通过在石头上摩擦矛头来形成或磨尖它, a groove is gouged very similar to the grooves beside the Procession Panel

Comb Ridge is a monocline spanning between southeastern Utah and northeastern Arizona—a formation 80 miles long with a north-south orientation, rising gradually on the eastern side and dropping precipitously 600 feet on the western side. It is an immense and magnificent structure and it has truly ancient Native American history, including the discovery of an intact Clovis Point spearhead and a petroglyph of a mammoth—both of which date to 13,1000年前. 

除了, it is home to Ancestral Puebloan dwellings that were occupied from 1150 to about 1290 AD. In 1990, teachers discovered a large petroglyph panel at Comb Ridge that is now called the Procession Panel. Near the Procession Panel, I found something that I did not understand. 

Monarch Cave is an Ancestral Puebloan dwelling in a large alcove at the end of a canyon, 在一个间歇的瀑布旁边，在一个溅水池的高处. The structures have some intact walls, and the cooking area is littered with small corn cobs. Several metate depressions were formed in the floor by grinding corn with a small rock called a mano. The ceiling is darkened with the smoke of cooking fires and a nearby wall is stained with the activity of tanning leather. 

The two approaches to the alcove are very narrow, so the site was easily defended. 君主洞从公元1150年到1290年被占领, when most of the people in the Four Corners area abandoned their ancestral homeland due to drought and famine. 

游行板, 在君主洞的上方和更西边, decorates a vertical red rock wall that catches sunlight late in the day. 它有15英尺长, and it depicts 179 people coming from three directions to converge at a kiva, 具有精神意义的聚会场所. 

其中两个人戴着鸟头饰, 还有几个人拿着钩杖, 表明他们是酋长. Animals include bighorn sheep, deer, snakes and either wolves or dogs also are depicted. Hunting activity is represented by atlatls (slings to hurl spears), 画板上描绘的两只动物被长矛刺穿.   

When I was at the Procession Panel, I looked around for other petroglyphs. Approximately 70 feet north of the panel I found two vertical grooves in the rock. 它们大约有一英尺长, about three-eights inch wide and one-half inch deep and in cross section were V-shaped. They did not look like art, but they appeared to be purposely formed. I looked up, then down, but they did not point to anything unusual. 我不知道这些是什么.

It turns out that many Native American sites have grooves gouged into rock. The Cape Cod National Seashore in 麻萨诸塞州 has a display near Nauset Marsh of a 20-ton communal sharpening stone called Indian Rock. It commemorates thousands of years of activity of the Nauset people, 谁用石头来磨尖矛尖, 鱼叉和鱼钩. 

查塔姆也出现了类似的情况, 麻萨诸塞州, recognizes the long history of the Monomoyick people with one of their sharpening stones. 几千年来一直如此, Native American people from at least 15 tribes in the northwest traveled to Kettle Falls on the Columbia River between Oregon and Washington to harvest salmon leaping up the falls. 

All who came to catch fish were invited to sharpen their spear heads on the sharpening rock, a boulder weighing one ton that is now on display on the bank above the river, commemorating the times when the river ran free and Native American people lined its banks harvesting salmon. Here in Colorado, sharpening grooves are prominent at Balcony House in Mesa Verde National Park. 

Archeologists have described and demonstrated the efficacy of abrasion for sharpening stone spear heads, 骨锥或骨针. 通过在石头上摩擦矛头来形成或磨尖它, a groove is gouged very similar to the grooves beside the Procession Panel. Experiments with sharpening spear points produce grooves that are straight, 横截面呈v形，两端较浅, 就像游行板上的那些. 

然而, 印第安人使用许多工具, 从大型, heavy cutting tools wielded with two hands to butcher bison to axes for cutting trees to small knives for preparing food. For each of these, the shape of the groove differs because the shape and size of the tool differed. Sharpening grooves are seen at many Native American sites and on other continents. 

游行板上有梭镖，但没有弓箭. 这幅岩画的年代可以追溯到公元760年到800年, 大约在公元800年，弓和箭取代了梭镖.

Once I began a literature search on grooves in stone at Native American sites, I was humbled by my realization that I had been ignorant of something that was common here in the West and known around the world. 

But I got over that and remembered the exhilaration of visiting a place where the landscape so strikingly beautiful and imagining how life was for those who lived in Monarch Cave 800 years ago and fed themselves with what they could glean from their immediate surroundings. 对康姆里奇的博彩平台推荐令人深深感动.

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