High Places in the Painted Desert: Exploring Salient Spaces at Petrified National Park

Petrified Forest National Park, located a few hours east of Flagstaff, Arizona is world renowned for its deposits of Triassic-era petrified wood. This landscape also contains a rich cultural history, with over 10,000 years of human habitation and use preserved in over 1,200 documented archaeological sites. The majority of these sites are attributed to Ancestral Pueblo communities who dwelt in the Petrified Forest region for centuries, farming the landscape and creating one of the highest concentrations of petroglyphs found in the American Southwest. My research examines two sites which suggest differing forms of social power performed in the Petrified Forest landscape. The Mac Stod site is a small great house, possibly representing a far flung node of Chacoan ideology. Conversely, the Lacey Point site is a suspected shrine site centered in more local ideologies, which exhibits a surprisingly large and diverse artifact assemblage. Through an examination of petroglyphs, ceramics, and landscape I assess how Mac Stod and Lacey Point embody different forms of salient space in the Petrified Forest.

[@redpill5471]

Interesting vid ty. One thing the archeologist needs to work on not saying um ah uh so many times.

[@wickedkae]

Those rock arts are recordings of plasma formations they saw in the sky. Just amazing that there are that many there. Not sure why this is being ascribed to hunting. Plasma physicists have already demonstrated all of this in the lab. Very cool to see these pics.

[@headlessspaceman5681]

Those rock arts are recordings of cotton candy they saw in the sky. Not sure why this is being ascribed to hunting. Cotton candy has already been reproduced in a lab.

[@westho7314]

ah ,um,ah,um ah ah.. every 3 words, very hard to follow orator,maybe edit audio.

[@redpill5471]

So glad I wasn't the only one 😊

[@markdrouin8629]

Umm .....ummmmm ummmmm that's the take away this guy can't talk without saying umm every other word I just couldn't after awhile. They should have edited out all the umms. Of course the video would be like 40 minutes shorter. I am very interested in the topic .this guy has no public speaking skill. This was hard to watch.