THREE HUNDRED PICTOGRAPHS: DR. HARDISON AND A CENTURY OF

The Arkansas Archeologist (2014) 53: 1-36 1

THREE HUNDRED PICTOGRAPHS: DR. HARDISON AND A CENTURY OF PETIT JEAN MOUNTAIN ROCK ART DISCOVERY

Donald P. Higgins, Jr.

Arkansas Archeological Society, Petit Jean Mountain

Hundreds of aboriginal pictographs are found in the caves and on the shelter rocks of the Mountain. These are a wide variety of characters painted with red ochre, many of them as distinct as if they had been painted only yesterday. More than three hundred have been found, most of which have been photographed and drawings made of all.

—Dr. T. W. Hardison, 1955

In 1914, the wife and son of Dr. T. W. Hardison, a physician living on Petit Jean Mountain, reported finding red ocher pictographs in a cave on the southern bluff. Hardison’s subsequent explorations as he visited patients in the rugged hill country led him to discover more. Following his successful effort to establish Petit Jean State Park in 1923, he realized that the rich cultural resource represented by the rock art might supplement the scenic beauty of the area as an attraction for visitors. With encouragement from the National Conference on State Parks, he and others explored the bluffs and canyons of the Mountain in the late 1920s specifically for rock art, and by the time he formally published his thoughts on the subject in 1955, he claimed to have found hundreds of pictographs. His detailed personal records, however, disappeared following his death in 1957, and most of the locations of these paintings were lost to science. It has remained for others to retrace Hardison’s footsteps and scientifically document the amazing concentration of aboriginal art. Now 100 years after the Hardisons’ first discoveries, the late doctor’s statements regarding the profusion of rock art on Petit Jean Mountain are confirmed by recent site documentation.

INTRODUCTION

The central Arkansas mesa called Petit Jean Mountain, on the south bank of the Arkansas River in Conway County (Figure 1), boasts more than a hundred documented archeological sites, spanning the history of human occupation from prehistoric Native American habitations to early 20th century farms. Many of the Native American sites display rock art, mainly paintings, on the sandstone surfaces of outcrops and rock shelters. Dr. Thomas William Hardison, a country physician who in 1923 became the founder of Arkansas’s state park system (Higgins 2012), asserted that he had found more than 300 individual pictographs (Hardison 1955a), a number that places Petit Jean Mountain’s prehistoric art galleries at the forefront of known rock art concentrations in the southeast United States (Fritz and Ray 1982). Continuing discoveries on this frequently visited expanse of rock and trees, however, suggest that Hardison’s number of 300 was only a starting point. Since 2006 when the count stood at 46 sites and 225 pictographs, the Arkansas Archeological

Survey has added 23 Petit Jean rock art sites and 253 newly recorded individual pictographs, or elements, for a total of 478 as of February 2013.

Hardison became aware of these paintings in 1914, upon the discovery by his wife and son of a rock shelter whose walls were decorated with red images (Hardison 1932). Dr. Hardison spent the rest of his life writing and speaking of the wonders of the Mountain, including its archeology. A century later the history of this archeology makes a compelling story as many of Hardison’s early discoveries are only now finally coming to light as documented archeological sites.

HARDISON’S ARRIVAL IN THE PETIT JEAN COUNTRY

The tale begins in November 1906, when recently credentialed doctor Thomas William Hardison (Figure 2) stepped off a Choctaw, Oklahoma and Gulf railroad passenger car at Fowler Mill near the small town of

The Arkansas Archeologist (2014) 53: 1-362

Adona in Perry County. An establishment of the Fort Smith Lumber Company, Fowler Mill processed the many thousands of shortleaf pine trees felled from the mountain forests, and Hardison was its newest resident as contract physician. While tending to patients at the mill and in the surrounding Petit Jean mountains and valleys, Hardison quickly fell in love with the area and its people, notably including Julia Hutto, the schoolteacher on Petit Jean Mountain who the next year became his wife. He found the scenery spectacular and in six months had secured a promise from company officials to spare from the saw the rugged canyon timberlands of the Seven Hollows area on Petit Jean Mountain, an act that laid the foundation for the Arkansas state park movement (Hardison 1932, 1955a; McGuire 1950).

Hardison’s interaction with the region’s mountaineers, particularly Marion McCabe, James McMahan and Jesse Mitchell, grew in him a fascination with the Mountain’s folklore and American Indian history, as they regaled him with tales of early settlers, visits of former residents from Indian Territory, and finds of Indian artifacts. Hardison’s interest in the latter became so well known that for the rest of his life neighbors occasionally offered him such relics during visits to their homes (Hardison 1932, Hardison 1955a; Arkansas History Commission [AHC], T. W. Hardison Papers [Diaries], 15 Nov 1931, 18 Sep 1937, 14 Dec 1946, 29 Apr 1957). One oral tradition, told by McCabe and embellished by McMahan, was the story of an eighteenth century French political refugee who settled on Petit Jean Mountain and buried gold in a cave below his cabin. Little surprise, then, when Fowler Mill’s timber worked out and Hardison and his wife moved to Petit Jean Mountain, that they built their home in 1911 on the very

spot tradition held was the location of the Frenchman’s hut (Figure 3) (Hardison 1932, Hardison 1955a, McGuire 1950).

FIRST ROCK ART DISCOVERIES

One can imagine Hardison’s thrill when, three years later, his wife and son reported finding strange markings—red ocher pictographs—on the walls of a rock shelter in the bluff west of their home (Figure 4). Hardison dug into the floor of the shelter, but instead of finding French gold, found another kind of treasure: ancient stone tools and pottery. Since the Arkansas River Valley was long known to contain vast deposits of Native American pottery and other relics, Hardison, as he later admitted, initially failed to recognize the importance of the paintings, although he discovered others now and again as he continued to explore the area (Hardison 1932, Hardison 1955b, AHC Diaries 29 Jul 1941).

Once he and his allies succeeded in establishing Arkansas’s first state park in 1923, Hardison immediately sought out people expert in developing such preserves, and for this purpose attended the Third National Conference on

Figure 1. Location of Petit Jean Mountain in Conway County, west-central Arkansas. (Arkansas State Highway & Transportation Department 2013.)

Figure 2. Dr. T. W. Hardison, circa 1920s. (Photo courtesy of Petit Jean State Park.)


Figure 4. Hardison Rockshelter, 3CN32. (Photo by author.)

Figure 3. Location of the Hardison home on Petit Jean Mountain. (Google Earth image, ©Geoeye, 2013.)


State Parks that same year in Indiana (Nelson 1928; AHC Diaries, 7-9 May 1923). Upon his return Hardison found himself without much help within the state for continuing the movement. He recalled,

Support for my efforts came fast after that—from every part of the country except Arkansas. Raymond H. Torrey, Field Secretary of the National Conference, working through the means of a grant from the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Memorial, made four trips here to help plan the development of the park, and to create an interest in its development among the people of Arkansas [Hardison 1957:45].

Torrey first visited Petit Jean Mountain on a foggy, rainy day in January 1926, not seeing much but restricted views of the bluffs and waterfall, but it impressed him enough to come again when the Conference met at Hot Springs National Park later that year in June (Arkansas Gazette [AG], 14 Jun 1926:1, 18 Jun 1926:1). One scheduled event was a visit by its distinguished slate of delegates to the 80-acre Petit Jean State Park, still Arkansas’s sole state-owned park (AG, 16 Jun 1926:1). Torrey stayed a week longer in Arkansas and, at Dr. Hardison’s invitation, came back to Petit Jean and produced an article for the Arkansas Gazette highlighting the beauties of the park, which he could now see in sunshine and blue skies (Torrey 1926a).

October 1926 saw a vast increase in the size of the Park with the donation by Hardison’s old employer, the Fort Smith Lumber Company, of the Seven Hollows region, more than a thousand acres of rough canyonland drained by generally parallel creeks. Hardison asked Torrey back to see the expansion (Torrey 1926b).

HARDISON AND TORREY

Raymond Hezekiah Torrey (Figure 5), described as “[e]xuberant hiker, brilliant trail planner, prolific writer, unyielding conservationist, volunteer organizer and motivator, shrewd negotiator and diplomat, botanist, amateur geologist and historian” by the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference, which he helped found, was a journalist for the New York Evening Post. His weekly column, “The Long Brown Path,” popularized the cause of public hiking trails, and because of his broad interests and missionary zeal, he found a natural home as Field Secretary of the National Conference on State Parks

(New York-New Jersey Trails Conference 2005). He had authored a book on outdoor trekking (Torrey et al. 1923), visited every state of the nation and many of its parks, and was considered a national authority on state parks (AG, 18 Jun 1926:1, 28 Nov 1926:II, 19). Hence he possessed just the right amount of credibility and writing skill to spread the state park gospel in Arkansas.

As Hardison led him down bluffs and through canyons, the November 1926 exploration elicited in Torrey a much greater excitement than had the scenery views alone, and produced a commensurately longer Gazette article, to boot—one that put Arkansas and the world on notice that Petit Jean Mountain had some interesting art galleries:

Hitherto unknown Indian pictographs were found in a cave on another hollow and probably many such marks of the aborigines are to be disclosed in the more remote ravines… On the walls of one of the caves in this gorge we found two Indian pictographs, new to Dr. Hardison, who has made a study of these characters, which are found everywhere in a similar rock shelters in the Petit Jean region. These were fresh and unaltered, unspoiled by what has happened in more accessible places by the thoughtless defacement of

Figure 5. Raymond H. Torrey. (Photo courtesy of American Academy for Park and Recreation Administration.)


visitors. One figure seemed to represent a reclining human figure, another, a double circle of radiating lines possibly represented the sun. This cave was near what appeared to be a permanent water hole, which was in keeping with aboriginal habit, of locating such a shelter where water would be at hand [Torrey 1926].

