ILLINOIS ARCHAEOLOGICAL SURVEY

Visions of Other Worlds

The Native American Rock Art of Illinois 

Mark J. Wagner
Staff Archaeologist, Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale 

"As we were descending the river, we saw high rocks with hideous monsters painted on them and upon which the bravest Indian dare not look. They are as large as a calf, with claws and horns like a goat, their eyes are red, beard like a tiger’s and a face like a man’s. Their tails are so long that they pass over their bodies and between their legs under their bodies, ending like a fish’s tail. They are painted red, green and black, and so well-drawn that I could not believe that they were drawn by the Indians, and for what purpose they were drawn seems to me a mystery"

....Father Jacques Marquette*

The above description by Father Jacques Marquette of the appearance of the Piasa Bird, a Native American painting of a mythical spirit being, must rank as one of the earliest, if not the earliest, written accounts of Native American rock art in eastern North America. The Piasa Bird, which was located on the Mississippi River bluffs near present-day Alton, Illinois, became a well-known landmark remarked on by numerous travelers beginning with Father Marquette in 1673 until the early 1850s when it was destroyed to furnish stone for a rock quarry.

Although Illinois may lay claim to one of the earliest descriptions of Native American rock art, only now, over 300 years after Marquette and Joliet’s voyage down the Mississippi, are we beginning to appreciate the extent and complexity of this artistic legacy left to us by the earliest occupants of Illinois. As additional sites are reported each year, it becomes clear that far from being a unique event, the Piasa Bird was part of a widespread Native American art tradition within Illinois involving the creation of painted and carved designs on rock surfaces, and extending back in time at least a thousand years if not much farther.  

What exactly is Native American rock art? As I use the term, it means any prehistoric or historic period image—abstract, geometric, or representational—painted or carved on an immovable rock surface. By immovable rock surfaces I mean those that are permanent parts of the landscape, such as bedrock outcrops, cave walls, large boulders, bluff faces, and ceilings and walls of rock shelters. The images created by Native American at such locations are an integral part of and draw their power from the landscape that contains them. They cannot be removed from their settings without severely damaging or destroying their significance.

Rock art sites in Illinois include both petroglyph and pictograph sites. The word petroglyph simply means “rock carving” or “rock engraving.” Native American peoples created petroglyphs in Illinois by pecking or grinding into rock faces to create images of human hands, footprints, and animals, and designs that are more complex. Pictographs, in contrast, are drawn or painted onto rock faces. Most pictographs in Illinois were created using hematite or limonite. These are iron ores that create a reddish pigment when ground into a powder and mixed with animal fat. The fat helped to bind the pigment to the rock surface and prevented it from washing away. Iron-ore-based pigment is so durable that images painted with it are visible even after centuries of exposure to the forces of nature.

Illinois sites show usage of different materials to create the art. I have recorded two sites in southern Illinois where between A.D. 1000 and 1500 Native Americans used iron-ore-based pigments to create large paintings of humanlike figures, birds, and other images on the bluff face overlooking the Mississippi River. The paintings at both sites are badly faded but are still visible despite exposure to direct sunlight, rain, and snow for at least the last 500 years. Other sites in Illinois contain pictographs created with charcoal. The images at these sites were created either by using the charred ends of sticks as pencils to create line drawings or by grinding charred wood into powder and mixing the powder with animal fat to create a black paint. Iron-ore- and charcoal-based paintings in Illinois depict birds, canoes, deer, human hands, bison, animal hides, human heads, geometric designs, and a variety of other images.

Even counting now-destroyed sites such as the Piasa Bird on the Alton bluff, Illinois contains less than sixty known rock art sites. Almost all of the recorded sites are located in the Shawnee Hills, lower Illinois Valley, and American Bottom regions of southern Illinois. I strongly believe that these sixty or so known sites represent only a very small portion of the actual number of rock art sites within the state. I am convinced that Illinois actually contains hundreds. I think that the current low number of known sites reflects the fact that many rock art images are badly weathered, overgrown with vegetation, hidden away in remote areas, or difficult to recognize without previous experience in identifying rock art. One indication that there are indeed more sites out there waiting to be discovered is that over the last ten years, six previously undiscovered sites have been reported by fishermen, hikers, and local residents who encountered them by accident. All six proved to be authentic prehistoric rock art sites that contained, among other things, images of humanlike figures, a crescent moon and star, and human footprints.

I discovered a previously unknown rock art site myself about two years ago while visiting a high bluff that is a favorite of rock climbers in southern Illinois. I had never been to this bluff before and was not looking for or expecting to find any rock art. As the landowner was showing me around, however, I glanced at a section of the rock face and was startled to see a small but very real faded pictograph of a rust-red cross painted on the wall. Neither the landowner nor any of the rock climbers had ever noticed this clearly visible painting, although they had passed by it for years. More than anything else, this experience brought home to me that many rock art sites remain unknown because people unfamiliar with Native American rock art overlook them or simply do not recognize them for what they are.  

