Introduction to California Rock Art Foundation
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You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello out there in archaeology podcast land. This is Dr. Alan Garfinkel. I'm the president and founder of the California Rock Art Foundation. And what we do is we identify, evaluate, manage, and conserve rock art both in Alta, California and in Baja, California.
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We conduct field trips, we have trainings, exercise, we do research, and in every way possible we try to preserve, protect, and coordinate treasures of Alta and Baja California rock art, of which there are many, and diverse. We also work closely with Native Americans and partner with them to recognize and protect sacred sites. So for more info about the fabulous California Rock Art Foundation, you can go to carockart.org
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Also, I'm open to give me a call, 805-312-2261.
Exploring Little Lake: Location and Significance
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We would welcome sponsorship or underwriting, helping us to defray the costs of our podcasts, and also membership in California Rock Art Foundation, and of course, donations since we are a 501c3 nonprofit scientific and educational corporation. God bless everyone out there in podcast land.
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You're listening to The Rock Art Podcast. Join us every week for fascinating tales of rock art, adventure, and archaeology. Find our contact info in the show notes and send us your suggestions.
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Hello out there in archaeology podcast land. This is Dr. Alan Garfinkel, your host for episode 120. We're going to do a deep dive into the archaeological and rock art site of Little Lake right there on the eastern skirt of the Sierra Nevadas and the very edge of the COSO range. We'll do a virtual rock art tour and answer some of your questions about what's so interesting about Little Lake.
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Welcome to the show, everybody. This is Chris Webster. And if you're hearing my voice, it means I'm talking to Alan about something interesting. Alan, how are you doing? Good. How are you? Very good. Very good. I welcome a chance to catch up and talk about some interesting things in the world of anthropology, archaeology, rock art, etc. Yeah.
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So we were talking before the show about what we're going to discuss on here and something that actually comes up a lot in your life. And I see the California rock art foundation newsletters and it comes up in there as well. And that's little Lake California. So we're going to talk about that today. What little Lake is what it means. And, and really what the also at near the end, we'll talk about what the California rock art foundation field trips. That's a little like look like you're actually running one this Sunday, which if you're listening to this podcast is actually in the past. So don't say you can't sign up for that one.
00:02:50
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But another one might pop up and you can explore it and then go on that one. But why don't we place Little Lake in the world and tell people where it's at and what it is? Yeah. So Little Lake has been a place that's been part of my sort of anthropological, archaeological journey for about the last 50 years. It's located right along Highway 395.
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in eastern California. It's just on the southernmost border of Inyo County.
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as you head north into what's called the Owens Valley, which is on the eastern skirt of the Sierra Nevada, the far southern Sierra Nevada. And the Owens Valley is where there's some very famous rock art, but also some wondrous geological formations. The highest mountain top in the domestic United States is there in Lone Pine, Mount Whitney, of course. That's Mount Whitney. Yeah, just north of Bishop.
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And it's known as the Longest Valley. It's an extraordinarily beautiful area of California. And one I've had the pleasure of learning about and visiting and doing various studies in for on and off for many, many decades. So Little Lake is a spring-fed lake that's along that highway. And you'll see it. It's rather small.
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And it is sort of coterminous or coincidental with the initiation of the volcanic basaltic flows that you begin to see as you enter Rose Valley and the Owens Valley.
Research and Discoveries at Little Lake
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Any of that make sense?
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Yeah, it does. And I've seen it many times going down Highway 395. You can see it right off the highway there. And the whole eastern side of it is just a basalt wall and kind of going on the southern side of it. And that's exactly right. It is a big basalt wall. It's a basalt flow that heads into the Indian Wells Valley just north of Ridgecrest and that area. And literally the basalt stops.
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It stops right there. And what's interesting about Little Lake, per se, the location and character of that particular spot, is it is where the basalt, the black basalt of what's called the Coso Range, touches the white granite of the eastern skirt of the Sierra Nevada. There's a constriction right there.
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right there. And that's where we have Little Lake. Way back when, when Emily Davis was doing her work there in that part of the country, she enlisted a
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gentleman famous for his work in researching and reconstructing the prehistoric environments of the Great Basin. His name was Peter Marringer, okay? And what Peter did was get a boat and go out on this little lake, right? And then tried to core the lake
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and retrieve that core and date the radiocarbon elements to see how old the lake is and to reconstruct the climate, the paleo-hydrological environment that existed for the last 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, 5, 6, 7,000 years ago.
