Clay County Petroglyphs | Kentucky Life | KET

there are several petroglyphs in Clay County I have had the opportunity to look at a couple of those and as a woman of Indian descent particularly if Cherokee descent our feeling is that those petroglyphs are put there by Cherokee people petroglyphs are just simply drawings or images that are attached or pecked into stone and pecking is taking a sharp Rock or something and actually pecking in the surface and you can see the peck marks around and that was the usual type of petroglyph done in in Kentucky an open-face Bluffs that's getting weather exposure is not going to last a long time and there are early accounts historic accounts of being many more of these sites and mininum being painted and someone being quite spectacular sandstone weathers two ways on the surface and from inside of the sandstone the surface weathering is just what you would think when rain snow sleet and things like that actually remove that particles of sand on the surface but the second thing that occurs is even more important is that water within the sandstone tends to percolate to the surface carrying minerals with it when it gets to the surface of the sandstone it evaporates leaving the crystals there as the crystals grow they pop off the sandstone so the petroglyph tends to recede into the rock in other words it's being freshly made everyday so to speak making it very difficult to date I could pick up a piece of burned torch material and draw on the wall and it would be drawn you know yesterday but that charcoal is 2,000 or 3,000 years old so you date it and it's says it's two or three thousand years old but that doesn't mean it's wrong two or three thousand years ago so dating pictograph and petroglyph sites is extremely difficult the most of the petroglyphs that we see are around what they call terminal our cake our early woodland which is about a thousand years BC the Native Americans who were found in Clay County area would have included the Cherokee and certainly a Shawnee would be the two most likely groups that were in there traditionally the petroglyph would be for location they might be an event that took place they may have been commenting on a ceremony they're people that have studied this and study it with present-day Indians that try to relate what they see now with what it might have happened in the past syllabary was developed by Sequoia if you have ever listened to bitter tears by Johnny Cash they're referred to as the talking leaves and what happened was Sequoia recognized when the Europeans came that they could talk to each other across distance on pieces of white paper and he wanted his Cherokee people to be able to do that also all Indian communities including the Cherokee were totally aural everything was passed from generation to generation by word of mouth so what Sequoia did was to look at a way that he could have talking leaves or a written means of communication we definitely known Native Americans have been Americans have been in this area for probably ten to twelve thousand years if not longer the eastern woodlands people all of them passed through Kentucky at various times hunting but it's also equally true that there were permanent villages in Kentucky there would not be petroglyphs were that not so you were living four or five thousand years ago you were Hunter and gather you were living off the land the natural bounty of the land and these a lot of these sites may be new places you're exploring they are our way the Indian way of leaving our history recorded a petroglyph might talk about a hunt a spiritual quest a ceremony travel but it is the old Indian way of leaving a written record of what was there what they did what they experienced that is our history vandalizing the site really does hurt the site and people tend to do that john loves Mary type things occur on a lot of these sites and it's people being thoughtless about them people write their names on bridges spray paint their names on bridges you know we don't promote that we don't like people writing their names on in caves and rock shelters anymore but you certainly see it you can go to early tourist sites like Mammoth Cave and other cave sites and you'll find thousands of people's signatures and names on there and you'll find under that you'll find prehistoric drawings if if I know there's prehistoric drawings in a place on the cave that's usually also the most popular place to write people to write their names historically on the cave and so there's layers of these pictographs and signatures and the sound oftentimes in the same place which makes it hard to figure out what's what it is particularly important as a cherokee descendant because these artifacts these petroglyphs are in the states where I was born raised worked and lived where I was educated they were left by my ancestors I see that as a part of my own personal history all I want to do is find them record them and try to protect them and that's my only mission so the best way to protect them is just keep locations confidential one of the things that would be very helpful I think and I think the Commission feels this way is educating our young people because if we start really educating our young people to the fact that yes we did have Native Americans in Kentucky before European contact yes we do have material that they left here and yes there are sacred places here and help them to understand that and help them to recognize those places these are small windows to the past and they're very fragile and once they're gone they're going forever Native American people have been in Kentucky for thousands and thousands of years we are still here and we will remain here we

Channel: KET - Kentucky Educational Television

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Keywords: KET, Kentucky Educational Television, PBS, public television, public tv, Kentucky (state), Kentucky Life, Travel, History, People, Native American History, Cherokee, Cherokee History, Origins of Cherokee Language, Clay County (US County)

Id: ffBejVcdha8

Length: 7min 22sec (442 seconds)

Published: Thu May 29 2014