Native American rock art sites in Illinois have been dated, based on style, to the Late Woodland (A.D. 450–1000), Mississippian (A.D. 1000–1550), and Historic (post-A.D. 1673–ca. 1835) periods. Late Woodland images in Illinois appear to consist of small pecked images of people, animals, crosses, and other simple designs. Mississippian-era rock art sites, in contrast, contain many of the same images found on Mississippian copper and shell objects discovered throughout the southeastern United States. These include petroglyphs and pictographs of cross-in-circle, human hand, raptorial bird, and antlered serpent designs. Historic period sites contain paintings of bison (an animal that only began to enter Illinois in great numbers near the very end of the prehistoric period), bison hides, skinned bison carcasses, crescent moons and stars, dog- or wolflike creatures, and other images.

It is uncertain whether rock art dating before A.D. 450 is present in the state, although I believe it is. Rock art designs that may have originated before the Late Woodland period include the human footprint and bird-track motifs, which occur on a number of rock shelters and bedrock outcrops in the southern part of the state. Human footprints and bird tracks also occur on the neck of a Middle Woodland (100–300 B.C.) pottery jar recovered from a site in the lower Illinois River valley, indicating that Native Americans within Illinois were using these two symbols in combination almost 2,000 years ago.

The reasons that Native Americans created rock art designs at one particular place on the landscape and not another are not always clear. I personally believe that the majority of rock art images in Illinois were created for religious purposes at places once viewed as forming parts of sacred landscapes. Such landscapes were often believed to have been created in mythic time and could serve as physical proof of the religious beliefs of a particular group. For example, an unusually large depression in a boulder may be said to represent the place where the Creator sat to rest after making the world. Places of spiritual importance within such landscapes may include unusual geological features, such as waterfalls, caves, and high cliffs, as well as physically unremarkable locations such as springs, boulders, and groves of trees.

Settings such as these represent sacred places in which an individual might obtain power or must possess it to be protected from the supernatural forces that reside there. Power is a spiritual energy, offered by spirits in dreams or visions, and it enables a person to interact with forces in the supernatural and natural worlds. Properly conducted rituals, including the creation of rock art, allowed individuals to draw on the power contained in these gateways to the supernatural world. The creation of rock art could also act as a “feedback” mechanism that reinforced the spiritual power of a particular location as the images became incorporated into the religious beliefs of later groups. For example, the Tukano Indians of Brazil believed that prehistoric petroglyphs located within their territory were not made by humans but rather were the remains of mythological events associated with the creation of the world.

One place that may represent such a spiritually charged scene is the Piney Creek site in extreme southwestern Illinois. Located within the Piney Creek Nature Preserve, this rock overhang contains over 150 painted and pecked images, making it the largest known rock art site in Illinois. The images at this site appear to have been created on a number of visits over a very long phase during the Late Woodland and Mississippian periods. Some of the images depict humanlike figures with upraised arms and horned heads, attributes often associated with the seeking of spiritual power in Native American art. Others are of figures that have humanlike bodies and legs but that have wings instead of arms. Such winged figures have been interpreted in other parts of North America as representing shamans. Shamans are part-time religious practitioners who are most commonly found in pre-agricultural societies similar to the Native American groups of southwestern Illinois before A.D. 1000. They use techniques such as rhythmic singing and drumming, hyperventilation, and drugs to enter a trance in which the shaman believes his or her soul leaves the body and ascends to the Upper World to communicate with the dead, recover lost souls, and intercede between spirits and people. Shamans often believe that they turn into a bird or fly to complete such journeys. This “mystical flight of the shaman” is portrayed in Native American and Eskimo art by drawing or sculpting humanlike figures that have wings instead of arms—figures that are very similar to the small, winged petroglyph figures found at the Piney Creek site. Other Piney Creek images that clearly have a spiritual meaning include a series of very gracefully drawn deer, some of which are portrayed with heads and tails down and legs folded beneath their bodies as if in the process of dying. In addition to this unnatural pose, several of these deer also have been killed symbolically by having their interiors pecked out with a rock.