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And what he found was his core could not even get to the bottom of the lake. And there was a lake or a lacustrine moist arena there continuously for the last 5, 6, 7,000 years. So you've got that lacustrine environment, that moist meadow and an actual lake of fresh water that exists there.
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for almost a continuous time from the middle Archaic right through to historic times awesome, so what kind of
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I mean, what kind of significance did this lake really have to the people that lived in this region, given the fact that, you know, it's not the only lake around, but it has been there for a really long time. And, you know, can we tell what significance it had based on the rock art that's there or any other associated artifacts? Well, given that it's a freshwater lake, right, which is rather rare.
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The average rainfall in that southwestern corner of the Great Basin is three inches. Three inches of rain, okay? So you're talking about an oasis in the Mojave Desert. It's also right there on the interface between what we call the Mojave Desert and the deserts of the Great Basin. Now, because of its existence,
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Throughout prehistory and history, there was, of course, a travel route that was used by the miners and by the other people that wanted to travel that area. And they had a stage station there in the 1850s. And throughout prehistory in the late prehistoric period, the Native people traversed the area and stopped at Little Lake as a, you know, kind of a way station
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in the California desert before continuing their route towards the west, towards the Sierras and into the Central Valley and into the Coast Range and onto the coastal plains, et cetera. So chances are Little Lake played some sort of a role in that whole interchange, in that whole route and travel spectacle, probably for most of history and prehistory.
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Yeah. Okay. So there it is. I got acquainted with it by accident. I knew little to nothing about it, right? Okay. But as it turned out, one of the first jobs I ever had to do in archaeology was when I moved to Riverside and found myself needing employment. And I went to work for the Bureau of Land Management
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in the Riverside office doing what was called the California Desert Plan, the desert planning staff, where they were initially doing studies on where the greatest treasures of archaeology and history existed
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and biology and all the other resource bases throughout the California desert, especially where it was located on government Bureau of Land Management land. And there in fact was a lot of BLM land right there around that place we call Little Lake.
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Yeah. So I became aware of that place and was initially attracted to it. I wanted to know more about it and found it to be intriguing.
Geological Wonders: Fossil Falls and Basalt Flows
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There was from many years ago a cut off, a turn off into a parking lot and into a little trail that went to a place called Fossil Falls.
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And fossil falls have nothing to do with fossils, and nothing to do with a waterfall per se. But what it is, is the Pleistocene River, the Owens River, traversed the eastern skirt of the Sierras, traveling down Owens Valley, and meandering its way
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into that area just north of Little Lake, cutting a gorge and making a waterfall there at the edge of the COSO range. And so there's a dry waterfall that exists just north of the natural physical feature called Little Lake. Yeah. I've never been over to Fossil Falls, but I always see the signs out there. It's
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It's remarkable. What you see is a bunch of scoured and fluted boulders, right? That exist almost as though it was a mosaic or a sculpture, a natural sculpture. And people go there because of the fantastic fluted forms that they can see and because of the beauty and drama of that particular spot. It's a rather dramatic and exquisitely engaging place. How's that?
00:11:42
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Nice. All right. I think that's probably a good place to stop. And then on the other side, we'll talk a little bit more about the rock art at Little Lake and what you can expect to see there. We'll be back in a minute.
00:11:55
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Welcome back to episode 120 of The Rock Art Podcast. And we're talking about Little Lake, California, a really small but special and unique place in the prehistory of California and that region and just the native people there. So let's talk about the rock art that's there. That's obviously what we want to discuss on this show. So what kind of density is there? It's nothing like some of the stuff at China Lake Naval Weapons Center, like we've talked about. I don't think anything's like that.
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But what kind of rock art density are you looking to find there? Well, believe it or not, it's not too different from the density that we can find within the little call with the, you know, the Koso Landmark National Register District. I was retained as a graduate student at UC Davis.
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to do the Cultural Resource Management Plan for Little Lake and Fossil Falls. And so I spent the better part of several months, at least, walking along and looking and studying and meeting and talking and trying to get a bead on what exactly Little Lake was, what archaeological resources are there, what the rock art was there, and what that all could and indeed have meant to the Native people.
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It is a remarkable place, a very remarkable place for a variety of reasons. The most diligent work that really has uncovered or discovered the character of that place was done by Joanne Van Tilburg as part of her work at the UCLA Cotsen Research Institute. She had 80 volunteers, 80, 8-0.
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that volunteered for a week or two every year for 10 years to somehow record and document, as we could, the rock art at Little Lake. And she ended up recording over 6,000 individual instances of rock art at Little Lake. Wow, that's impressive.
