The Archaeological Society of New Mexico and the Rock Art of the Galisteo Basin
J. J. Brody, Department of Art and Art History, University of New Mexico, Director of the Rock Art Recording Projects of the ASNM

         Not far from the ancient pueblo town we call Pueblo Blanco is a sandstone escarpment on which are carved almost three-hundred petroglyphs including three enormous horned serpents (the largest is 6.5 meters long), an almost life-sized brown bear and several mudhead-like faces that seem to emerge from the rapidly eroding rock. The serpents are visually powerful and it is easy to imagine them mesmerizing Helen and Jay Crotty so that, in 1995, they would bring the Rock Art Recording Program (RARP) of the Archaeological Society of New Mexico (ASNM) to the Galisteo Basin where it would stay for many lifetimes.

ASNM is a volunteer organization of avocational and professional archaeologists that began systematically recording rock art about thirty years before it came to the Galisteo Basin. Initially, led by Colonel James Bain, it held an annual summer Rock Art Recording Field School at different locations in New Mexico. During the 1990s, however, directed by Jay and Helen Crotty who had succeeded Bain, the summer field school was replaced by year-round recording, most notably in collaboration with the National Park Service at Albuquerque’s Petroglyph National Monument. Simultaneously, RARP began assisting ASNM affiliate societies to develop local recording activities.

After completing the Pueblo Blanco sandstone project, RARP turned its attention in 1996 to the four hogbacks of an almost four-mile-long igneous outcrop called the Creston Dike that is the south boundary of the Galisteo Basin. Also known as the “Devil’s Backbone”and, improperly, “Comanche Gap”, Creston’s 5,000 peroglyphs were not recorded completely until 2004, about a year after the Crotty’s retired.  RARP then moved its activities a few miles north to the seven-mile-long Galisteo Dike where work still continues. Early in 2005, it began another project at La Cieneguilla, technically outside of the Galisteo Basin, but still mandated by the Galisteo Basin Archaeological Resources Protection Act.

Meanwhile, in 2004, another Galisteo project was begun at Petroglyph Hill, sponsored by George Mason University and directed by one-time RARP volunteer, Dr. Marit Munson. Collectively these five locations may have as many as 30,000 petroglyphs, mostly made by Pueblo people during the Rio Grande Coalition and Classic periods but also representative of more ancient and more recent Puebloans, Archaic, Plains, Athabaskan, Hispanic and Anglo peoples. It seems that all comers, each for their own reasons, made pictures at the same locations during all of human time in the Galisteo. Collectively also, since 1995, perhaps 100 individuals associated with at least eight different heritage or research organizations have volunteered their time and skills to record those images, working under separately negotiated agreements on lands owned by no fewer than seventeen private and four public land-owners