Native American life in Illinois became distinctly more complex during the Mississippian period. The use of agricultural plants, particularly maize, led to marked population growth and the development of large political and religious centers such as the Cahokia and Kincaid sites. As these societies became more complex, full-time religious specialists such as priests may have gradually replaced shamans. Priests, unlike shamans, very seldom enter trances or have animal-spirit helpers. They instead draw on a learned body of religious knowledge to perform public rituals for the good of the entire community. Religious imagery became more formalized during this period as Mississippian peoples engraved shell, copper, and stone objects with symbols such as raptorial birds, horned and winged monsters, crosses enclosed by circles, and human hands. Based on these symbols, archaeologists think that the Mississippians believed in a three-tiered universe—Under World, This World, and Upper World—similar to that of southeastern Native American peoples encountered by the earliest European explorers. The Under World was a place of change and disorder, inhabited by monsters such as the Horned Serpent and Underwater Panther. The Upper World, in contrast, was a place of structure and stability. Birds, particularly the falcon, belonged to the Upper World, as did giant birdlike spirits known as the Thunderers, who were believed to control rain, thunder, and lightning.

Archaeologists have known for many years that Mississippians carved and painted these same symbols at rock art sites in southern Illinois. But only in the past few years have we discovered that at some sites patterns exist in the arrangements of these symbols that directly relate to Mississippian beliefs about the Upper and Under Worlds. The most dramatic of these sites is the Millstone Bluff site, a late Mississippian (A.D. 1300–1550) bluff-top settlement in the Shawnee National Forest in extreme southern Illinois. The bluff top containing the site has never been farmed. Consequently, a series of circular depressions representing the remains of collapsed or abandoned houses that once surrounded a central plaza are still visible on the site surface. Millstone Bluff also contains three sets of petroglyphs located on three separate rock slabs at the western, central, and eastern edges of the north bluff face. Among the petroglyph images in these groups are falconlike birds, antlered serpents, humanlike figures, crosses inside circles, and other motifs. Figure A. Map of eastern group, Millstone Bluff site, showing falcon, cross in circle, and other motifs.

Like almost all rock art sites in Illinois, the Millstone Bluff petroglyphs had never been recorded adequately, although archaeologists and local people have known of them for at least fifty years. So a few years ago, my wife Mary McCorvie, who is the Shawnee National Forest archaeologist, and I decided to map all three groups in detail. As we were mapping the eastern group, we suddenly discovered that encoded within it was a repeating pattern of three symbols—a falcon, a humanlike figure, and a motif archaeologists call the “bilobed arrow”—located on the two arms of a chevron-shaped design. In combination, these three symbols also form the basic elements of a well-known mythical being often appearing on Mississippian shell and copper art. Named the “Falcon Impersonator” by archaeologists, this image consists of a humanlike figure whose body is surrounded by feathers, wears a bilobed arrow headdress, and has falconlike eye markings. Because of the difficulty in adequately portraying this complex figure as a petroglyph, the Millstone Bluff artisans apparently decided to portray it in an exploded, or schematic, view that emphasized the three most important attributes of this being. Although the linked nature of these symbols had previously escaped us (and probably all other viewers of this group since the end of the sixteenth century), any Mississippian peoples who had seen them would have immediately recognized them as symbolizing the Falcon Impersonator.

The discovery of the pattern encoded in the eastern group led us, in turn, to a second, more important discovery, one that now seems obvious in retrospect but one that no one had ever considered before. That is, could all three rock art groups at the site form part of a single composition? We suddenly realized that this indeed was the case. What had escaped everyone (including us) for years was that the eastern and western groups are symbolic opposites of each other. The Upper World-related symbols of the eastern group—falcons, bilobed arrows, and Falcon Impersonator—are completely absent from the western group. Instead, this group contains images such as winged and antlered serpents that have clear Under World associations. The central group, located midway between these the eastern and western groups, contains a combination of Upper and Under World images. In sum, we now believe that rather than being a jumble of unrelated images created at different times, the three Millstone Bluff petroglyph groups instead represent a planned ritual landscape in which the Mississippian inhabitants intentionally laid out their cosmological view of the universe.

Over the past few years, we have begun to discover that many other southern Illinois rock art sites contain similarly complex bodies of symbolic imagery related to Native American cosmology. One such site is the Austin Hollow site, a heavily vandalized sandstone block situated adjacent to a highway in Jackson County. This site once contained numerous carvings of human feet, hands, and bird tracks, as well as Mississippian designs such as the ogee (an elliptical, eye-shaped design) and the ceremonial mace (a war-club-like motif often held in the hands of humanlike figures in Mississippian shell and copper art). The sandstone block containing these designs was originally located next to a spring but was moved during highway construction in the 1930s.

