But as Paul Nevin pulls his motorboat closer, his finger traces a shape in the air, and suddenly, in the golden, waning light, the image of a bear practically leaps off the rock.
Native Americans carved images in rock on islands in the middle of rocky rapids in the Susquehanna River, near Safe Harbor, Lancaster County.
They came to this place, where rock and sky and water meet, to be closer to their mother earth, Nevin believes.
Hundreds of years ago, perhaps thousands, they carved supernatural animals, mystical thunderbirds and other half-man, half-animal creatures. They chiseled long, wavy snakes that point to the sun at solstice. They hammered out medicine men and medicine women, many kinds of animals and human and animal tracks.
Nevin, 54, of Hellam Township, York County, has studied this place for 25 years, painstakingly searching for carvings on islands, photographing them, bringing Native Americans to hear their impressions and occasionally guiding kayaking trips here. He’s watched for the angle of the sun at dawn on winter solstices and guided a flashlight over them at night to spot nuances. He’s done rubbings of the images, gently cleaned them and read historical documents to learn more.
Nevin grew up in York County, but he only found them after reading an archaeology book published in the 1930s. Since then, he’s found and identified hundreds more scattered across seven islands.
He’s dreamed all the things that might have happened here: medicine men on vision quests, teenagers coming of age on Little Indian Island, huge gatherings of people listening to speakers whose voices carried from Big Indian Island out across the river.
“I think they regarded this as a special place, a sacred place, and they came here to this place to celebrate it,” he said. “These were symbols that were important that they wanted to last a really long time.”
Nevin, a carpenter who restores historic buildings, thinks the petroglyphs are 500 to 1,000 years old.
Kurt Carr, an archaeologist and senior curator at the State Museum of Pennsylvania, thinks they’re much, much older. “It could have been 2,000. It could have been 10,000.”
He said the petroglyphs were carved by Algonquin-speaking Native Americans, hundreds of years before the Susquehannocks came. It’s impossible to accurately pinpoint when they were carved, Carr said.
“There might have been other things attached to them, wooden or organic,” he said. The carvings might have been a signpost to mark territory or give directions.
Carr first saw them 30 years ago. “I thought they were really cool, but I thought this was really crazy that they did this out in the middle of the river,” he said.
As time has passed, he’s become more impressed.
“We dig up all kind of things and you really think you start to understand the past, but for the most part, we can reconstruct environments. We get an idea of what they were eating, what they were hunting,” Carr said. “This is a chance to look at the psychology. This is their world view.”
Tens of thousands of fingers have touched a small collection of petroglyphs at the State Museum, Carr said. In the 1930s, archaeologist Donald Cadzow removed them because he feared the construction of the Safe Harbor Dam would flood them.
Cadzow wrote a book about the carvings that’s in print again: Petroglyphs in the Susquehanna River near Safe Harbor, Pennsylvania. That’s the book that led Nevin to the rocks.
Native Americans carved petroglyphs in many states, but the number and concentration of images at Safe Harbor is the highest anywhere in the eastern U.S., Carr said.
Nevin calls the carvings a hidden treasure. To reach them, a visitor must boat across the rocky waters. The dam controls the water level, which can rise or fall half a foot very quickly, creating unpredictable trips.
“It’s definitely not for beginners,” Nevin said, recounting the times he’s banged his boats into rocks on the way to the petroglyphs.
During the day when the sun is high, the petroglyphs are nearly invisible. They’re cut just a quarter-inch or less into the rock. But near sunrise and sunset, the images become apparent, especially with a guide.
“If you step on these islands, unless you splash water on them, you don’t know,” Carr said.
Nevin dampens an area with a sponge to show the images in sharp contrast, a technique he calls “the magic sponge.”
People once thought these carvings were the equivalent of graffiti, something native people carved while they waited for the fish to bite, but now they appreciate how deliberately they were created.
“This was done before there were metal tools. They were basically done with stone hammers and stone chisels,” Nevin said. “To make one of those dots takes about a half hour,” he said, pointing to a circle the size of a quarter. “Down on Indian Rock, you’ll find serpents that are nine feet long.”
To know the angle of the sun at solstice, the artists must have measured and recorded day after day for years, Carr said.
“It’s not just some guy getting out there and carving his initials or a picture of his girlfriend or the deer he just killed. It’s so much more complicated and so much more exciting.”
After 25 years, Nevin feels like he knows how to interpret up to 5 percent of the drawings.
“This might be serpent or a river or both. They can mean two or three things,” he said.
“You work for a real, real, real long time, and every couple years another piece fits,” he said. It took him four or five years to realize the serpents line up with the sunrise and sunset at solstices, he said. “So it takes a certain mind set to do the work.”
Unfortunately, over the years, more people have added their own carvings, some with names and dates, from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. People built duck blinds on them.
“We kind of hid these from the public for a long time,” Carr said. “It’s always a balance between keeping secret or telling them about it and telling them to be careful.”
The old philosophy was if nobody knows where the petroglyphs are, they’ll be safe, Nevin said. Now, they’ve set up sort of a neighborhood watch for the rocks with the idea that with more eyes watching them, they’ll be safer.
A group of local petroglyph enthusiasts attached signs to trees on the rock islands in 2002 and there’s been no vandalism since then, Nevin said. Recently, they’ve added sign-in sheets.
“Let people know that to native people, this is a sacred place,” Nevin said. “Let people know that walking on these rocks is like walking into a church.”
___
Information from: The Patriot-News, http://www.pennlive.com/patriotnews
Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-ES-07-20-10 1425EDT