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And she says she may have gotten maybe 80% of it at best.
Unveiling Rock Art: Types and Cultural Importance
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She was using sort of old school rock art recording techniques. But one of the things that was very striking about Little Lake is that of those 6,000 instances of rock art, 20% of them, which would be on the order of what? At least 1,000, right? Of those are called Numic Scratched, our friend the Numic Scratched.
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And so that exists in great profusion. And Joanne Van Tilburg argues that it's probably related to the historic women who occupied that place and scratched imagery relating to their subsistence and ceremonial and religious life there at Little Lake.
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I don't think we've talked about Numick Scratch in a while because we've been focusing on some other things. Can you describe what that looks like again for our Westerners and for me? I remember a little bit of it, but I haven't seen it in a while either. Yeah, Numick Scratch Rock Art is a little bit different. It's not something that was readily recognized until relatively recently.
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It's, if you go back to 1968, where they talk about COSO rock art with the pioneers of trying to characterize the rock art of that region, they had, there was no mention of it at all. And so only recently, they were able to discern that what they thought was maybe graffiti was actually
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historic or late prehistoric engravings, little tiny etchings, very thinly etched and scratched into the rocks. Some thought at one time to deface or embellish the older images that were done at a much different fashion, technologically crafting these much thicker and much more embellished and much more deeper in representational or naturalistic elements.
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The nummic scratched is typically done as a cross-hatching or a set of diagonals or some sort of largely completely abstract and non-naturalistic and non-representational
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series of designs that are on other rock art or on rocks themselves, and they're done in such a superficial way that you can't really see them very well or see them at all, only with glancing light
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or with special cameras, or using different techniques, or hopefully if the clouds have covered up the sky, you can catch a glimmer of what's called numbing scratched. OK. So what other kinds of rock art can we find there? There's the classic rock art of Koso there in profusion. So we have the classic Koso bighorn sheep.
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We have the flat back, boat-shaped bodied with full front-facing bifurcated horns, some of them quite large. We have depictions of dart points. We have tremendous profusion of ottlottle images. Those are, of course, the implements that are used to spear and kill the wild animals, the larger arteodactyls.
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And then there's other imagery, decorated animal human figures, not in profusion. And then there's a host of other rock art there that is pictographs, paintings, and they're polychrome. They're red, they're white, they're black.
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These exist in a great abundance at certain areas of Little Lake. If you go to Little Lake and you look at the geography and landform, the lake itself is rather small, and wrapping around the lake is a singular and impressive basalt flow.
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that looks like a snake. It has that columnar basalt that's right above the lake as well and it's a black brown intense color and then at the end of the
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lava flow terminus, it has a bulbous end and that's either called the head or tail of the rattlesnake. And that is where there's an enormous concentration of rock drawings, both petroglyphs, pictographs, stomach scratched, and ancient rock art that has been dated using portable XRF methods, state of the art portable XRF to 10,000 years ago.
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Wow, that's impressive. Yeah. Do you think this site meant anything, I don't know, different or unique to the people of that area as compared to other rock art sites? You know, I mean, similar to the ones on China Lake and in the area or was it special or was it just, I don't want to say an ordinary, but just like another place where, you know, there's a, there's a collection of rock art that people went to frequently. And maybe that's the reason why there's so much there.
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or do you think there was something special about it? I think there was something very special about it because of the presence of the lake. What's unusual in part is that on the base, we have a class of beings, super mundane beings. We call them pattern body anthropomorphs, decorated animal human figures, or animal human avian women, lunar goddesses, et cetera.
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Those are absent at Little Lake. You can't find almost one of them if your life depended on it. I think there's a total of two or maybe even three or four at most of these decorated animal human figures. I'm not sure why.
00:19:49
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I am not sure exactly why, but for whatever reason, that particular class of figures, elements are absent there. Yet, the area is solidly a singular archaeological establishment where you can't put your foot down without stepping on an artifact. That is where the Pinto site, the stall site at Little Lake exists. And that's where Mark Raymond Harrington
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in 1957 working for the Southwest Museum excavated and found what he felt to be house floors and living spaces and burials and a very rich and abiding expression of permanent occupation there on the shores of Little Lake. That's interesting. Has anybody gone back to
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I mean, that was in the 1950s. No, no shade on 1950s archeology. But has anybody gone back to reanalyze that thinking and and and see what we think about today using modern methods or is that still accepted?
Archaeological Theories and Restricted Access
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Well, there's been lots of different studies and, you know, minimal excavations here and there at Little Lake, but nothing substantial and nothing to really sink your teeth into vis-a-vis as as grand.
