3. The Arroyo Grande Petroglyphs

These petroglyphs are pecked on a rock at a distance of less than fifty miles north of the last preceding group. The Arroyo Grande is an immense dry river-bed that debouches into the desert immediately southwest of the mouth of the Colorado river. It is a deep chasm in the midst of an excessively barren region. In one of the many rocky gorges that intersect the Arroyo Grande from the northwest there are eight or nine tinajas, or natural cisterns, where rainwater -- when there is rain -- collects, and the petroglyphs are cut shallowly into the face of a dark granite bowlder set above the largest of the tinajas. In the lower right-hand corner of the cliff there appears a figure which may have been intended to represent a human being. Aside from this it would seem as though the scribe had attempted to make an inscription rather than to delineate [/ p. 249] human or animal figures. The design that at once catches the eye, however, is the rain sign so characteristic of the Hopi of Arizona -- conventional clouds from which lines representing rain depend. Two other characters of interest are the M and the which stand out from the center of the group. Here, moreover, as at San Fernando, are designs so far resembling the Phenician characters representative of Bh and N as to explain the classification of the California petroglyphs by the unknown chronicler of the eighteenth century as inscriptions of the Chaldeans and other ancient peoples, although, of course, they have no relation whatever.