New Arrival
The Navajo call it “Tse’ Hane’,” the rock that tells a story. Two hundred-square-foot Newspaper Rock in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park is covered with rock designs that inspired this blanket. The earliest symbols were carved as many as 2,000 years ago. Over the centuries, Fremont, Anasazi, Navajo and Ute cultures carved figures and shapes into the “desert varnish,” a blackish manganese-iron deposit that gradually forms on exposed sandstone. The black rock was an invitation to creativity. As the sharp tools of ancient artists chipped away, the pale rock beneath was revealed. Hundreds of images can be seen in these stories made in stone. The petroglyphs feature a mixture of human, animal and abstract forms. Depictions of deer, pronghorn antelope and human hands on the blanket let us imagine the hunters, the stories, the messages and the news of those days long gone.