00:21:07
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as what Harrington did in 57 or what Joanne Van Tilburg did a few years back to hopefully characterize the rock art. Now, when Tilburg was in there, she went to town and tried to
00:21:24
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very intensively to examine the ethnographic record, the archaeological record, what all the other archaeologists had said about COSO rock art, what they had said about the ethnographic peoples that resided around that area, and what we might believe
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would have gone on at Little Lake. And one of her resulting conclusions was, in contrast to what some of the other scholars, Rockart scholars said, is she had said there was very, very little evidence of anything that she could pin down to relate to
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hunting activities. She did not see that as a significant subsistence settlement element to all of her research there at Little Lake itself. Which is interesting because one of the continuing controversial elements when you think about COSO rock art has been the ongoing dialogue between all kinds of
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various people over the years since 1968, including Campbell Grant, David Whitley, Dr. Alan Garfinkel, et cetera, about the role of hunting and its significance or lack thereof in the subsistence settlement activities of the people who lived in the COSO range. Interesting, huh? Yeah. Okay.
00:22:52
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All right. Well, with that, let's take our last break and then talk about what a trip out to Little Lake would look like and how you can participate in one of those. We'll be back in a minute.
00:23:03
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Welcome back to the rock art podcast episode 120. Again, we're talking about Little Lake, California and the rock art in this really small place with a lot of, with a lot of rock art to see. So you might be asking yourself, well, how can I get out there and, and, and really check this out? First off, can just an average person, if they know where it's at, visit this site, or is it protected or blocked or somehow can anybody get there if they know where it's at? So that's a very good question. Very astute question. And.
00:23:31
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The answer of course for most of COSO rock art is that it's protected either by the Bureau of Land Management or by the owners of the private Little Lake Duck Club or by the China Lake Naval Weapons Center itself. So this concentration of rock art is locked up behind fences and guarded. It's highly protected. Now there is some
00:23:56
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available on the outskirts and fringes that you can see and go and visit. But the largest concentrations and larger expressions are pretty much difficult and near impossible to get to see. Also, especially with the issues of COVID, the issues of
00:24:19
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an enormous earthquake that hit the base two years ago in excess of 7.1 that had, they estimate $8 billion worth of damage. And then with the Little Lake Duck Club,
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being hit by that monsoon and destroying all their roads and having to put tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars back into reconstructing all of those roads.
Field Trips and On-Site Experiences at Little Lake
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They've been a little bit adverse to opening up their private duck club
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to the general public again. I think because of liability issues and the issues of maintenance to try to keep up such a pristine property. They spent a million dollars to clean it up. They go regularly in there and clean up the deposits of weeds and other undergrowth that cloud and create a difficult lake environment.
00:25:20
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and it cost them a lot of money. They only have 25 members, and I think the members pay some unbelievable amount of money for access to the lake once or twice a year during the year to hunt and to spend time at the lake. When you get there, and we're going in there one time this year,
00:25:42
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And I imagine in the future, we'll have other times that we can go into Little Lake again. And I'm sure at some time in the future, they're going to open up the base and there'll be times that we could go into, see Little Petroglyph Canyon as well. You will see some treasures. At Little Lake itself, when you get there, you'll see the stall site itself, which is an open-air campsite.
00:26:09
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It's covered in huge flakes of obsidian because the COSO obsidian quarry is less than a couple miles away. It's covered in these enormous flakes that were thinned down for the manufacture of what they call bifaces or roughouts or
00:26:29
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and huge dart points. There's also a rock shelter there that has a rock image in there, relatively recently, and a lot of other pictographs that can best be seen using D-Stretch. And D-Stretch, of course, is a
00:26:48
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post-processing element, a program that brings out the invisible and makes it visible in terms of pigment, but also in terms of some of the images of rock art. So there's that. And then when you get all over the Little Lake itself, there's whole walls of rock art that are just covered
00:27:12
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with a lot of representational images, with ottlottles, with dogs, with what else, milling slicks, everything under the sun you can possibly see in Great Basin rock art. Both representational, realistic, and abstract is perceived. There's examples of rattlesnakes,
00:27:34
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There's examples of mountain lions are represented frequently on and on and on. I could go on. So, but there's every class of figures that can be found on the base are also seen at Little Lake itself.
