts found in the caves are probably far more significant than the wall paintings. They are stored in boxes in Bozman and not available to the public. Mana Lesman
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    Re: Pictograph Caves by Andy B on Tuesday, 28 July 2015
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    Hello Mana, thanks for the information, we'd love to see your watercolours of the caves if you have any.
    [ Reply to This ]

Montana’s Pictograph Cave reopens after lengthy repairs by Andy B on Wednesday, 15 July 2015
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Six months after a major rock slide closed public access to the namesake cave at Montana’s Pictograph Cave State Park, it has reopened.

The viewing platform at the cave, near Billings, was reopened to the public on July 4th after months of restoration and stabilization efforts.

Park officials describe it as a major undertaking: "Before we could open the viewing platform after the rock fall, we had to do an assessment. We had geo-stabilization and a rock fall consultant group come out and remove some over-hanging rock, then set up a better system for monitoring the movement of the cave." said Jarret Kostrba, Montana’s Pictograph Cave State Park Manager

More at
http://cavingnews.com/20150708-montanas-pictograph-cave-reopens-after-lengthy-repairs

According to a report by Montana’s KTVQ.com, the rock fall was initiated by natural erosion due to a temperature shift — a change in frigid air to warm temperatures.

http://www.ktvq.com/story/29495625/pictograph-cave-state-park
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Guide to the Pictograph Cave Collection by Andy B on Sunday, 19 June 2011
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This collection includes hand-drawn tracings of 107 pictograph drawings from the Pictograph Cave and hand-drawn versions of 14 index pages used in William Mulloy's 1958 work, A Preliminary Historical Outline for the Northwestern Plains.

The archaeological significance of the Pictograph Cave (also known as the Inscription Cave) was first discovered in 1937 by Mr. H.S. Barringer of Billings, Montana, Mr. and Mrs. Jim Browne, then of Billings; and Mr. Oscar Lewis, then of Glendive, Montana. The cavern is a large erosional recess in a sandstone escarpment located approximately seven miles southeast of Billings, Montana. It had been known to local inhabitants, both Native American and white, as an interesting location due to the many painted pictographs of Native American origin that covered its walls.

http://nwda-db.wsulibs.wsu.edu/findaid/ark:/80444/xv39334#overview
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Montana state to consider methods of preserving cave's pictographs by Andy B on Sunday, 19 June 2011
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Considering that the oldest dated image in Pictograph Cave is 2,149 years old, it is surprising that even 15 of the 103 original ochre and charcoal images of warriors and animals are still visible.

The question now confronting Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, which manages the site as a state park, is whether to try to preserve the art and slow the decay of the cave, or let nature take its course as the art fades inevitably into oblivion.

Jannie Loubser, an archaeologist and rock art expert from Atlanta, surveyed the site on Friday to help the state decide what to do, or not do, next. With the help of Sara Scott, of FWP's heritage resource program, Loubser took detailed measurements and notes on the current condition of the cave.

"Whatever can be done to protect the place and increase its lifespan, most people would agree that's the way to go," Loubser said. "But we need to be kind of minimalist about it."

Wet weather this winter and spring has helped speed deterioration in the large cave southeast of Billings. Water has seeped into cracks and the porous sandstone, which then freezes and can break off. A broken-off piece is how one pictograph of a turtle was dated as 2,149 years old.

The decay of the lower portions of the cave has also been accelerated by the excavation of the cave floor between 1937 and 1941, which removed several feet of dirt and left the lower cave walls exposed.

"The whole thing is shifting like an eggshell that you broke the bottom off of," Loubser said.

Read more, with a photo gallery at the Billings Gazette
http://billingsgazette.com/news/local/article_355ada0f-fd07-5dbc-b8f5-4949a25af69d.html?oCampaign=hottopics
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Artifacts from Pictograph Caves get new attention by bat400 on Monday, 15 November 2010
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Nearly 1,400 years ago, a member of a nomadic people sheltering in the sandstone recesses of Pictograph Cave discarded a basket woven with willow and milkweed fiber. It was a masterful construction that James Adovasio, (Mercyhurst College, Pennsylvania) described as “closely coiled and the stitches so tightly packed that the basket would have easily held water.”

Adovasio, a leading expert in prehistoric perishable artifacts, was asked to examine the basket fragment by the Montana Parks Department, guardian of Pictograph Caves about six miles southeast of Billings.

Housed at the University of Montana in Missoula, the basket piece is among more than 30,000 artifacts recovered in excavation of the complex of three caves by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration between 1937 and 1941.

Under the leadership of state Parks Department archaeologist Sara Scott, the collection is getting renewed attention. A graduate student has been hired to catalogue and organize the artifacts — a process that has already paid off with the rediscovery of two 1-inch bone effigies that were presumed lost. One of the effigies represents a turtle, the other a human face.

In the process of re-examining the collection, Scott contacted Adovasio. He eagerly agreed to take a look at the basket fragment.

After viewing the artifact, he concluded that it “is a wall fragment of a basket that was most likely used as a tray by prehistoric people to parch seeds, separating the husk from the seeds so that they could be eaten.” Adovasio said these early Americans would have placed seeds in the tray with small pieces of charcoal and continually flipped them to heat the seeds but not burn the basket.
“When they are parched like that, the seeds are more easily digestible,” he said.

Even then it was an old technique — one commonly used in the Great Basin area of Utah, southern Wyoming and parts of Colorado, Idaho and Nevada. The basket itself resembles those associated with the Freemont Culture, which flourished in the eastern Great Basin at roughly the same time, Adovasio said.

There’s no way to tell whether the people who left the basket at Pictograph Cave were part of a Freemont diaspora or if they simply obtained the basket through trade. Possibly the weaving technique was passed to each culture by a common ancestor in more ancient times, he said.
With permission from UM, Scott carefully shaved a tiny sample from the basket... Adovasio sent both pieces to Oxford University for a special type of radiocarbon dating called accelerator mass spectrometry. This technique can date materials using minute samples, Scott said.
Results show the basket was made 1,371 years ago, plus or minus 31 years.
Although the excavations of Pictograph and Ghost caves 70 years ago were used by archaeologist William Mulloy of the University of Chicago to develop a prehistoric chronology for the northwestern plains, carbon dating techniques had not been developed at the time. The basket fragment, among the few items with a datable organic origin, are the first carbon dates from the Pictograph Caves artifacts collection.

The basket fragment and tinder stick were found among the top layers during the excavation process, which took archaeologists down 20 feet into deposits. Mulloy used projectile point types and stone tools to establish the earliest dates at 9,000 years ago.

While most artifacts from excavations at the caves are stored at UM, replicas of some are on display at the new Pictograph Cave visitor center, said Doug Habermann at the FWP office in Billings.

The park facility is not a museum and does not have a full-time staff or specialized curators to care for the valuable and rare items found in the caves, he said. But he hopes that Scott’s efforts will result in a database that the public can access.

Now that access to the collection has been opened and efforts are being made to put it in order for future research, Scott sa

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