“We want to show you some petroglyphs located not far from Arandas. We’ve never seen anything like them before.” This email message immediately grabbed my attention because it had been sent by two archaeologists, Rodrigo and Cyntia Esparza. If the Esparzas considered this rock art extraordinary, I told myself, it must be extraordinary indeed. So, I made an extra effort to try to set up an expedition to Arandas—no easy task because the site was at the end of “un camino feo” (literally, an ugly road) and only high-clearance vehicles would be suitable for reaching the place.
As often happens with such excursions, potential participants signed up and then dropped out and in the end none of us had the vehicle we needed, but just seconds before midnight, so to speak, our friend Eugenio Mancera came up with a borrowed Jeep and we were in business.
Arandas is located 100 kilometers east of Guadalajara, but that’s not exactly where we were headed. Instead, we drove to the nearby and much smaller town of Jesús María, where we met our guide, a talented young photographer named Arnulfo Salazar.
Salazar has been working for years on an extraordinary publishing project. He and 12 other local people are studying photography at the Casa de Cultura in little Jesús María. The group includes housewives, painters, a secretary, a chemist and a computer expert. Their goal has been to document their home town, its people and their activities, as well as local attractions in two books of artistic, black and white photographs. A grass roots project like this, carried out entirely by people living in a small Mexican town, is not something you come across every day.
Next, we drove to the dam, just half an hour’s drive from Arandas at the end of the “ugly” road.
We arrived at a farm under the care of 79-year-old Don José, who led us toward the edge of a nice-looking lake just below the farmhouse. Two minutes later, we found ourselves surrounded by petroglyphs. These were not on a rock or a canyon wall but spread all over the ground beneath our feet, something I had never seen before. The “ground,” in this case, was a wide expanse of rather smooth, relatively soft volcanic rock from which a thin layer of topsoil had been removed very recently when someone pointed out part of a petroglyph to the owner. To everyone’s surprise, the more dirt they removed, the more petroglyphs were found.
The engravings included some shapes which we easily recognized: “It’s a bird!” Others, however, were as elaborate and bizarre (to modern eyes) as the stylized art in the old Mexican codices. Many of the glyphs had at least one spiral worked into the design or attached to one end of it.
Don José then said we should take a look at other engravings he had spotted “just 15 minutes away.” Well, the minutes soon turned into hours as we examined more and more rock art on both sides of the lake. In several places we found “Pecked Crosses” in which the lines of the cross were perfectly oriented with the four cardinal directions, inside two concentric circles made up of a great many tiny indentations or “cups” where, I understood, one could place small red beans called “patolli” which might be used for astronomical or calendric purposes or perhaps also for some kind of game. A simpler design, known as a Patolli, is considered the ancient precursor of modern board games like Monopoly, and a good example of one can be seen in a room at the Casa de Cultura in Mascota, a room entirely dedicated to petroglyphs.
Near the end of the day, a member of our group, Andrew Taylor, spotted one or two of these tiny cups in a little patch of exposed rock and we all drew together to watch him brush away the earth, revealing a very big Pecked Cross—at least one meter in diameter—which Don José had not known about.
How old are the engravings? “They were made about 1100 years ago,” said Cyntia Esparza, and Rodrigo added that it was only thanks to the dirt cover that these petroglyphs had been preserved at all. “And they are already being destroyed,” he added, “by people walking on them.” We found one elaborate representation of a bird underneath the ashes of a fire someone had recently built on top of it.
The archaeologists pointed out that these petroglyphs need to be traced, studied and protected and they are trying to start a project towards that end with SEMARNAT (the Mexican Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources). As more and more soil is lifted from the rock, many more petroglyphs will probably be revealed and Lake La Luz may someday be recognized as one of the most unusual archaeological sites in the world. Because so many Pecked Crosses/Patollis have been found among the engravings, I couldn’t resist asking Rodrigo Esparza whether Lake La Luz might have been the Las Vegas of ancient times. “Sorry to disappoint you, John,” he replied, “but so far these crosses-in-circles seem more related to counting days than gaming.” Of course, only a tiny portion of the local rock has been cleaned, so who knows how many Patollis may be awaiting discovery?
Because these petroglyphs need to be protected, visiting them is not encouraged, but the Reporter will do its best to keep readers abreast of new developments and especially of interpretations of the engravings as experts begin to study them.