Picture Rocks petroglyphs
— the marks the desert keeps.
Not only on a wall.
Picture Rocks petroglyphs, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“The Picture Rocks petroglyphs sit in a quiet wash on the west side of the Tucson Mountains, in the desert community that takes its name from them. The Hohokam pecked spirals, lizards, and human figures into the dark basalt patina between roughly 550 and 1450 CE. The carvings hold up best in the low, raking light of early morning.
The place, in three passes.
The Picture Rocks petroglyphs lie in the bajada west of the Tucson Mountains, near the community of Picture Rocks, Arizona. The carvings were made by the Hohokam, a sedentary farming culture that occupied the Sonoran Desert from roughly 300 to 1450 CE. The motifs include spirals, concentric circles, anthropomorphic figures, and depictions of lizards, deer, and bighorn sheep. The same cultural tradition produced the better-known panels at Signal Hill in Saguaro National Park West, three miles south, and panels above Hohokam Pima National Monument near Sacaton.
The carvings are pecked into the desert-varnished surfaces of dark basalt boulders. Desert varnish is a thin coat of clay and manganese-iron oxides that forms on exposed rock over thousands of years; pecking through it exposes the pale stone beneath, giving the figures their high contrast. Over centuries the new surface slowly re-varnishes, so the deepest, palest figures are the youngest and the faintest are the oldest. The Arizona State Museum at the University of Arizona dates most regional Hohokam rock art to between 550 and 1450 CE.
The petroglyphs sit on a mix of Bureau of Land Management ground, Pima County natural reserve, and private land held by the Redemptorist Renewal Center. The closest publicly interpreted Hohokam panel is at Signal Hill in Saguaro National Park West, a half-mile loop from the Signal Hill picnic area. Visitors are asked not to touch, chalk, or rub the carvings; skin oils and pigment accelerate the loss of contrast. Early-morning low-angle sun reads the panels best. October through April is the comfortable window in the lower Sonoran.
