Ancient Pueblo Rock Art Depicts a 'Celebratory' Solar Eclipse
By Tracy Staedter, Live Science Contributor | August 14, 2017 08:32am ET
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Ancient Pueblo Rock Art Depicts a 'Celebratory' Solar Eclipse
The rock art depicting a solar eclipse, possibly from A.D. 1097, looked "more celebratory than frightening," said a University of Colorado archaeoastronomer.
Credit: J Mckim Malville/University of Colorado
Millions of people will gaze at the Great American Eclipse on Aug. 21, shooting photographs and taking selfies. A thousand years ago, early Pueblo people, called Chacoans, captured their experiences of a total solar eclipse by carving it into a rock — a circle with looping streamers that resemble the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona.
Not only does this rock art, or petroglyph, depict a solar eclipse with a gigantic eruption of plasma called a coronal mass ejection (CME), its looping lines may have evoked a wondrous, inspirational experience, said solar astronomer J. McKim Malville, a University of Colorado Boulder professor emeritus, who is an expert in archaeoastronomy.
"The petroglyph looks more celebratory than frightening," Malville told Live Science. "If our interpretation is correct, they tried to depict the extraordinary sight of the corona, like nothing seen before — associated [it] with a deity that was even more mysterious and powerful than they imagined." [See Photos of the Petroglyph of the Solar Eclipse]
Malville discovered the petroglyph in 1992, while on a scientific excursion into Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, with W. James Judge, then a professor of anthropology at Fort Lewis College in Colorado. They found the petroglyph among others pecked into a large boulder called Piedra del Sol, near the ruins of a cultural hub for the Chacoans, who thrived there between A.D. 900 and 1150.
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