Rock Art Preservation Is Often Uncharted Terrain

You can see the past etched into the face of a boulder in the Bowers Museum courtyard, a maze of thin lines created by Native Americans thousands of years before Orange County’s landscape succumbed to cul-de-sacs and freeways, industrial parks and glass cathedrals.

This ancient maze, hauled in from the nearby Santa Ana Mountains, is one of the few samples of tribal rock art on exhibit locally.

The rarity of such carvings has added weight to demands that rock carvings recently discovered in two Irvine caves be preserved.

But preserving such artifacts does not necessarily mean making them available for public viewing.

Although laws require that newly discovered historic items--ranging from rock art to cooking pits to human remains--be identified and recorded, few regulations deal with what happens to the material afterward.

That has led to such oddities as an Orange County warehouse filled with the bric-a-brac of the past, a 15,000-cubic-foot collection so disorganized that even those charged with watching over it don’t fully know what they have.

Although the current debate centers on faded images carved in stone, the disclosure of the Irvine rock art underscores the ongoing debates among preservationists, developers, government officials and Native Americans over what items ought to be preserved.

Complicating preservation efforts, archeologists and others say, are laws that are simply insufficient to protect irreplaceable relics of times gone by.

Particularly challenging is the preservation of rock art, which by its nature often is immovable--and prey to the elements, vandals and illicit collectors.

In the current debate, one of the Irvine caves containing a small carving--described as a 4-inch squiggle with a circle at one end--could be demolished as part of a 2,500-home development at the edge of the San Joaquin Hills.

The other cave, containing a large carving of a rattlesnake, will be ceded to the city of Irvine as part of 1,000 acres of open space adjoining Irvine Co.’s Shady Canyon development near the Turtle Rock neighborhood.

That cave, and six others nearby, will become part of an undeveloped area open to the public, but the caves themselves would remain off-limits, said Sharon Heider, Irvine’s open space administrator.

Keeping the caves secure, though, is not easy, she said.

“Typically, they’re not mapped, we don’t have trails to them, and if there are ways that we can do it, we’ll plant cactus and those kinds of things that would keep people from wanting to go in those areas,” she said. “The last-ditch scenario is: If the sites are highly attractive, we’d patrol them.”

The biggest risk, Heider and others said, is damage by vandals or collectors chipping the art from the cave walls.

“They are a very important cultural resource that provide a lot of information about our connection with this land,” she said. “They need to be protected. There is a bigger basis for public good than just letting people tour them.”

Countless sites in the deserts have been damaged or destroyed over the years by vandals and sometimes by well-meaning aficionados making rubbings of primitive carvings.

Although Orange County has more than 1,600 registered archeological sites, most consist of abandoned cooking spots or similar leavings of daily life. And while there are about 6,000 rock art locations throughout California--mainly in the southern deserts--discoveries of such relics are rare in Orange County.

It’s not that ancients passed the region by, experts say. Rather, the sandstone that predominates in Orange County--canvases for the rock artists--erodes more quickly than harder rock in the deserts.

And, they believe, an unknowable number of artifacts were destroyed by developers’ plows before laws arose requiring that builders catalog their findings and alert authorities.

“I would assume, given the fact that the surrounding counties have rock art, it must have been made in Orange County as well,” said Phyllisa Eisentraut, an archeologist and assistant professor of anthropology at Cal State Fullerton. “Most likely it was done in rock shelters and caves.”

Some sites were identified by a 1930s Works Progress Administration program, she said, but “have since been subject to development.”

Rob Selway, director of the Orange County Historical Commission overseeing the county’s collection of relics, said he knew of no other rock art sites in the county. Local archeology enthusiasts were similarly hard-pressed to identify locations.

But Damien Shilo, chairman of the Juaneno Band of Mission Indians, said that the tribe’s archeological committee has recorded an unspecified number of sites and that he has visited at least seven himself, including those announced recently in Irvine.

Shilo declined to identify the other sites, most of which he said are unknown to mainstream archeologists and hard to reach. To view one in Laguna Hills, he said, requires rappelling gear.

“We try to keep it off the beaten path because, more often than not, when we’ve said where they are, we get the vandalism,” said Shilo, 43, a Los Angeles firefighter who lives in San Juan Capistrano.

Natural forces also take their toll on some of the art.

One depiction of a hand discovered decades ago in a canyon at present-day Crystal Cove State Park disappeared when a cave collapsed during the El Nino storms of 1982-83, rangers said.

Another off Laguna Canyon Road has reportedly faded so much that it is barely discernible.

And some rumored sites turn out to be mirages. Reports of petroglyphs at Aliso and Wood Canyons Wilderness Park--including a mention on a county Harbors, Beaches and Parks Division Web site--are erroneous, park rangers said.

But rock paintings can be seen off Ortega Highway just over the Riverside County line, near the El Cariso ranger station. And Riverside County’s Mockingbird Canyon, near Lake Matthews east of Corona, contains pictographs that archeologists believe were involved in solstice celebrations by the Luiseno and Gabrielino tribes.

Few such sites, though, have been found south of the Santa Ana Mountains. “We have not really dealt with that issue very much,” Selway said.

But the flatlands and coastal hills have been a treasure trove of other artifacts from native civilizations, including village sites and massive burial grounds.

Under preservation guidelines dating to the late 1970s, relics discovered during projects that require county permits--such as building or grading--are turned over to the county. Human remains fall under different guidelines and usually are turned over to local Native American groups for reburial.

The county began accepting artifacts--ranging from million-year-old whale bones to Native American grinding stones--with vague intentions of someday displaying them in a museum but with no guidelines for amassing and monitoring the collection.

One attempt to establish a museum failed in 1992 when the nonprofit Natural History Foundation of Orange County went bankrupt, souring donors who had come up with $550,000 for the cause.

The county Board of Supervisors has supported a natural history museum in concept, but said it would not fund one, Selway said.

And despite a feasibility study from the early 1990s that laid out blueprints for establishing a center, none has been developed, he said.

The development boom of the ‘80s uncovered large amounts of artifacts and ecofacts--shells, bones and plant remnants--that overwhelmed the county’s ability to store them, and the facility stopped accepting new material in 1992.

That means unknown numbers of artifacts are being stored privately by developers, contractors and others involved in construction projects.

“Back then, people were just happy to preserve them and get them out of the ground from in front of development,” Selway said. “People were not as far-sighted about curation and the condition the artifacts would be in when there were accepted.”

As a result, the county has boxes and boxes of raw materials from identified archeological sites, agglomerations of dirt and material still waiting to be sifted and sorted.

Nearly three years ago, the county contracted with Cal State Fullerton--using a combination of parks money and federal grants--in a $400,000 project to devise a means for curating the massive collection. The project is directed by Eisentraut and Cal State Fullerton paleontologist John D. Cooper.

“We’ve done an initial inventory and have a box-by-box sense of what kinds of collections we have for both archeological and paleontological remains,” said Eisentraut, who is in charge of the archeological portion of the project.

Researchers have also devised a system to catalog the collection as it is analyzed, she said. A full report on the project is due in the next year.