Despite Torrey’s reputation as outdoorsman, hiker and naturalist, he found himself unequipped to explain or even adequately describe the pictographs. Returning to New York City with drawings and photographs of the rock art, he sought advice from Isaiah Bowman, Director of the American Geographic Society, which had published Torrey’s New York Walk Book three years earlier. Bowman in turn directed him to Clark Wissler (Figure 6), curator for the American Museum of Natural History’s anthropology department. Torrey wrote Wissler in early December 1926 (American Museum of Natural History, Division of Anthropology Archives, New York [AMNH], Torrey-Wissler letter, 7 Dec 1926).

Torrey suggested that the pictographs he had seen in a dozen Petit Jean Mountain caves might be new to science, and he thought them worthy of a separate newspaper article. He asked Wissler for an “authoritative interpretation,” if possible, of the figures that he described and sketched on the letter (Figures 7 and 8).

Several days later Wissler, who was no expert on rock art either, admitted that he delayed his reply to search the literature, and he had found no useful reference on Arkansas pictographs. He thought they were important and should be recorded and preserved. Since Torrey had told him similar forms appeared at many sites, “[t]his seems to me to indicate a fairly uniform culture and that these drawings belong to the same period.” But he refused Torrey’s invitation to divine their meaning, saying, “Any interpretation must be based upon the examination of a very large number and since those seem to be so highly conventionalized that they are far from realistic, it would be venturesome to guess what was in the minds of the artists” (AMNH, Wissler-Torrey letter, 17 Dec 1926).

Torrey asked in his next letter for permission to use Wissler’s thoughts on the pictographs in his upcoming Gazette article. He also expressed his hope to return the next year to Petit Jean to follow Wissler’s suggestion and document more figures. He would send Wissler more photographs. He planned to have his camera adjusted so

that he could take pictures closer than the six-foot focus for which his lens was set. His initial attempt at photography had not, he thought, been successful because of the bright sunlight on the pictograph and the focusing distance the camera required. Nevertheless, with that letter Torrey sent Wissler the first known photograph of a Petit Jean Mountain pictograph (Figure 9). Since the aboriginal image showed so faintly, Torrey felt it necessary to describe it as “one of the double circle figures” (AMNH, Torrey-Wissler letter, 22 Dec 1926).

Torrey was able to return to Petit Jean Mountain in March 1927, arriving on the 26th and going home on the 30th. He and Dr. Hardison devoted two full days to archeological pursuits. On the 27th the pair, with six companions, investigated Panther Cave and the Seven Hollows. The next day Hardison’s medical duties intervened, but he took Torrey along anyway and then on the morning of the 28th the two alone went into Seven Hollows to excavate a “mound” they had found in one of the hollows the previous November (AHC Diaries, 26-29 Mar 1927, Torrey 1926b). The scrupulous Torrey had again sought the counsel of Wissler, who in this

Figure 6. Dr. Clark Wissler. (Photo courtesy of American Museum of Natural History, New York.)


Figure 7. Raymond Torrey’s first letter to Clark Wissler, reporting pictograph discoveries at Petit Jean Mountain, Arkansas. (Division of Anthropology Archives, American Museum of Natural History, New York.)


case advised caution and due regard “…to the technique and experience of archaeologists before undertaking such a piece of work,” and had sent Torrey a manual for archeological fieldwork (AMNH, Torrey-Wissler letter 4 Mar 1927 and Wissler-Torrey letter 6 Mar 1927).

The excavation was a failure, but the duo spent the afternoon successfully seeking other rock art locations. Dr. Hardison wrote of the experience, “Torrey and I opened mound in Natural Bridge Hollow, but found nothing. In afternoon we discovered many pictographs under brow of mountain between our place and Bud Morris’[s]” (AHC Diaries, 29 Mar 1927).

In his resultant May 8, 1927, Gazette article, “More Pictographs Discovered on Petit Jean Mountain,” Torrey laid out the March discoveries (Figure 10).

More than 50 of these pictographs have been found, first by Dr. Hardison, and later by parties in which I was privileged to be a member, and in my own searches, along the south brow of Petit Jean, in some of the Seven Hollows and along Cedar creek canyon. But we have probably

only made a beginning with them, for our studies covered only a few miles of rock walls, whereas there must be 30 miles of bluffs and gullies with cave and shelter formations which would have attracted these ancient artists, all around the mass of Petit Jean mountain and its spurs southward and westward [Torrey 1927].

Among all these new discoveries, Torrey described three separate motifs in detail (Figures 11 and 12). One of them—a new “unique figure … suggesting roughly a birthday cake with four candles on it”— occurred, he said, twice on the same site and then again a mile away (Figure 13). This recurrence led him to invoke Wissler:

The repetition of the same character, in identical or nearly identical forms, suggested to Dr. Clark Wissler, curator of the Department of Anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History to whom I reported these pictographs, that the makers of them had developed a sort of alphabet, with fixed characters, and with definite meanings. A thorough

Figure 8. Pictographs with site numbers suggested as matches for Raymond Torrey’s drawings shown in Figure 7. (Photos by author.)


search and a listing of these characters according to number of occurrence, and other factors, might bring some key to this puzzle, as did the famous Rosetta Stone, in translating Egyptian hieroglyphics [Torrey 1927].

This Wissler reference was not entirely accurate, as Wissler had not written anything about an alphabet or translation. On the contrary, although Wissler had characterized the few pictograph sketches as “highly conventionalized” and “far from realistic,” he had warned against trying to determine their meaning. But the idea of conventionalization was enough to plant in Torrey’s imagination the prospect of a written language, and to explain that, he looked south and declared that among these figures he had found a “hieroglyphic,” which a friend thought resembled a calendar carving on a Maya temple in Yucatán (Torrey 1927).

True to his promise, Torrey sent photographs back to Wissler and informed him that he had…

reported the pictographs to the State Historian, who knew little about them, and

also wrote about them to President [John C.] Futrell [sic] of the State University at Fayetteville, Ark., with the thought that he might interest some research student, but I guess some outside agency will have to tackle them if they are worth it” [AMNH, Torrey-Wissler letter, 9 Apr 1927].

Torrey wrote his letter to Arkansas History Commission director Dallas T. Herndon on the same day, and sent him, as he had Wissler, a set of photographs of Petit Jean Mountain pictographs (AHC, Torrey-Herndon letter, 9 Apr 1927). Unfortunately, it appears he had not after all been able to shorten the focus of his camera, so all his pictures seem once again to have been taken from at least six feet away (Figure 14). In the same way that he had tried to interest University of Arkansas President Futrall in the pictographs, Torrey expressed to Herndon his belief that “these are worthy of expert scientific investigation and I hope that they may eventually receive such study.”

Writing back a few days later, Herndon offered no confidence that any such endeavor would occur in the state of Arkansas, and instead deflected the responsibility for any study of the rock art directly back to Torrey himself:

Figure 9. First known photograph of a Petit Jean Mountain pictograph (faint concentric rings in center of photo, 3CN314), November 1926. (Division of Anthropology Archives, American Museum of Natural History, New York.)


“I trust that you may be able to arrive at some explanation of the existence of these pictographs with the aid of the scientific investigation that you hope to bring to bear on the subject.” And, with that, Herndon told Torrey that he would be pleased to have the “benefit of any new information that you arrive at in regard to the origin, etc., of these things” (AHC, Herndon-Torrey letter, 13 Apr 1927).

Torrey never returned to Petit Jean Mountain after the March 1927 visit. He had done essential work in publicizing the Park and bringing the rock art resource to the attention of Arkansas’s citizens and public officials. He and Hardison remained friends until Torrey’s death in 1938, the two frequently exchanging letters and occasionally boxes of lichens—Torrey’s scientific passion—but only meeting once more, in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, at a National Conference on State Parks meeting in June, 1937 (AHC Diaries, 20 Dec 1932, 24 Mar 1933, 14 Jun 1937, 26 Aug 1938). Torrey’s ideas on the cultural meaning of the pictographs had infected Hardison (or Hardison’s had infected Torrey), for from the March 1927 visit on, Hardison’s actions and writings on rock art would show that he was collecting various motifs that would support the concept of an alphabet or other system that could

ultimately be translated.

HARDISON AND REDINGER

Dr. Hardison later wrote that he never had a guest he enjoyed so much, and considered Torrey “a rare man” (AHC Diaries, 9 Dec 1932 and 26 Aug 1938). He had to wait more than a year for another visitor to accompany him in the search for pictographs on Petit Jean Mountain. Julia Hardison’s younger sister Ellen arrived from Michigan with her family for a visit in May 1928 and Dr. Hardison found Ellen’s husband, Clyde Redinger, game for exploration (AHC Diaries, 18, 21 and 24 May 1928). Hardison’s sole diary entry for the time was a taciturn, “Went to Seven Hollows with Clyde. Slept in the Bear Hole,” on May 21 (AHC Diaries). Redinger (Figure 15), however, was so smitten by the adventure with his brother-in-law that he later described their outing in magazine articles, and left copies of his pictograph sketches with his family and, ultimately, with an artist-historian at Petit Jean State Park. Save for Torrey’s photographs and drawings, Redinger’s work (Figures 16 and 17) seems to be the only surviving graphic evidence for Hardison’s rock art documentation. In contrast to Hardison’s clipped “Slept in the Bear Hole,” Redinger’s account was positively romantic:

Figure 10. Petit Jean rock art regions described by Raymond Torrey. (USGS Topo, 7.5’ Series, Adona Quad 1989, Atkins Quad 1989, Morrilton West Quad 1979, Perryville Quad 1989.)