Springs represent places of spiritual power to Native American and other peoples throughout the world. Spring waters are often believed to contain a healing power that has flowed into the physical world from the spirit world. Historic period southeastern Native American peoples also believed that Under World monsters such as the Underwater Panther dwelt in springs. Although very dangerous, these creatures also represented a source of power and eighteenth-century Creek and Chickasaw warriors are known to have carried into battle medicine bundles that they believed contained the bones of the Underwater Panther. In the case of Austin Hollow, I believe that Native American peoples created the rock art designs here to both acknowledge and obtain part of the power contained in the nearby spring. The presence of human footprint motifs at this site, possibly one of the oldest rock art designs in the state, indicates that this location may have been viewed as a source of spiritual power as far back as 2,000 years ago. Later, Mississippian peoples also interacted with the spring, adding their own designs, such as the ceremonial mace. Austin Hollow is the only location in Illinois where petroglyphs of the mace or war club have been discovered. The uniqueness of this image suggests that, similar to the historic period Chickasaw and Creek, Mississippian leaders or their warriors, for a purpose such as war, may have been attempting to obtain power from dangerous Under World spirit beings living in the spring. 

From the late 1600s to the 1830s, Native Americans in Illinois continued to paint images on rock faces, as well as on trees, wooden grave markers, and the insides of their houses. Paintings on perishable surfaces such as trees of course no longer exist, and our only information about them comes from very limited descriptions in the accounts of European and American travelers. Native Americans continued to paint and draw images in rock shelters and caves during this same time, and some of these sites, too, exist now only in written accounts. A case in point is the Cave-in-Rock site in Hardin County. A British officer who visited this very large cave on the Ohio River in 1765 recorded in his diary that he saw a “great many Indian marks & signs” on the walls, none of which survive today. What happened to these paintings? Cave-in-Rock fills with water when the Ohio River floods, and it may be that some of these paintings eroded or washed away. It is also possible that park workers unknowingly destroyed these paintings and a number of inscribed names dating to the 1700s when they cleaned the cave walls of graffiti at some point in the twentieth century.

One historic period Native American pictograph site that has survived is Buffalo Rock in Johnson County in the Shawnee National Forest. Located directly on a Forest Service trail once known as the Golconda-Kaskaskia Trail, a very important route through the rugged Shawnee Hills in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this site contains a hematite painting of a bison shown in profile. Images of bison do not occur at prehistoric Mississippian sites in the area, and this suggests that this painting almost certainly was created at some point in the late-seventeenth or eighteenth century when bison existed in large numbers in southern Illinois. Despite the fact that Buffalo Rock has been known since the early 1800s, we discovered a few years ago several previously unknown paintings at the site, including a crescent moon and a star. These images, although badly faded, were located in plain view but had never been noticed before, even though Buffalo Rock is visited by thousands of people each year. Once again, this experience made me realize how difficult it is to recognize the sometimes badly faded rock art of the Eastern Woodlands. It also made me wonder once more how many unrecorded sites in similar condition still exist across the state.

We have come a long way in understanding the Native American rock art of Illinois in the over three centuries since Father Marquette first described the paintings on the Alton bluffs in his journal. I think his sentiment “for what purpose they were drawn seems to me a mystery” is shared by and remains a driving force for those who study Illinois rock art today. With the discovery of each rock art site, we gain additional clues to help us unravel the mystery of the extent, age, and purposes of this very important aspect of the Native American heritage of Illinois. In addition, as at Piney Creek and Millstone Bluff, detailed studies of long-known but poorly documented rock art sites are producing insights into the spiritual meaning of Illinois rock art in a way that we simply could not have imagined a few years ago. Rather than being at the end of a 300-year journey, I think that the study of the Native American rock art of Illinois is at the beginning and the best is yet to come.

Illinois has three rock art sites that are open to the public. One is the Piney Creek site, the largest known rock art site in the state, with approximately 150 painted and carved designs. Administered by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR), this site is contained within the Piney Creek Nature Preserve on the Jackson-Randolph County line in southwestern Illinois. A marked trail leads to the site where an interpretive panel provides information on the various rock art designs. Directions to Piney Creek can be obtained by calling the Site Superintendent, Randolph County Conservation Area in Chester, Illinois at (618) 826-2706. This site is not handicapped accessible.

Two other sites are in the Shawnee National Forest. The Millstone Bluff site is an unplowed late-Mississippian village located on a steep ridge top in the Shawnee. A self-guided walkway with interpretive signs leads visitors through the site. Three sets of petroglyphs, including falcons, horned serpents, crosses in circles, and other designs, are located on rock slabs surrounding the village. Buffalo Rock is also located in the Shawnee National Forest, only a few miles from Millstone Bluff. Neither site is handicapped accessible. Contact Shawnee National Forest Service archaeologist Mary McCorvie for directions at (618) 687-1731.  

If you are interested in learning more about the rock art of Illinois and the Eastern Woodlands, please consider joining the Eastern States Rock Art Research Association (ESRARA). For membership information write Dr. Denise Smith, Secretary, ESRARA, 11 Cypress Court, Pooler, GA 31322, or consult the ESRARA Web site at www.esrara.org.