Petroglyphs and Security

The computer and software industry is increasingly turning its attention to security issues. Michael Chertoff, Homeland Security Secretary, recently said that "The potential consequences of a cyber attack are very real and every bit as concerning as the potential of a physical attack on the order of what we saw on September 11". Redmond Developer May 1, 2008

Awareness of this reality has called my mind to the security issues that were faced by those artisans who did the petroglyph's thousands of year ago. Animals, infections, weather, climate, stupity, and angry people would seem have been among the real threats. Strange as it may seem, apparently there was no threat to the messages they were inscribing on the rock. Even more remarkable is the obvious conclusion that over thousands of years no one has gone to the trouble of destroying the rock surface. Either it was just too much work or the point of doing the destruction was not in vogue.

Today business ventures, governments, media, religions, the military and the arts depend on electronic communication using the silicon in computer chips. The silicon has been mined from the earth surface and formed into machines that work using electricity to manipulate numbers and symbols in order to transmit meaning. Rock has been fabricated to enable meaning to fly through space. In earlier times the earth bound rock could not be poached or stolen by enemies so the messages were quite secure.

I believe this fact of life makes it all the more urgent to translate the meaning of petroglyph symbols. We may urgently need ideas that our ancestors had discovered and carved into the quartzite rock for the benefit of coming generations.

Weather 5000 Years Ago

The Middle Holocene Period was 5000 to 7000 years in the past. Studies are being done to determine what was happening to global weather at that time. In the US Dr. David Leigh of the University of Georgia is quoted in the March 26, 1999 edition of Science Daily saying that some data leads to the conclusion that the in the the US a region from the Southwest through the Dakotas was likely warm and wet. Much of what is now called Canada was yet covered with an ice sheet in this period. We are beginning to see something of the the circumstances that produced weather in the region of the Jeffers Petroglyph's.

Bryan Fagan in "The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations" (Bloomsbury Press 2008) says that the oceans actually are the weather makers for the earth. Currents that move warm and cool water about produce events such as El Ninos or La Ninas. 800 to 1300 AD was the Medieval Warm Period. That era is recent in time. Civilizations in the Pacific, South America, China, Africa, India, and the Arctic illustrate the dynamic powers of the weather to provide for creation and demise of civilizations.

The principles developed in Dr. Leigh's work can be used to consider possibilities for earlier times. Civilizations grew and waned in rhythm with weather that produced people friendly circumstances and also brought droughts that banished people from regions.

Mid continent North America is insulated from the sea by thousands of miles of land but the weather knows no such boundaries. What is learned about the US Southwest can very likely begin to fill in the blanks as regards weather in mid continent. Ocean currents may well help us to understand better the people who developed the Petroglyphs.