Figure 11. “An astonishing figure, both in its form and the circumferences of its location, was in a low cave a mile [west] of Dr. Hardison’s home, on the south brow of Petit Jean mountain, a cave so low that to make the figure on the roof of the cavity the artist must have lain on his back and worked with his rude brush on the rock face only two feet above the floor. The pictograph was a device of two parallel curving lines with hooks on each end and at the right end of the lower line was an arrangement of vertical and horizontal lines like the blank spaces in a crossword puzzle.” Raymond H. Torrey’s 1927 Arkansas Gazette description identifies a pictograph that graces the site 3CN181. (Photo by author.)

Figure 12. “These figures were triple circles on the upper sides of which were five lines, arranged like the fingers and thumb of a hand, and some had the thumb, if that it was, missing. But these were the only figures I have seen in the Petit Jean region which resemble pictographs, carvings or paintings on wood, skin or pottery like those recorded from other aboriginal peoples in North or South America. In many respects these Petit Jean aborigines had evidently developed an independent method of expressing their thoughts.” Raymond Torrey’s 1927 Arkansas Gazette article described pictographs at 3CN345. (Photo by author.)


Figure 13. Raymond Torrey’s 1927 Arkansas Gazette article mentioned a recurring pictograph that looked like “a birthday cake with four candles on it.” This motif, with slight variations, was present three times at one site, now known as 3CN127. The top right element is the barely visible one at 3CN127, while the bottom right element is from 3CN20, a mile and a half away. (Photos by author.)


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Figure 15. Clyde Redinger, circa 1961. (Photo courtesy of Ellen Sue Redinger Turner.)

and it is most difficult to borrow money” (AHC Diaries, 9 Sep 1930). Hardison’s collections, never great, all but dried up. In the entire year of 1932, he received only $224.50 from his patients, whereas just a few years earlier he had taken in more than $3,000 (AHC Diaries, 31 Dec 1932). He decided to gamble on a scheme that had worked for him several times before: writing.

In 1915 and 1917, Dr. Hardison had authored a series of articles for a magazine called The Country Gentleman (Higgins 2012). In 1927, the Ladies Home Journal paid him $1,000 for a two-part story about his experiences as a country doctor, and then in 1928, $500 for still another (AHC Diaries, 13 May 1927 and 28 May 1928). Regardless of what the doctor received in barter for his services, he still required cash for medicine, instruments, transportation, and taxes, and his income from writing had been a bonus. When the Depression hit, he decided to try it again. This time it would be a huge undertaking, an autobiography he eventually called “Feet On the Mountain” (AHC Diaries, 1 Jan 1932).

Doctor Hardison had prepared a pleasant surprise for me. Together, we were to do some exploring for the Smithsonian Institute in a wilderness locally known as The Seven Hollows.… Doctor Hardison briefed me. We were to seek red ochre pictographs left in caves by long-vanished aborigine artists. We were to explore all caves we found. Here we planned to search for any messages left by earlier inhabitants. We knew that centuries after the cavemen left, Indians arrived to be replaced, in turn, by white invaders.… [T]he doctor and I set out at dawn on our venture. I cleared a path ahead through the trackless forest. After a strenuous day we parked his roadster beneath a rocky overhang, then continued on foot along a perilous ledge. We set up a base camp in a bear cave (abandoned by its former occupant).… Access to The Seven Hollows before us was hazardous and forbidding. Through them coursed seven creeks.… We climbed down, crossing, backtracking, and gathering bruises, but we did find nearly 300 pictographs [Redinger 1983].

The two men’s search was not limited to the Seven Hollows area of the state park, as Redinger recounted in another, more matter-of-fact, article: “In 1928, with my brother-in-law, Dr. Hardison, I explored many interesting caves beneath the south brow, outside the present park area. It is not advisable for the timid tourist to venture there in summer, owing to the prevalence of very large rattlesnakes” (Redinger 1961). Indeed, Hardison, Redinger, and Redinger’s son Jack spent almost one entire day exploring the south brow rock shelters, and doubtless that portion of the visit contributed substantially to the “nearly 300 pictographs” Redinger recalled finding (Ellen Sue Redinger Turner, personal communication, 18 Jul 2009).

FEET ON THE MOUNTAIN

The hardscrabble existence of many of Petit Jean Mountain’s residents was of course made worse by the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929. The next year things continued to deteriorate. Dr. Hardison’s people depended upon him for medical care, despite the fact that often they could not pay him. He lamented, “The outlook is not hopeful. I doubt that I shall collect $100 this fall,


“Feet” was a project he had worked on occasionally since 1929, and it had gone through several working titles. But he obsessed over it from 1930 through most of 1932, doing the lion’s share of the writing using a typewriter set atop a stone slab in a quiet and solitary place—the very rock shelter in which his wife and son had found the first pictographs in 1914. For medical emergencies he had installed a telephone line from the house to the cave (AHC Diaries, 24 Sep 1929, 22 Oct 1930, 14-24 Jun 1932, 4 and 12 Jul 1932).

In the middle of this work he received a letter from the distinguished archeologist Mark Raymond Harrington, who was amply familiar with the area’s rich deposits of ancient pottery and other artifacts through a visit several years earlier to nearby Carden Bottoms (Harrington 1924). That day Hardison wrote, “This morning I received … a letter from Dr. M. R. Harrington, Southwest Museum, Highland Park, Los Angeles, Cali., who has heard through Raymond H. Torrey of the pictographs. He says they may be of Maya origin, and he wants further information” (AHC Diaries, 5 Dec 1931).

Hardison finished the manuscript in September 1932 and dispatched it to the Ladies Home Journal (AHC Diaries, 19 Sep 1932). But only a couple weeks later his hope turned to despair, as he wrote on 3 October 1932: “A card from the express office this morning states that the [manuscript] has been returned. I don’t know what I can

do now. I see no hope of saving our home or paying any of my debts” (AHC Diaries).

Hardison’s fortunes eventually recovered, as succeeding years’ diary entries demonstrated, but the 1932 manuscript held one distinction in his writings—it was the first time he gathered his thoughts on paper regarding Petit Jean Mountain’s rock art treasures. He had reflected on what he had heard from Raymond Torrey about his correspondence with Clark Wissler, and had drawn conclusions:

When our boy was six years old, he and his mother made the first discovery of these pictographs on the walls of a cave under our pasture west of the house. Occasionally, after that, I stumbled on other such characters widely scattered over the mountain; but it remained for Torrey, twelve years later, to recognize their importance. His investigations showed that the group of pictographs found by [Julia] and Billy were in fact a part of a painted frieze extending three miles west of our place, on every suitable rock face and in every cave along the brow.

Archaeologists, among them [Dr. Clark

Figure 16. A photograph from Clyde Redinger’s personal collection showing a page of pictograph transcriptions from his visit with Dr. Hardison in 1928. (Photo courtesy of Ellen Sue Redinger Turner.)


Wissler of the American Museum of Natural History and Dr. M. R. Harrington of the Southwest Museum of Los Angeles,] who have recently been studying drawings and photographs which we have sent them have identified certain Mayan characters among the hundreds that we have found; and the time seems to be approaching, as we find more of these characters written indelibly upon the faces of these old rocks, when archaeologists may read the story of a civilization that flourished in these mountains a thousand years [ago][Hardison 1932:178].

HARDISON AND THE MAYAS

Regardless of whatever Wissler and Harrington may have actually said about the pictographs of Petit Jean Mountain, Hardison’s notion that “certain Mayan

characters” occurred among the hundreds of pictographs was certainly true, at least in the sense that there were pictographs that, in form, looked like Maya characters that would have been known to researchers in the first decades of the 20th Century. Bishop Diego de Landa’s 16th-Century transcription of a Mayan “alphabet,” for example, contained a few symbols that, even if they were not exact duplicates, somewhat resembled Petit Jean pictographs (Figures 18 and 19) (Higginson 1886:18).

Moreover, to Hardison, who as a well-informed citizen of his time had likely read about the early 1920s discoveries of spectacular Mayan sites such as Chichén Itzá, somehow linking that great civilization to central Arkansas would make sense. As Hardison was launching the state park movement, Sylvanus Griswold Morley announced that he had found meaning in Mayan glyphs. “He has been working these 10 years upon the problem of the hidden information bound up in the writing of the Maya people, those natives of Yucatan and the hinterland to the south in Northern Guatemala, who built so wonderfully as to rival the structures of ancient Egypt itself” (De Puy 1921).

Morley believed that Mayan influence extended into what was now the American Southwest. “There was desultory trading in Mayan pottery carried on with the peoples in Mexico, Peru and the southwestern United States. This pottery found among these other peoples and its Mayan date determined by comparison with similar pottery in Central America may lead to an approximately accurate date being set upon the cliff dwellings of the United States and ruins in Peru and Mexico, Doctor Morley thinks” (Science Service 1922). So, if the Southwest, then, why not the Southeast, and Arkansas? The point would be raised again a few years later by another archeologist.

In 1933 Hardison’s diary reflected the arrival at Petit Jean State Park of a 200-man Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) contingent assigned to develop infrastructure, an effort that was to take several years (AHC Diaries, Jun-Jul 1933). The National Park Service (NPS) oversaw the effort, and its officials were frequent visitors to the Hardison home. As CCC enrollees constructed buildings, roads, dams and trails in the Park, the NPS occasionally sent out experts to check that the work made sense and met standards. One of these individuals was the NPS regional archeologist, Erik Kellerman Reed, who visited Dr. Hardison’s home and the state park in 1936 (AHC Diaries, 14 May 1936). The park superintendent, Samuel G. Davies, reported that “[a]n archeological project is taking place directed by Mr. Reed. Numerous arrowheads,

Figure 17. A sheet of transcribed Petit Jean Mountain pictographs, from Clyde Redinger’s daughter’s family scrapbook. (Reproduction courtesy of Ellen Sue Redinger Turner.)


bits of pottery, rubbing stones, etc. have been found” (Davies 1936).

