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Rock Carving
Excerpt - Mysterious Rock Carvings
… Aunt Phil remembered villagers of Tyonek, in Cook Inlet, talking about cave paintings while she taught school there during the 1930s.
“Some of the old-timers told me about them,” she later said. “But they’re in remote sites and few white people have seen them.”
The villagers said some paintings were on Indian Island, Bear Island and Sadie Cove in Kachemak Bay, and in a rock shelter at the head of Tuxedni Bay. Indian tradition says they were made by people who lived there long ago. Cultural deposits point to an antiquity probably greater than that of any known Indian deposits in Kachemak Bay.
 Mouths of salmon streams in Southeast Alaska are filled with inscriptions pecked into hard rock like this one found around Hoonah.
Photo courtesy of Alaska State Library
Place File Collection, ASL-P01-4184
Rock paintings have been found at Eskimo sites on Kodiak and Afognak islands, too, where the Athabascans never penetrated in recent migrations from the Interior. In Prince William Sound there are similar paintings that are indisputably Eskimo.
Archaeologist Frederica de Laguna believes the Cook Inlet rock paintings are of Eskimo origin, also.
Red hematite, perhaps mixed with animal fat, was used and probably applied with fingers or the frayed end of a stick. The most prominent figure suggests conventionalized symbols used by the Bering Straits Eskimo to depict a raven; men are represented in kayaks and umiaks, two types of Native boats. Sea mammals and land animals are depicted, also, as well as hunting scenes and other activities.
 Some Alaska Eskimos lived in partially underground dwellings called barabaras.
Photo courtesy of Alaska State Library
Summer on the Thetis Collection, ASLP27-113
They don’t seem to be primarily works of art, as they were not near any permanent villages. Were they painted to secure good luck in hunting and other activities? Were they connected with religious and magical practices of the pre-historical inhabitants of the area? These types of questions surround carved rocks found in Southeast Alaska, too.
Rock drawings
Alaska’s petroglyphs, Greek for rock carving, are among many enigmas of science. Because their true meanings are elusive, they remain a mysterious link to a people who inhabited the world a long time ago.
The carvings are in abundance in Southeastern Alaska and are unique because they are associated with salmon streams, rather than primitive village sites, and always face the sea. Mouths of salmon streams are filled with inscriptions pecked into hard rock like sandstone, slate and granite, while good rocks for carving remain bare in villages near those streams.
To those familiar with the ancient beliefs and oral traditions of the Tlingit and Haida Indians, the petroglyphs show that salmon is life. These Native Alaskans, whose diet was primarily fish, were not hunters and had no agriculture. If the salmon failed to return, it could mean starvation for the clans.
It made sense, therefore, for them to try to avoid small runs and to do everything possible to try and increase the runs. They may have carved images of intermediaries, including deities “Raven” and others in special favor with the Salmon People, on the rocks in an effort to bring salmon back to their communities….
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