00:27:51
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nice yeah i highly recommend anybody who's a fan of going and visiting rock art sites to download d stretch onto their phone i know it has a an iphone app i've got it online and it works completely offline so you don't have to you know if you're out the middle of nowhere you can take a photograph with your
00:28:07
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Camera roll and then open up D stretch bring it in and try these different presets for different Well different presets for different basically exposure settings and color settings that help That are that are known to help pull out some of these sort of hidden images that you can see in rock art It's pretty cool. So check that out. It's not a free app. You can download it But then they you know, there's like one guy that's created this and is supporting it
00:28:29
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helped support him a little bit and get the app. But it's pretty neat. Talking about the California Rock Rock Foundation field trips to Little Lake, what does a day look like? Where do they meet? What do you guys do for the day? Take us through that field trip.
00:28:45
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Yeah, we meet there about 9am and it's at the entrance to Little Lake there at 395. They'll open up the gate for us and we assemble and then we drive in. There's a house there. We fill out some paperwork that's a liability form and then they let us go.
00:29:06
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which is rare. They let us go wherever we want to go, that we let us walk on anything we want to walk on. They let us touch whatever we need to want to touch. And that's unheard of, by the way. You normally don't have that freedom to sort of get intimate with the rock art as you do at Little Lake. So people take advantage of that too.
00:29:28
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to photograph it up close and personal. They also are able to see things that they've never really seen before with such an amazing concentration of representational, naturalistic, paintings, rock art, archeological features, open air campsites, flake stone. It's got everything under the sun, all packaged up under one umbrella.
00:29:53
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It's a beautiful place. It really is to see a spring-fed natural lake, much as it was throughout prehistory, is an honor and a privilege to actually experience that.
Join the Preservation Efforts
00:30:08
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We then go to various places that have been identified as concentrations of the rock art.
00:30:15
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Some are in alcoves, some are exclusively paintings, some are other areas that are sort of in cul-de-sacs. And then we'll stop for lunch.
00:30:27
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right near the lake and have something. I'll probably give a bit of a lecture or answer questions as we go around to the various sites, trying to do my best to field all the questions and do my best to answer them as best we can based on our studies and research. And then, at about mid-afternoon, we'll
00:30:49
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we'll say you do and some people then take some further time and they go out to Fossil Falls and they'll take pictures there as well. And then we end up leaving for our various domiciles or going in to Ridgecrest and maybe getting a bite to eat and then going home with a wondrous day experienced and people are never but never the same because they can't get those images out of their mind because they're
00:31:18
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They're very, very compelling. How do one explain this? These are images that cause one to emote. They're emotional images. They're images that produce surprise. They also produce joy or drama or inspiration. They'll show individuals with hands arising towards the sky. Those are called adherents who are praying.
00:31:43
Speaker
to their deities. And so it's a freeze frame into the minds of people that lived hundreds and thousands of years ago. Awesome. Okay. So how can people join in with these field trips a little? I know you're doing one already that's going to have gone after we released this episode, but where can they keep an eye out to really find out when these are happening?
00:32:11
Speaker
Yeah, I would stay vigilant, but I would join the California Rock Art Foundation or support the efforts that we have with our podcast and underwriting or sponsoring these podcasts. And we'll keep you apprised. Also, from time to time, we have
00:32:30
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situations where we can get in to interesting places that have remarkable rock art. And we sometimes have those field trips that are on rather short turnarounds. So we will blast out a quick email and get people there rather quickly.
00:32:50
Speaker
Nice. Okay. Well, the California rock art foundation is at CA rock art.org. And that is always linked down in the show notes. So you can go check it out. And if you scroll down to the bottom of that homepage, you can enter your email address and get their newsletter. And there's a lot of good stuff in the newsletter. Things like these trips are sometimes announced there if they have time and things like that. So definitely check that out. I think with that, Alan, do you have any final thoughts on, on little Lake before we end the show?
00:33:17
Speaker
Well, it was interesting. We just came back from the Society for California Archaeology meetings in Riverside. We spent a couple days there. And I know this isn't a cultural resource management platform per se, but I did confirm that here we are in California, right? That it's ground zero for the greatest concentration of
00:33:36
Speaker
cultural resources, professionals, anywhere in the world. There's 2,000 such people that are actively engaged in various ways, studying the past or preserving the past or teaching about the past and history and prehistory and architecture. And that's rather exciting. And join us for the ability to see and experience some of these magnificent sights. And I'll see you in the flip-flop, gang.
00:34:12
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Rock Art Podcast with Dr. Alan Garfinkel and Chris Webster. Find show notes and contact information at www.arcpodnet.com forward slash rock art. Thanks for listening and thanks for sharing this podcast with your family and friends.
00:34:44
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.