Dr. Hardison did not report in his diary any discussion on archeology that he may have had with Reed, but Reed’s later writings suggest that he lacked an appreciation for the rock art he almost certainly found during his Petit Jean project. He did not believe that rock art was communicative in the sense of alphabets and syllabaries: “Petroglyphs and pictographs can seldom be ‘interpreted’, and often they have no ‘story’ to tell. In many cases they are probably the clan symbols of passersby” (Reed 1940). However, he did have one conviction that would have interested Dr. Hardison. He believed that the Mayas might well have affected the prehistoric cultures of the area that included Petit Jean Mountain. “In the territory of the present United States, advanced cultures arose in two areas—in the arid Southwest, largely due perhaps to ultimate connections with Mexican civilization; and in the Mississippi Valley region and the Southeast, possibly owing something to Mayan, or Mexican influence” (Reed 1941).

CURIOUS VISITORS

Hardison’s thinking on Petit Jean rock art was likely also shaped by the constant stream of visitors he hosted at

his home—people curious about Petit Jean Mountain and its natural and archeological wonders—who felt free to stop by unannounced and occupy his time, which he was usually happy to share. Many people came simply to see the pictographs in his rock shelter, which he called “the cave,” and talk about Indians (AHC Diaries, 25 Aug 1940, 16 Jun 1944, 4 Sep 1945, 5 May 1946, 8 May 1948, 11 Jun 1948, 4 Jul 1948, 14 Aug 1949). Of these many tourists, two of them stood out—Dr. Clarence Webb of Louisiana and former state senator William Coxon of Arizona (AHC Diaries 4 Sep 1945 and 11 Jun 1948, Eccles 2012).

Dr. Webb, despite his stature in Louisiana archeology and his fame relative to the Poverty Point and Belcher Mound sites, apparently did not add much if anything to Dr. Hardison’s understanding of aboriginal rock art. To Hardison, Webb was simply another Mountain tourist—albeit a brother physician—who dropped by to talk one day in September 1945: “Dr. Webb and wife, Shreveport, spent most of the morning here. Dr. Webb was interested in the pictographs, and I went with him to the cave.”

Senator Coxon’s visit, a few years later, in 1948, was a different matter. Coxon studied petroglyphs for much of his life, his awareness launched by a trip to Mexico and then continuing with the profusion of glyphs in his

Figure 18. De Landa’s Mayan “alphabet.” (Higginson, 1886:18)


home state of Arizona (Eccles 2012). Dr. Hardison noted, “William Coxon and daughter Bertha, Phoenix, Arizona, came 4 PM and stayed till 6:45. Coxon, a business man whose hobby is archaeology, came to see our pictographs. I took him to the cave. He had photographs of several thousand, many of them like ours, made in many parts of the world. He thinks ours are 10 or 12 thousand years old. The most interesting man I have met since Raymond Torrey” (AHC Diaries, 11 Jun 1948).

Comparing local rock art to that found on other continents, Coxon deduced that there were two kinds of rock art in America: “one of which was inscribed by the Indians and the other by a prehistoric, unknown source” (Eccles 2012:275).

Coxon’s unknown but benevolent travelers left informative signs all over the earth so that Europeans had access to the Americas and other lands during prehistoric times, with petroglyph and pictograph warnings of danger as well as rock art directions to water, food, shelter, and

so forth (Eccles 2012:275-276, 283). Coxon could tell the difference between relatively recent tribal marks and the ancient universally understood messages, which he called “cognate petroglyphs,” by the observation that the cognates derived from a system of geometric symbols. Individual symbols were formed from bases or formations, which “are the dot, line, curve, zigzag, semi-circle, circle, oval rectangle, triangle, square, oblong, lozenge, cross, and spiral … the alphabet of the cognate series” (Eccles 2012:275). The Indian rock art could be fairly recent, as Coxon had talked to mid-century Indians who were still making it, but according to Coxon the cognate rock art was, as Dr. Hardison suggested in his diary, thousands of years old (Eccles 2012:277).

Dr. Hardison would have appreciated such a system, as many of the pictographs he, Torrey, Redinger, and others cataloged were composed of these basic shapes.

ROCKEFELLER AND MAN’S MARK

In February 1953, Dr. Hardison received a visit from George Reynolds, the son of Hardison’s old friend Dr. John Hugh Reynolds, on behalf of the heir to one of America’s great fortunes—Winthrop Rockefeller. The reason for the call was simple, and would change Arkansas’s history: “George Reynolds 9:15 AM to talk to us about a place on the Mountain for Winthrop Rockefeller, New York, who was at George’s a short while with Frank Newell, L. R., Tuesday” (AHC Diaries, 26 Feb 1923).

The Hardisons met future-Governor Rockefeller a few months later and immediately took a liking to him (AHC Diaries, 7 Jun 1953). In addition to a cash infusion and jobs, Rockefeller brought to the Mountain an interest in its natural and cultural history. Once settled at Winrock Farms, he found a desire to preserve the knowledge Dr. Hardison had acquired in his near-fifty years of service in the Petit Jean country. The following June Rockefeller asked Hardison to record on tape what he knew about the Mountain (Hardison 1955a).

The conscientious Hardison did not talk extemporaneously—instead he wrote a script and then read it into the tape recorder, a process that took from June 1954 until February 1955 (AHC Diaries, 9 Jun 1954, 24 Jul 1954, 18 Jan 1955; Hardison 1955a). Rockefeller apparently liked the narrative so much that he agreed to fund the printing of several booklets to be distributed or sold publicly, using Hardison’s stories of the Mountain arranged according to topic (Hardison 1955a). Ultimately Rockefeller paid to put out two small paperback booklets

Figure 19. Comparison of De Landa’s “alphabet” letters with Petit Jean Mountain pictographs transcribed by Clyde Redinger.


entitled A Place Called Petit Jean: Some Legends, and A Place Called Petit Jean: The Mountain and Man’s Mark (Hardison 1955b, 1955c).

In his taped remarks, Hardison revealed for the first time anywhere his idea of the overall significance of rock art among the scenic, geological, paleontological, and other features of Petit Jean Mountain: “But more important than these, national and state park authorities have agreed, are the hundreds of aboriginal pictographs found in the caves and on the shelter rocks of the Mountain” (Hardison 1955a).

The Mountain and Man’s Mark, Hardison’s last published work, two years before his death in 1957, was also his only public writing that discussed his rock art discoveries. He devoted four of the book’s eleven pages to the Mountain’s ancient inhabitants, and credited Torrey with helping find 200 of the “more than 300” pictographs recorded. Briefly describing their south brow excursions, Hardison remarked for the first time that “[o]ne or two caves held a veritable art gallery.” He ascribed to Wissler—instead of Harrington—the notice of “similarity of these characters with the writing of the Mayas of Yucatan” (Hardison 1955b:8-9).

Although not mentioned, Hardison seemed to have incorporated William Coxon’s ideas into his Petit Jean

rock art philosophy. He thought that the few petroglyphs, or rock engravings, found in the area were more recently made than the pictographs. Hardison opined, “The petroglyphs are probably the work of a people who came after those who painted the characters, since none that I have seen bears any resemblance to the pictographs. Conceivably they could be the work of the Indians.”

He then marveled at the abundant and beautiful pottery found a few miles west at Carden Bottoms and remarked that the people who made it were “far more skillful and artistic than I had supposed the recent North American Indians to be. I have wondered if it could be the work of a people who a thousand or more years ago left the pictographs on the shelter rocks and on the walls of the caves of Petit Jean Mountain” (Hardison 1955b:10-11).

It seems impossible to know the extent to which Coxon’s theories, perhaps discussed over nearly three hours on a spring day in 1948, affected Hardison’s own thoughts. There is, however, an interesting similarity in illustrations between the depiction in Hardison’s book of a man making a rayed circle and the image on the cover of a magazine illustrating one of Coxon’s articles on rock art (Figure 20). Somehow Coxon had concluded that the “Stone-Writers” were “average to above average in height, wearing short kilts that came to the knees, much like the ancient Egyptian laborers” (Noorbergen 2001).

Figure 20. Comparing illustrations of writings by Dr. Hardison (left) and Sen. Coxon, it seems that American Indians were left out as possible rock artists. (Hardison 1955b:8; Fate Magazine cover by permission.)


Whether coincidence or not, the illustrations both show similarly-clothed, apparently Caucasian people as actors, making and reading rock art, fitting with Coxon’s belief that Europeans had visited America in prehistoric times, facilitated by signs on rock.

In this last publication of a prolific writer, Dr. Hardison recalled that everyone who had seen the photographs and drawings of pictographs “urged the paintings be preserved for study by authorities competent to give them their proper places in aboriginal American cultures” (Hardison 1955b:9). Hardison never considered himself to be one of those authorities, and consistently deferred to others, to whom he gave credit.

AFTER HARDISON

Dr. Hardison succumbed to serum hepatitis in 1957 at age 74, ironically at the hands of a fellow medical doctor (Higgins 2012). No one remaining on Petit Jean Mountain could fill his shoes as Sage of Petit Jean, and for a period, interest in the Mountain’s ancient remains all but vanished. For anyone interested in aboriginal rock art, only two sites were generally known and advertised as attractions in the state park—Indian Cave (3CN17) and the Rock House (3CN20). Not surprisingly, these and Hardison’s rock shelter (3CN32) were the first documented archeological sites on the Mountain, but they were not reported until 1962. Anybody reading Dr. Hardison’s pamphlets would

be justified in thinking that 300 pictographs on Petit Jean Mountain was simply big talking, as these three sites together, though spectacular, contained “only” something more than a hundred. The documentation at the time, moreover, only mentioned the presence of rock art; it did not describe the pictographs and petroglyphs, or even include sketches or photographs. By 1962 the park superintendent had stretched barbed wire across the opening of Indian Cave, and the name “Indian Cave” had been painted in large white letters on the side of the shelter rock. The initial documenter, Ed Sanders, was able to get inside the wire to collect a number of stone artifacts, including a “fragment of grindstone with paint adhering.” The rest of the paint was on the walls and ceiling. He wrote, “Ocher pictographs on the roof. Possibly quite modern.” Sanders counted it a “[g]ood site to excavate as a tourist attraction” (Sanders 1962). Six years later when an archeologist came to look, the fence was torn down and it appeared as though someone had even tried to steal a pictograph, leaving chisel marks in the stone (Figure 21) (Huner 1968).

