Pictograph Cave

Pictograph Cave State Park is a short drive from Billings, Montana- the town where we have elected to spend three nights.  Today we visited this park and viewed living quarters of prehistoric hunters and gatherers from 9,000 years ago.  In the first excavation on the Northern Plains beginning here in 1937 over 30,000 artifacts were found.  The site suggests long distance travel and trade occurred here at the time.  Southwestern style basket fragments were found as well as Pacific Northwest harpoon points made of Caribou horns.  Seashells and soapstone carvings were also found here-neither being indigenous to the site. 

The cliffs at this site are made of sandstone and were not suitable for making stone tools.  Rocks such as chert, flint and obsidian known to be easy to shape into tools and arrowheads as sharp as surgical steel were sought after over long distances by traveling tribes.  This area also offered medicinal plants like mint, sunflower seeds, wild rose, rose hips, white sage and juniper to name just a few.  A lodge uncovered here may have been used for rituals such as the “bear dance” and for fasting to purify the body and prepare the mind for spiritual dreaming.

 Pictographs are painted onto the rock in this cave as opposed to petroglyphs, which are carved into the rock found in other locations.  The Crow word for this place was “Alahpalaaxawaalaatuua” which translates as “where there is spirit writing”-the Crow people believed the souls of deceased humans produced the pictographs along with living people.  Some of the images are visible only during periods of heavy moisture or rapid snow melt particularly charcoal paintings as water percolates through out the cave lifting a “veil” of calcium that has formed over the pictographs for generations.  The red pigment was made from a mineral called hematite (a concentrated iron ore) ground up and mixed with animal fat, blood, berries, water or urine.  This mixture was then heated to a common consistency before being applied with fingers or a stick to the rock.  Charcoal pigment from the pictographs has been carbon dated to 250 B.C. or the time of the Roman Empire and when Cleopatra reigned in Egypt.  The surrounding marine sandstone cliffs containing seashells were created during a time when most of the central U.S. was covered by an inland sea.  During periods of heavy rainfall massive waterfalls pour down off the cliffs and create black streaks in the sandstone.

 This awesome trek through ancient history was incredibly interesting and we are pleased with what we have learned at another stop along the road.  Inspiration to study more is a constant influence when we are able to see history first hand.