Category: Ancient

The mission of the Deer Valley Rock Art Center is to preserve and provide public access to the Hedgpeth Hills petroglyph site, to interpret the cultural expressions found there and to be a center for rock art studies worldwide.

Voted a Phoenix Point of Pride, Deer Valley Rock Art Center is a destination.

The Center is managed by one of the top archaeology programs in the country – the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, an academic unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, at Arizona State University.

Petroglyphs (also called rock engravings) are pictogram and logogram images created by removing part of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, and abrading. Outside North America, scholars often use terms such as “carving”, “engraving”, or other descriptions of the technique to refer to such images. Petroglyphs are found world-wide, and are often (but not always) associated with prehistoric peoples. The word comes from the Greek words petro-, theme of the word “petra” meaning “stone”, and glyphein meaning “to carve”, and was originally coined in French as pétroglyphe.

The term petroglyph should not be confused with pictograph, which is an image drawn or painted on a rock face. Both types of image belong to the wider and more general category of rock art and Petroforms, or patterns and shapes made by many large rocks and boulders over the ground, are also quite different. Source: Wikipedia