Awareness of Petit Jean Mountain history was renewed when Arkansas State Parks hired Harley Albert (Hal) Lane to work at Petit Jean.

In the summer of 1972, Hal was hired as the Artist-Historian for the Arkansas State Parks Department. Dale Bumpers

Figure 21. Vandalism at 3CN17, showing metal toolmarks on zoomorphic pictograph and edges where panel has been broken or slabbed off. (Photo by author.)


(Arkansas governor at the time) had seen examples of Hal’s work on display at the School of the Ozarks. Mainly it was the carved sign for the Ralph Foster Museum that attracted Bumpers’s attention, and a decision was made to secure Hal to design and build a series of interpretive displays and entrance/trail signs for the Arkansas State Parks. Hal continued this work, including coordinating research on the history of the State Parks and the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps in Arkansas, until his death from a heart attack in September of 1980 [Andy Lane, personal correspondence, 7 Jul 2012].

Lane’s mission, in addition to carving entrance signs, was to “get up and visualize and interpret the history of the various parks of Arkansas.” This of course required access to Hardison’s work, and for that George Reynolds wrote a letter to Dr. Hardison’s daughter-in-law, asking if she would lend Mr. Lane Dr. Hardison’s diaries and any other documents applicable to state park history (Center for Arkansas History and Culture, George Reynolds Collection [GRC], University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Reynolds-Hardison letter, 14 Sep 1972). Mrs. Hardison sent the materials and by reading them Lane became quite conversant with any matters relating to Dr. Hardison’s life and work, and with the scientific knowledge Hardison had gained relative to the Mountain, including rock art.

As fortune would have it, Dr. Hardison’s brother-in-law Clyde Redinger was still active, was a diehard trailer camper, and still occasionally visited Petit Jean State Park (Redinger 1961, 1983). He made one of these trips in the early 1970s, and met Hal Lane. Redinger told him about the 1928 forays along Petit Jean’s bluffs and hollows in search of rock art, and showed him the sheet of his pictograph transcriptions (Figure 16) that he carried with him, pinned to the inside wall of his travel trailer (Ellen Sue Turner, personal correspondence, 31 Jul 2009).

SPACE ALIEN ROCK ART

Lane copied down the symbols and got the story of Redinger’s 1928 pictograph search. Then in 1975, for the first time in decades, Petit Jean’s pictographs again made state news. Only this time the writer was neither historian, archeologist, nor even cryptologist, but rather a ufologist—a student of unidentified flying objects—named Lucius Farish (Figure 22).

Lou Farish worked in the Plumerville post office and, by the mid-1970s, had begun publishing a monthly 20-page digest called UFO Newsclipping Service (Huneeus 2012). Farish met Lane and saw the pictograph sketches Redinger provided. Instead of Maya or other Indian motifs, however, Farish saw advanced mechanisms with which no aborigine would have been familiar, but might have tried to represent in a rock painting as best he could. The excerpt below refers to Figure 23:

In examining various pictographs in the collection, certain ones seem quite intriguing, prompting the viewer to wonder where Indians saw such things as

Figure 22. Lucius Farish (second from left) brought a new and different point of view to the study of Petit Jean Mountain rock art. (Petit Jean Country Headlight photo, Larry Miller, 16 Apr 1975:1.)


are shown here. In the drawing designated as “a”, one wonders if this represents a comet or other celestial sight. The circles and angles of “b” are rather difficult to explain, as are its “tripod legs.” The Indians did not use the wheel, but “c” shows a clear representation of one, complete with spokes. Recalling the popularity of Erich von Daniken’s book, Chariots of the Gods?, and the concept of “ancient astronauts,” the device shown in “d” might be thought of as a camera or some similar mechanical device. Curious figures and beings are shown in “e”, “f” and “g”. These would seem to represent things which we would consider totally foreign to the Indians’ normal environment. Pictograph “h” reminds one of an archery target or, to use the imagination a bit more, perhaps a landed UFO? A perfect letter “A” is surmounted by two “Domes” in figure “i”. In “j”, we see a configuration which tallies with many UFO descriptions of modern times, although it may depict something much more mundane. Nowhere in this series do we see the types of drawings we tend to expect from Indian artists of those days, i.e. animals, birds and other things of their everyday life [Farish 1975a].

The problem was that Farish and Lane, like M. R. Harrington before them, had not seen the pictographs themselves—save for those in the Hardison Rockshelter, which they visited—but only quickly-made and thus inaccurate representations of complex rock art elements. Nor could they have, for the most part. In 1975, the locations of the sites at which most of these pictographs were recorded had been lost to science. Some would not be found again for more than 30 years and still others would remain lost. Because Redinger’s surviving sketches were so few—nothing close to the nearly 300 he claimed to have seen with Hardison—this page had not included “the animals, birds and other things of their everyday life” that researchers now interpret as present among Petit Jean paintings.

In Farish’s Arkansas Gazette and Petit Jean Country Headlight article—the same story appeared in both, months apart, with only slight variation—he was careful to credit Dr. Hardison with the original pictograph discoveries and bringing them to outside attention, describing Hardison as

“certainly Petit Jean’s foremost historian. He collected many Indian artifacts and catalogued the pictographs which he found in more than 50 caves on the mountain. Photographs of one such cave and its now-dim drawings accompany this article” (Farish 1975a and 1975b).

SCIENTIFIC STUDY BEGINS

The proper scientific study recommended by Wissler and echoed by Torrey and Hardison through the years finally began in 1978 when Arkansas Archeological Survey research assistants Gayle Fritz and Robert Ray began a review of Arkansas rock art sites (Sherrod 1984:xii, Sabo and Sabo 2005). They got to Petit Jean Mountain the next year (George Sabo, personal correspondence, 1 Apr 2013) and documented eight additional rock art sites, counting among them some that included images mentioned by Raymond Torrey in the 1920s.

They published the results of their study in 1982, marking the first scholarly article on Petit Jean rock art. They noted that in the whole state, only 46 sites were known. Almost a quarter of those were on Petit Jean Mountain alone and, thanks to their research, the Petit Jean total was now 11. This was certainly not enough, so far,

Figure 23. Hal Lane’s copy of pictograph drawings shown to him by Clyde Redinger. (Adapted from Arkansas Gazette, 18 May 1975:4E.)


to support Dr. Hardison’s report of 300 pictographs (Fritz and Ray 1982:240, 252, 254). They realized, however, that the research potential was far greater than they had initially imagined. Fritz and Ray credited Hardison with early study of Petit Jean rock art, and acknowledged that documenters had not yet found all of Hardison’s sites: “Although locational information for all but a few sites was unfortunately lost over the years, they are now beginning to be rediscovered, suggesting that the earlier reports [of more than 300 separate pictographs] could very well be true” (Fritz and Ray 1982:241, 252).

Fritz and Ray gave a name to the rock art style on Petit Jean Mountain: “Petit Jean Painted,” and described the red iron oxide paintings thus:

Geometric forms, both rectilinear and curvilinear, predominate but human and animal figures are also present. While a few sites contain relatively extensive painted areas, it is common to find single design elements, or very small groupings of designs, in relative isolation or on shelter walls and ceilings. In addition, it has been observed that many of the design elements are stylistically similar to designs found on Carson Red-on-Buff pottery vessels from Carden Bottoms, a large, late prehistoric and early historic aboriginal complex located just west of the mountain [Fritz and Ray 1982:252].

Like several researchers before them, Fritz and Ray found comparison of basic geometric symbols from the rock art to another medium irresistible. Finally, instead of assessing similarity with designs of the far-off Mayas or some benevolent ancient race of Europeans, they sensibly picked a culture much closer—native, homegrown Arkansas Indians.

For the first time, Fritz and Ray published the Petit Jean Mountain rock art catalog as it existed at the time—eleven sites, listing some individual pictographs and their measurements, and relating them to their surroundings (Fritz and Ray 1982:252-257). One important result of their effort was that all eleven rock art sites they knew about were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 (American Dreams, Inc. 2013). Clark Wissler would have been pleased. He had suggested more than a half-century earlier, “Certainly these rock pictures are important and any steps that may be taken for their preservation or for recording them are to be encouraged”

(AMNH Wissler-Torrey letter, 17 Dec 1926). At last, it was being done.

But as if to demonstrate the perishability of “locational information”—as Fritz and Ray termed it— related to rarely studied archeological resources, the next two groups of field researchers, in 1980 and 2004, had trouble identifying one of two Fritz and Ray sites at the bottom of the Natural Bridge Hollow. As a result, the Arkansas Archeological Survey reassigned one site’s number to another location and the original rock shelter was not rediscovered and re-documented until 27 years later as 3CN304 (Arkansas Archeological Survey [AAS] station site files at Winthrop Rockefeller Institute [WRI], 1980-2007).

