Chumash Painted Cave Pictographs

In addition to ghost towns, hiking, exploring back roads, mountains, Route 66 and all things desert related, We also LOVE American Indian history, ruins and rock art. So today, we'll take a little break from the desert posts.

Chumash Painted Cave is probably the smallest state park in California. It's in the coastal mountains above the beautiful city of Santa Barbara.

The road up here isn't very wide and there really isn't room for two cars side by side.

Just off the road and up about 20 steps is the cave. The Chumash tribe and the state locked the cave up decades ago to preserve the pictographs. I thought it was going to be hard to take photos because the grid of the ironwork looked fairly small.

This is why they keep people away from it. I was so happily surprised that the images were still so vibrant. There is also some very old scratched in names and dates in the cave. Early graffiti...

Although the experts have no idea exactly what these symbols and images represent, they believe that they were created by Shaman or priests when they came to the cave searching for power or spiritual strength as they tried to influence supernatural beings and forces to intervene in human affairs.

The creators of these images used charcoal, red ochre and powdered sea shells. As the early tribes lost their way of lives, the meanings of many of their symbols was also lost.  The Chumash people have been in this area for thousands of years. The exact time these images were made is not known, but at a minimum they are many hundreds of years old.

All of the images were amazing, but I was really drawn to the somewhat scary looking image in the upper right hand corner of the photos.

I took this photo because I thought these odd shapes were pretty interesting. I'm sure some of them were formed by nature, I wonder if they were originally "cupules." The link will take you to a good example of "cupule" rock art.  Cupules are believed to be one of the most ancient forms of rock art.

Look at the left hand side of the photo. There is a pictograph OUTSIDE of the cave. I didn't notice it at all. I wonder if it is original. We'll be there fairly soon and I'll try to find out exactly what it is.
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More Importantly:

The lovely and talented Alex J. Cavanaugh has just released his latest Science Fiction thriller...

A Storm gathers across the galaxy...

Commanding the Cassan base on Tgren, Byron thought he'd put the days of battle behind him.  As a galaxy-wide war encroaches upon the desert planet, Byron's ideal life is threatened and he's caught between the Tgrens and the Cassans.

After enemy ships attack the desert planet, Byron discovers another battle within his own family.  the declaration of war between all ten races triggers nightmares in his son, threatening to destroy the boy's mind.

Meanwhile the ancient alien ship is transmitting a code that might signal the end of all life in the galaxy. And the mysterious probe that almost destroyed Tgren twenty years ago could return.  As his world beings to crumble, Byron suspects a connection. The storm is about to break, and Byron is caught in the middle...

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CassaStorm by Alex J. Cavanaugh

Science Fiction - Space Opera/Adventure

Print ISBN 9781939844002

E-book ISBN 9781939844019

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You can find CassaStorm and the other books in this series at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Amazon Kindle and Goodreads.

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Also available:

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