White Bird Shelter

About This Experience

The White Bird Shelter is one of those places where reaching the rock art becomes part of the story. The hike in is a little tricky, not because of distance or dramatic climbing, but because the wash is choked with saltcedar and other extremely dense brush. There is rarely an obvious way through. We kept trying to pick our way around it, sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other, searching for whatever opening looked least impossible. Once we finally reached the sandstone cliffs, things became a little easier and we tried to follow their edge around as best we could. Even so, the vegetation fought us almost the entire way. By the time we reached the shelter our arms and legs were covered with scratches. It was definitely one of those days when the landscape makes you pay an entrance fee in blood—but what waited beneath the overhang made every scratch worth the pain. White Bird Shelter is not simply a single pictograph panel. It is a complex rock-art site containing several groups of images created during different periods, making the wall almost like a visual history written by people who returned to the same place over many centuries. Some of the oldest and most striking paintings are generally attributed to the Barrier Canyon Style, an ancient artistic tradition associated with hunter-gatherer peoples of the Archaic period. These figures are very different from ordinary representations of people. Several anthropomorphs have elongated or strangely shaped bodies, elaborate internal decoration, unusual heads and features that seem to combine human and animal characteristics. Some appear horned, while others have shapes around the head that could perhaps represent ears, horns, headdresses or something entirely symbolic. Long sinuous forms occur near some of the figures and have occasionally been interpreted as snakes, although there is no way to know whether that was their original meaning. As with so much Barrier Canyon rock art, the temptation to identify shamans, supernatural beings, masks or spirits is strong, but none of these interpretations can be demonstrated with certainty. The paintings clearly meant something important to their creators; unfortunately, the explanations were never written down for us. What makes White Bird Shelter particularly important is that it has contributed to one of the most difficult questions in Southwestern rock-art archaeology: how old are the Barrier Canyon paintings? Rock art is notoriously difficult to date directly, but fragments of thick orange-red pigment had naturally exfoliated from two of the horned anthropomorphic figures here. Rather than removing pigment from an intact image, researchers were able to analyze material that had already detached. One of these samples produced a radiocarbon age of approximately 2710 ± 75 years before present, suggesting that at least some of the orange horned figures may have been painted around 1000–800 BCE. That makes them roughly three thousand years old. The result has been discussed cautiously because very small pigment samples can be affected by contamination, and it should never be used to assign an exact age to every image in the shelter. Nevertheless, it remains an unusually valuable piece of evidence supporting the great antiquity of at least part of the Barrier Canyon imagery. The shelter itself appears to have been used by people over an even longer period. Archaeological evidence indicates repeated human activity spanning thousands of years, beginning well before the painted figures and continuing into the Ancestral Puebloan period. What we see on the wall today therefore was almost certainly not created during one visit or even by one culture. It accumulated slowly, as different generations returned to the shelter and added their own images to a place that may already have been ancient to them. This becomes especially clear when looking at the handprints. Red and white hands occur across parts of the shelter, including negative or sprayed handprints produced by placing a hand against the rock and applying pigment around it. Some of these were placed directly over the older Barrier Canyon figures. That superimposition provides an unmistakable sequence: the strange anthropomorphs were already on the wall before later people added their hands. Many of these later additions are generally associated with Ancestral Puebloan occupation, showing that people encountered, and perhaps deliberately interacted with, paintings that may already have been thousands of years old. It is fascinating to imagine that moment. Someone hundreds or even thousands of years after the original artists stood before the same wall, saw those mysterious ancient figures and chose not simply to ignore them, but to place a hand directly over or beside them. Whether this was an act of respect, appropriation, ritual connection, simple artistic reuse or something entirely different is impossible to know. High beneath the overhang is the image that eventually gave the shelter its modern name: the white bird. Painted overhead rather than among the main anthropomorphic figures, it seems almost to float above the rest of the imagery. The bird remains surprisingly visible against the rock, and its elevated position makes it immediately distinctive once noticed. Archaeologists refer to it simply as the eponymous bird of White Bird Shelter. Attempts to identify it more precisely—as an eagle, raven, crane or another species—go beyond what the surviving image can tell us. Its symbolic meaning is equally unknown. Perhaps it represented a real bird important to the people who painted it; perhaps it carried ceremonial or spiritual significance. Or perhaps we are searching for meanings that were obvious to its creators but completely inaccessible to us today. That uncertainty is part of what makes the shelter so powerful. Everywhere you look there seem to be different layers of time: ancient horned anthropomorphs with patterned bodies, possible animal or snake-like forms, handprints belonging to later visitors, other painted animals and symbols, and finally the solitary white bird overhead. They are physically close to one another, yet some may be separated in time by more than a thousand years. The wall is therefore less like a single artwork and more like a conversation across generations—although only fragments of the conversation survive. After fighting our way through the saltcedar, following the sandstone cliffs and collecting more scratches than we could count, standing beneath that overhang felt completely different from simply looking at photographs of the panel. We were seeing marks created by people who had stood in exactly the same protected space centuries or millennia before us. Some of those people may themselves have looked at paintings already ancient in their own time. The meanings of the horned figures, the patterned bodies, the hands and the white bird may never be recovered, but their continued presence creates an extraordinary connection between those different moments in history. By the time we started back through the brush, our arms were still scratched and sore, and we knew the saltcedar would not make the return journey any easier. But there was no question about it: White Bird Shelter had been worth every single scratch.