Inspired by Fritz and Ray, University of Arkansas at Little Rock astronomer P. Clay Sherrod (Figure 24) embarked upon a project to document all the rock art he could find in the central Arkansas River Valley (Sabo and Sabo 2005). He sought out people who lived in or were familiar with the areas he visited—including the Petit Jean State Park staff—and many of them gave him tips on where and how to find rock art. Often accompanied by his son, Claiborne, and friend Robert Wittenburg, and, when on Petit Jean Mountain, by state park interpreter Ben Swadley, Sherrod spent two years cataloging rock art in his spare time, and then in 1983 the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation gave him a grant to continue his work (Sherrod 1984:x). The resulting publication was Motifs of Ancient Man, A Catalogue of the Pictographs and Petroglyphs of a Portion of the Arkansas River Valley in 1984. In it, Sherrod described selected sites and used his sketches of pictographs and petroglyphs to illustrate various themes, styles, and geographic variations of rock art (Sherrod 1984).

The Arkansas Archeological Survey credited Sherrod with documenting 35 Petit Jean rock art sites during the years 1982-1984. Survey archeologists sent out to check his sites agreed with many of them, rejected some, and sometimes revised the number of pictographs found, in several cases determining that “pictographs” were naturally occurring iron oxide stain (AAS-WRI site reports).

Part of the problem here was the state of technology. As Sherrod explained in his site report for 3CN164, “The pictograph was photographed and Xeroxed; the copy was retouched on site to render faint detail. Copy of retouch attached” (Sherrod 1983:6). This meant that Sherrod took a film-based color photograph that was then developed, printed, and the print photocopied in black and white. He


later took the black and white paper copy back to the rock shelter and then drew in what he observed in terms of rock art. As the illustrations in Figure 25 demonstrate, this technique did not seem an accurate way to document rock art. Another person was unlikely to see the same image that Sherrod drew on the copy of his photograph.

Nevertheless, by the time Sherrod was finished, Survey records showed 46 rock art locations on Petit Jean Mountain alone, a number equal to the site total for the entire state when Fritz and Ray tallied it in 1982 (AAS- WRI site reports, 1982-1984). Although Sherrod re-examined the Hardison Rockshelter (3CN32)—the third person to document it after Dr. Hardison himself—he was unaware of the previous accounts by Hardison and Torrey that pointed to other specific sites. Nevertheless, by comparison of some of his drawings with those made by Torrey and Redinger, it is clear that he revisited at least

four of those locations (Sherrod 1984:76-80).

It would be 23 years before another rock art site would be reported on Petit Jean Mountain—in 2007. Far from being a research desert, however, the Mountain and its rock art resources would be the subject of detailed studies by the Arkansas Archeological Survey. There was still no complete inventory of Arkansas rock art, and no convenient vehicle by which the public could be made aware of Arkansas’s prehistoric legacy on stone. Led by George Sabo III, the Survey sought grants from the Arkansas Humanities Council (2000-2001) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (2003), and undertook a years-long project to document in detail the paintings and engravings left by the Natural State’s prehistoric and protohistoric inhabitants, using the latest technologies and techniques. One important aspect of the study was rock art’s relationship to the ancient cultural landscape,

Figure 24. Clay Sherrod in 1984, near 3CN159, a site he documented two years earlier. (Photo by Mark Morgan, Arkansas Times, Sep 1984:86.)

Figure 25. Photo and retouching by Sherrod, top, showing location of presumed anthropomorphic pictograph, from 3CN164 site report. Bottom photo, by author, shows same spot today.


specifically “relationships between rock art imagery and the iconography of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, a set of religious beliefs and practices widespread across the southeast between A.D. 1000 and 1500” (Sabo and Sabo 2005:iv-vi).

Rock art teams spent considerable time at some of Petit Jean Mountain’s well-known sites, recording pictographs and petroglyphs in various media for cataloging. Although at this writing the project is not finished, products so far are an edited Popular Series volume titled Rock Art in Arkansas, a published paper on “Rock Art and the Study of Ancient Religion in Southeastern North America,” a first stab at a computerized database of rock art images, and an internet-based educational resource for teaching about Arkansas rock art. Additionally, archeologists have advanced Fritz’s and Ray’s theory that local Mississippian period cultures, such as those at nearby Carden Bottoms, may have produced Petit Jean Mountain images (Sabo and Sabo 2005, Sabo 2008).

Rock Art in Arkansas gave short shrift to Dr. Hardison’s contributions, allowing him no more credit than it did Dr. Webb—Hardison’s summer 1945 morning visitor from Shreveport, who may have visited but a single rock art site—for “mid-century interest” in Petit Jean Mountain rock art, and giving Webb equal attribution for documenting “hundreds of images, mostly pictographs, at a large number of sites” (Sabo and Sabo 2005:24). Although this Survey project did not undertake to discover more rock art sites, it was the first major effort to apply the detailed scientific methods foreseen by Wissler in the 1920s, and its focus on educating the Arkansas citizenry echoed Wissler: “I think it is well to call these things to the attention of the local organizations and to apply such stimulus as we can to the development of interest in this subject” (AMNH, Wissler-Torrey letter, 13 Apr 1927).

PROJECT XENOPHON

At this point, as the author, I must admit a certain amount of bias in any discussion of Dr. Hardison and his pursuits. As an infant I was his patient (AHC Diaries, 17 Jul 1954). Growing up in the Arkansas River Valley and spending much time on my grandparents’ Petit Jean Mountain property, I came to see Dr. Hardison as the embodiment of everything good about the Mountain, and the source of all worthwhile information about it. I found that he tended to exaggerate somewhat in his writings, especially when dealing with quantities, heights and distances, but forgave him when I understood it was all in the cause of furthering interest in his beloved mountain.

When at age 18 I left Arkansas to go to school, I left with a thirst to increase my knowledge of the Petit Jean country, and for 34 years, regardless of where the United States Air Force sent me and my family, I was able to research and collect information on topics that related to Arkansas in general and Petit Jean Mountain specifically, even though sometimes the connection was remote and tangential.

One of those topics was rock art. As a sixth grader I had visited the Hardison Rockshelter (3CN32) with Peter Read, a classmate whose family rented the late doctor’s house. The two of us investigated the bluffs below my grandparents’ cabin and found pictographs at a site now known as 3CN310. The thrill of being close to images painted or daubed onto sandstone centuries ago by a people long gone—and the consideration that these were holy places—never left my memory.

In late 1991 I had just returned to the United States after half a year flying jets in Saudi Arabia, and, eager to get back into my Petit Jean studies after I had read all the Hardison writings available to me from long distance, I wrote Petit Jean State Park’s superintendent to find out what I could about rock art. The answer I received was depressing:

“I am sad to report that much of the rock art that Dr. Hardison wrote about is no longer visible. Over the years vandalism has destroyed much of it, and a paper mill in the area has created what some call an acid fog, that is destroying the visible remains of the rock art” (Doug Carter, Petit Jean State Park Interpreter, personal correspondence, 23 Dec 1991).

Eventually my research led me to a State Parks official named Ben Swadley—formerly at Petit Jean but when I met him the director of the Plantation Agriculture Museum at Scott, Arkansas—and the story got better. We talked about Dr. Hardison and rock art. In 2000, Ben invited me to participate in a rock art documentation workshop on Petit Jean Mountain taught by Linda Olson of Minot State University. I jumped at the chance and flew back to Arkansas for the session in May. Attendees included people from the Arkansas Archeological Survey, the Arkansas Archeological Society, Arkansas State Parks, and a few others. The text Linda used, and which she co-wrote, said this in the preface:

Whatever the reason(s), it is clear that most American anthropologists and archaeologists have little interest in the study of rock art. Very few colleges


and universities teach a course in rock art much less a course in rock art documenting. Graduate level study in rock art is almost non-existent, and only a handful of anthropology departments will accept thesis and dissertation topics on rock art [Loendorf et al 1998:xi-xii].

This attitude within the community of professional archeologists seemed certainly the case during Dr. Hardison’s lifetime, especially with the archeologist assigned to Petit Jean State Park in the 1930s, Erik Kellerman Reed. I thought that since my wife and I planned to live on Petit Jean Mountain once I retired from military service I might be in a good position to search for and document rock art, and if the prefatory statement were true, likely no professional archeologist would mind.

“Project Xenophon” seemed an apt name for my endeavor. Xenophon was an Athenian soldier who found himself stuck in a strange, inhospitable land for a number of years, and he was mighty happy finally to be back home in Greece. As he entered his homeland he seized something that he thought would enrich him for the rest of his life. I thought archeology, and its rock art subset, might do that for me.

My objectives with Project Xenophon were not just to find and document rock art, but to solve mysteries presented by Dr. Hardison. For example, could I find the

rest of the “more than three hundred pictographs” that had been mostly photographed and all drawn by himself and his helpers? In 2006, as a review of site forms, revisit forms, and rock art supplements told me, there were 46 sites and 225 documented elements, including 100 at just one site—Rock House Cave (AAS WRI, site reports, rock art supplements). Since many of the Rock House hundred were described as “ephemeral,” or “smudges,” or “amorphous,” or “mineral stain,” or “indistinct,” or “blob,” and so forth, I felt strongly that Hardison would not have considered those as paintings. The total to Hardison, then, would have been many less than 225 at those sites. So where were the others? Dr. Hardison had also mentioned that there were spectacular south brow rock art sites: “One or two caves held a veritable art gallery” (Hardison 1955a). Was it one, or two? Was one of them his own rock shelter, with ten pictographs?

The art gallery mystery was the first one put to rest. When I began in 2006, I was heartily encouraged. First I documented a site on the south brow of the Mountain (Figure 26)—the first on Petit Jean since 1984—and then thought I would try to get access to the park, too. I met with Petit Jean State Park superintendent Wally Scherrey, and he told me he would be happy for me to explore the normally out-of-bounds parts of the state park. Leslie C. “Skip” Stewart-Abernathy, the station archeologist for my region, then at Arkansas Tech University, not only gave me his blessing, but also gave me a fieldbook, some other equipment and the loan of an intern, Michael Young, for

Figure 26. Project Xenophon bears first fruit. Panel from 3CN303, the first “new” rock art site documented on Petit Jean Mountain in 23 years. (Photo by author.)


the summer of 2007. Michael and I documented three rock art sites in the Seven Hollows area, and coincidentally a number of Prohibition-era moonshine production and processing sites.

I spoke at some Petit Jean Mountain Community Association meetings on subjects involving area history and managed to enlist the support of some of my neighbors on the south brow. These people kindly allowed me access to their property and some of them were pleased to descend the bluffs with me, braving snakes, ticks, chiggers, thorns and poison ivy, to help me photograph, sketch, and measure. Among the first of these sites were the two “veritable art galleries” I’d hoped to find. One was a 20-meter expanse of bluff with 26 individual elements, and the other a 5-meter length of bluff and rock shelter with 18 elements. Comparison with Redinger’s sketches proved both to be sites that Hardison, Torrey, and Redinger had documented. Figure 27, site profile sketches of the two, shows the density of rock art figures that to Dr. Hardison must have screamed “art gallery!”

The Eastern States Rock Art Conference came to Petit Jean Mountain in 2007, organized and executed by Michelle Berg-Vogel, who had attended the documentation workshop with me in 2000. She graciously allowed me to lead a portion of the rock art field trips on the Mountain. Through that conference I met several rock art experts who assisted me from then on.

Reinaldo “Dito” Morales, professor of art history at the University of Central Arkansas (Figure 28), was truly a godsend. Following the conference I invited him back to the Mountain to see some sites I’d come upon and documented, and lamented the fact that technology could not illuminate pictographs not visible to the naked eye. He corrected me by way of introducing me to a software photograph enhancement application called DStretch, or Decorrelation Stretch.

Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory developed DStretch to bring out faint details in remote sensing images. Jon Harman optimized it for rock art, and described it this way:

Figure 27. Site profile sketches of two south brow “art galleries,” 3CN314 and 3CN320. (Reproductions by author.)


DStretch is a useful tool for archaeologists involved in the study and documentation of rock art. Its enhancement techniques can bring out very faint pictographs almost invisible to the eye. Subtle differences in hue are enhanced which can give clues to superposition. Pictographs can be enhanced for publication or presentation to viewers not capable (or inclined) to puzzle out faint elements. Use of DStretch can be as simple as just hitting a button, but it also contains sophisticated tools for the manipulation of false color images. Because the enhancement works by increasing differences in hue, the technique gives better results for pictographs than petroglyphs [Harman 2008].

DStretch proved an amazing tool that allowed me to locate pictographs at previously undocumented sites and to find pictographs others had missed at very well documented sites (Figure 29). For example, the rock shelter known as 3CN125 was thought to have 21

pictographs when studied by the Survey’s rock art team. I shot photographic panoramas of the ceiling and walls, ran them through DStretch, and was able to describe 65 (AAS WRI, site reports). I found DStretch vastly superior—for determining content—than the painstaking tracings made in the past using transparent plastic sheets and markers. The unaided human eye cannot always accurately tell the difference between natural iron stain and a manmade pictograph, but, using DStretch run through one or several different optimization routines, it can do much better through digital photography.

As a case in point, consider Figure 30, an archival tracing of Element 9 at 3CN132. It is excellent work, accomplished by an eminently qualified archeologist. Note the pigment blotches recorded between the two thick vertical lines (Arkansas Archeological Survey 2004). Now take a look at Figure 31, which is a DStretched photograph of the same element, made with a fairly inexpensive digital camera. A change in the entire nature of the pictograph is apparent. Far from being blotches between two lines, the inside of the pictograph contains additional separate images, made up of rows of dots and lines that form geometric figures. Element 9 is revealed to

Figure 28. A Petit Jean rock art orientation for British archaeologist Christopher Chippindale, 11 Apr 2010. From left, the author, Cambridge University rock art researcher Chris Chippindale, University of Central Arkansas professor Dito Morales. (Photo by Rachel Engebrecht.)


Figure 29. Recently discovered site 3CN417 on Petit Jean Mountain, December 2012. On left, unprocessed photo. On right, same photo, but DStretch® reveals an enclosed cross. (Photo by author.)

of “more than three hundred” was no exaggeration. The “more” is now “many more.”

The total will become greater as more sites are found and better imaging techniques are developed. We know for certain that we have not found all the sites, for the simple fact that the few pictographs subjectively rendered on paper by Hardison, Torrey, and Redinger have not all been found. I took the most complete Redinger compilation, that shown in Figure 16, and went through site data looking for similar images. The results, shown in Figure 32, strongly indicate that Hardison visited a number of sites the Survey has documented, but there are still some elusive pictographs. This is a very inexact process, I must admit. Someone trying to document an image quickly cannot always get it perfectly. Nevertheless Redinger was close enough to identify many. Figure 33 shows a pictograph from 3CN314 that is very complex and, below it, one of Redinger’s transcriptions. Although the details do not completely match, the overall idea is unmistakable. This is a site that Hardison visited.

DR. HARDISON’S CONTINUED LEGACY

There are more rock art sites to be discovered. There are certainly many more pictographs to be discovered at sites already documented. Dr. Hardison’s wish that Petit Jean Mountain rock art be scientifically documented and interpreted is on a firm path to fulfillment, with

be pictures within a picture, and the actual distribution of pigment is more precisely seen.

With the help of this new tool and more interested friends and neighbors, I managed to document 16 additional rock art sites on the south brow of Petit Jean Mountain, five in the Seven Hollows, and one on Cedar Creek in the center of the Mountain. Ben Swadley—although still director of the Plantation Agriculture Museum, he remained very active in the study and preservation of Petit Jean rock art— added one more on the south brow, for a total of 23 sites since 2006. The aboriginal pictographs at these 23 sites (not all rock art elements found were ancient; some were modern forgeries), plus extra images found at previously documented sites, added 253 elements to the 225 already cataloged. In other words, the number of known rock art paintings has doubled since 2006.

The AAS rock art team recorders listed some of the individual elements in the Rock House and at other sites using terms that meant the documenter could not discern a describable image. Some of the ones I recorded seemed to be confusing, too, as if during the centuries since the images were painted, much of the pigment flaked or wore off, leaving something that my mind could not form into a recognizable pattern. Nevertheless, even if one were to say that these should not be counted as pictographs, the present total of 478 Petit Jean Mountain pictographs should make it indisputably clear that Dr. Hardison’s total


interpretation being the futile part. As Clark Wissler implied long ago, we will never be able to know what was in the mind of the artist when creating the rock art. We are making progress in an area that would have pleased Hardison, who hoped the pictographs would be studied “by authorities competent to give them their proper places in aboriginal American cultures” (Hardison 1955b:9).

One such authority, the Arkansas Archeological Survey’s George Sabo III, explained how this can happen when Petit Jean art is related to the art of the surrounding archeological areas:

The Carden Bottoms phase is the relevant cultural unit, represented by sites exhibiting a distinctive material assemblage that extends along the Arkansas River roughly from Conway to Ozark. Farther upstream we have another contemporaneous cultural manifestation called the Fort Coffee phase, and downstream from the Carden Bottoms phase area (towards Little Rock) is the Menard phase. The people representing these communities surely interacted, but they maintained distinctive identities in part through their material culture. Any, and perhaps all, could have visited

[Carrion] Crow and Petit Jean Mountains in addition to the many other prominence[s] within or adjacent to the valley. But the key point is that these cultural manifestations (and others, expanding outward into the Mississippian World) provide the comparative framework for studying iconography....Further, stylistic expressions are established via configurational analyses conducted for the entire corpus of artistic expressions expressed across these regions. Special attention is paid to how artists used different material genres (engraved ceramics, painted ceramics, pictographs, petroglyphs, and woven basketry, for example, represent five distinct genres)....

Figure 30. Archival tracing of Element 9, 3CN132. This technique was taught as the most accurate way to record a pictograph. (Arkansas Archeological Survey.)

Figure 31. DStretched photograph of the element depicted in Figure 30. Additional detail includes a previously unseen design within the thick borders. (Photo by author.)


The only possible way to grasp the larger patterns and relationships is through very careful analysis of the entire corpus....There are roughly 1200 whole vessels from Carden Bottoms that we have studied in great detail, and the stylistic links to rock art in the surrounding uplands are more than superficial. We also take into account the many hundreds of other vessels representing the Fort Coffee and Menard phases, as a cross-check on style definitions ascribed to Carden Bottoms phase assemblages. Comparable analyses for other material genres (chipped and ground stone tools, for example) flesh out the overall study. Further, we have colleagues in adjacent regions who are working on the same kinds of studies; currently, our research group is working with several teams participating in a comparative study of rock art from the Great Lakes on the north to Alabama and Georgia on the south, and from the Atlantic seaboard on the east to the edge of the southern Plains on the west. This is the context from which meaningful patterns are recognized and interpreted....[D]etailed information on

Figure 32. Redinger’s pictograph sheet (Figure 16) annotated with site numbers of locations in which similar looking pictographs have been documented.

Figure 33. Elements 20 and 21, 3CN314 (top), compared with a Redinger transcription (bottom). (Photo by author.)


the rock art assemblages at the many sites that you have visited…can then be incorporated into the larger, ongoing studies, thereby helping us flesh out the patterns that developed through time and across geographical space within Eastern Woodlands prehistory [George Sabo III, personal communication, 27 and 31 Jan 2013].

Some artistic expression, though it may be stylized as well, goes beyond simple geometric motifs. Some is clearly related to the natural environment of Petit Jean Mountain. As interpreted, food plants appear in many places in Petit Jean rock art, and also terrestrial, aquatic, and avian animals. Although we cannot know for sure, a pictograph discovered recently near Cedar Falls suggests the artistic depiction of that familiar cataract (Figure 34).

The remaining part of Dr. Hardison’s hope for his rock art discoveries is preservation. In that, we are not doing as well. From the beginning of human presence on Petit Jean Mountain, it seems, people have made marks on stone. We tend to think that ancient rock art as treasure, while recent graffiti is trash. Modern Americans defaced prehistoric rock art even before Petit Jean State Park came into being in 1923. Figure 35 is an example of such damage, displaying present day and pre-1923 vandalism. Frank Bird, a Petit Jean Mountain resident who was fifteen years old at the time, chiseled his name and the date, Dec. 27, 1916, through an ancient pictograph. Others followed his example.

It also seems that graffiti beget graffiti, and the best policy may be to remove it as soon as it is discovered. Unfortunately, Petit Jean State Park does not have the resources to combat this threat to our cultural heritage, as the park superintendent told me:

We fight this type of stuff all the time. First of all it’s hard to catch folks in the act of doing it but presently we have a case in court concerning folks who have used “Sharpies” to write their names throughout the park. A misdemeanor must be done in the presence of a LEO (Law Enforcement Officer) or have a witness with affidavit to prosecute. We do try to get some of the graffiti off using different types of techniques and some areas are so sensitive (such as rock art areas) we are not qualified to remove the graffiti. We

usually enlist the help of a rock art expert like Ben Swadley to help us which he has several times. I do not have enough staff to keep up with all the needed graffiti cleanup along with all the other things needed to keep the park going and cleaning graffiti takes special training and skills that [not] just anybody can do [Wally Scherrey, personal communication, 22 Jul 2010].

Scherrey later advised me that the prosecutor elected to drop the case (Wally Scherrey, personal communication, 1 Feb 2013).

Although there are several rock art sites within the boundaries of Petit Jean State Park, the park staff wisely advertises only one—the Rock House (3CN20)—as a

Figure 34. Above, a rock painting discovered in December 2012 that may be interpreted to represent Petit Jean Mountain’s Cedar Falls, shown below. In the pictograph, the horizontal line at the base of the “falls” corresponds to a ledge that allows a hiker to walk behind the thundering water. (Photos by author.)


place for tourists to go to see rock art. If pressed, some will take folks to Indian Cave (3CN17), but generally the policy works. I find graffiti at almost all the rock art sites in the park, but imagine it would be worse if park officials handed out a rock art map.

The very fact that people can still enjoy rock art at 3CN20 (and this is my studied opinion) is almost wholly due to the patient, long term efforts of one man—Ben Swadley, now the superintendent of Parkin Archeological State Park. Back in the early 1980s, while he was happy to help Sherrod find and document rock art, Swadley had serious worries about conditions at some of the well known sites in Petit Jean state park, particularly the Rock House. Vandalism increased at a rapid rate and prehistoric rock art was being defaced by spray paint, felt tipped markers, and simple gouging by sandstone pieces that perpetrators could pick up anywhere in the park. Graffiti became so large, bright, and ubiquitous in the Rock House that it dominated

the view. After he left his work at Petit Jean State Park, Swadley’s concern for rock art preservation remained. He successfully applied for grants for damage assessment at 3CN20, then conservation, and then a management plan for the site. He achieved recognition as state park rock art expert among his peers within the state government, as Mr. Scherrey acknowledged above. Finally, Swadley wrote an article using his experiences at Petit Jean State Park as a study in site management for the protection of rock art. American Indian Rock Art, Volume 35, published his work, “Actively Managing Rock Art Sites,” in 2009 (Swadley).

Outside the park the rock art survives better, except for one aspect of site preservation: more out-of-the park sites seem to be looted. In many of the south brow rock shelters there are pits from non-scientific excavation, and in one I even found a quarter-inch screen box left behind (Figure 36). Much of the desecration appears to have been caused by the previous or present landowners themselves. Even Dr. Hardison dug up his rock shelter, and allowed others to dig in it. The pictographs, however, remained bright, for the most part.

As Petit Jean State Park’s Doug Carter suggested back in 1991, there is a sense that the pictographs are fading. Since we have so few photographs of rock art before serious documentation started, it is hard to say how much they are fading, or how, or even if, environmental processes may be damaging Petit Jean rock art (Arkansas Archeological Survey 2007). During Clay Sherrod’s project in the 1980s, he worried about acid fog:

One of the first things [Sherrod] considered was acid rain, but most of the pictographs are inside caves and bluff shelters, protected from rainfall. “So it had to be something else,” Sherrod says. “And then one morning I noticed this blanket of fog over the river valley and I thought, ‘That’s the only thing—fogs and mists are the only things that could get into those shelters. Could they be carrying it?’... So I went up there on cool mornings and tested what the fogs were like; I repeatedly came up with pH readings of down to 2.0, which is really strong” [White 1984:89].

A source of the components of acid fog, nitrogen oxide (NOX) and sulfur dioxide (SO2), is only ten kilometers east of the Mountain—Green Bay Packaging’s linerboard

Figure 35. Ancient paintings and historic graffiti at 3CN147. Top photo is unmodified; bottom is the same image optimized for red pictographs by DStretch® software. (Photo by author.)


Figure 36. Artifact screen and looter hole at a Petit Jean Mountain rock shelter that also contains rock art. (Photo by author.)

mill at Oppelo. According to the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (2012:17), this plant built in the mid-1960s is authorized to pump into the air 267.1 tons of SO2 and 986.5 tons of NOX per year between now and 2017. I found no scientific studies to demonstrate that this is too much, or even that it damages rock art, and the wind does not always blow the fog to Petit Jean Mountain from the east, but I smell “paper mill” enough to think that Sherrod was on to something.

Dr. Hardison’s continuing legacy requires perseverance in the quest to find any and all rock art on Petit Jean Mountain using whatever technology comes to hand. “Three hundred pictographs” are only a beginning. We cannot fully assess cultural ties and environmental damage on the basis of incomplete information. We must have a comprehensive and detailed database of sites, pictographs and petroglyphs. And once we find rock art, we must protect it through law enforcement and common sense—archeologists alone cannot do it.

Acknowledgements and Dedication

I owe a debt of thanks to many people who encouraged me in this project, who climbed the bluffs with me, who helped me with research, who reviewed my work, or who allowed me access to their property. Among these are Glen Akridge, Michelle Berg-Vogel, Marglyph Berrier, Norma and Michael Bruck, Joyce and Dave Byrd, Joanna Campbell, Chris Chippindale, Pritam Chowdhury, Amber Cotton, Elise Cotton, Kaitlyn Cotton, Lela Donat, Cindy

Eccles, Rachel Engebrecht, Jim Farmer, Phyllis Galde, Helen and Rick Hargreaves, Jon Harman, Vicki Higgins, Jerry Hilliard, René Holt, Jean Hutchison, Terry Johnson, B. T. Jones, Betty and Jim Kizziar, Sam Koenig, Jim Langford, Kristen Mable, Dan Marsh, Dito Morales, Cathy and Dick Nugent, Linda Olson, Betty and Wilbur Owen, Donna Park, Larry Porter, Peter Read, Deborah and George Sabo, Wally Scherrey, Barbara Scott, Ellen Scott, Ann and Hank Shaw, Sandy Shaw, Clay Sherrod, Carl Slaughter, Eleanor Ruth and Gene Stanley, Karen Steelman, Sharon and Beau Steinmetz, Judith and Leslie C. “Skip” Stewart-Abernathy, Ben Swadley, Betty Thomas, Sue Turner, Jan and Neil Vannoy, Leslie Walker, Mary Louise and Mickey Wilson, Marianne Young, Michael Young, and other friends. You are a special gift to me.

Ellen Sue Redinger Turner (1924-2012, Figure 37) was a child of Petit Jean Mountain. Niece of Dr. and Mrs. Hardison, Sue and her family visited the Mountain while she was a small child, and she was terribly jealous when Dr. Hardison invited her father and brother to help him document aboriginal rock art in the Mountain’s caves and rock shelters. On those field trips her father,

Figure 37. During a pilgrimage to Petit Jean Mountain on September 5, 2009, Ellen Sue Redinger Turner, daughter of Clyde Redinger and niece of Dr. and Mrs. Hardison, visited Bear Cave, in which her father and Dr. Hardison spent the night of May 21, 1928. A distinguished archeologist in her own right, Sue co-authored the Texas archeological “bible,” Stone Artifacts of Texas Indians. (Photo by the author.)


Clyde Redinger, transcribed many of the pictographs they found, and, fortunately for researchers today, some of those drawings still exist. Even though she was not allowed to go “because of rattlesnakes,” she told me, her lifelong interest in archeology came at age four “…from Petit Jean Mountain. From that day on, I wanted to be an archeologist.” And Mrs. Turner certainly achieved that wish. A fellow and former president of the Texas Archeological Society, she was a research associate at the Center for Archeological Research of the University of Texas at San Antonio. Sue also received the 2007 Curtis D. Tunnell Lifetime Achievement Award in Archeology from the Texas Historical Commission. Perhaps even more significant is her documentary contribution to Texas archeology: she is the author of Stone Artifacts of Texas Indians, considered by many to be the “bible” of Texas lithics, published in its third edition in 2011. During the Arkansas Archeological Society/Survey’s 2009 training dig at Carden Bottoms, Sue emailed the Survey’s Barbara Scott expressing her disappointment that she couldn’t be on Petit Jean Mountain with us. I got the email from Barbara and thus began a voluminous correspondence and friendship that lasted until Sue’s death in 2012. She was able to visit the Mountain in 2009, after a 73-year absence, and again in 2011, a few months before her passing. She generously shared with me her family archive, including many of the precious documents and graphics I used in preparing this article, which I lovingly dedicate to her memory.

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THREE HUNDRED PICTOGRAPHS: DR. HARDISON AND A CENTURY OF

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