00:00.00 Alan Welcome back gang. We have Eve Ewing with us talking about the great mural rock art in the sierra de San Francisco on the peninsula of Baja and the nation of Mexico eve tell us a bit about how you perceive and. Process the rock art a little bit about the the work that you've done down there and the writings and publications that you've done in the documentary film and the whole the whole package just give us some insight about the way in which you analyze and. 00:30.64 Eve Oh my. 00:38.66 Alan Consider the nature of this these images. Okay. 00:39.20 Eve Okay, okay, well to continue with my background having um, sort of my sister and brother and I we just sort of raised ourselves on the farm when we came west. what what I brought with me was my tremendous love of country and um and how it how much it meant it meant to me and this gave me an advantage because indian people are born live and die. In their land and they know it so well I mean I just know a freckle of what what they went through but it led me to major in biology and with an emphasis on ecology which is the study of a interconnections of the natural world and um. And then learning how to observe if you're observing a cave or you're looking at an animal a painting and then you look at the cave it's in and then you look at the outside of the cave and and you back up even more and you try and. Ah, figure out. Why is this place chosen and sometimes it's it's possible to know and sometimes it's it's not but um, my first introduction to the great mural caves in it to the big, the big quave of pintata was amazing. We went to the ah. 02:07.18 Eve It took us in those days three days to get down into the the canyon sometimes too the first day would take you from San Ignacio to el represso which was a ranch up on the top of the the pass. And then the trail came down el represso and if we were lucky we would get all the way to cocoriso and the next day but if not, we would be camping somewhere in between a cocoriso was named after a rock which it means the pocked tooth or something like that. Pocked face or Pucked. Um, ah too and that is a mesa in that's a a mesa in the ah mountains. Um, that. 02:59.20 Eve That you when you're camped down at the base of it. You're camped along the stream that comes out of out of the ah rock art of from from the mountaintop up above which is awa verde. It's the tallest mountain there and I think it's where. They perceive the gods of rains lived there are stories that there are I never got a chance to go up there but there are ah rock art cairns up near the top. So my guess is that's one of the ways they hunted mountain sheep. Was to flush them up to the top of the hill top of the mountain and there would be somebody waiting to to hunt them but awaverde is where the clouds in the summertime gather and you know the rains are going to slowly slowly build and slowly come out. Ah, from from there the ah okay, my first introduction introduction to Kentata we first went to quava fletches which is quite an amazing sight and I think one of the important things is that each cave has its own flavor. And it would be sort of like um if you went into the the mission in sonic nasio which was ah built with all these paintings and and gilded and statuary of the catholic religion. 04:27.87 Eve So if you had a hurt knee. You'd go to one saint if you were wanting to do something else. You'd go and pray to another saint but it was all built for non-verbal non ah for but for a visionary. Education. Not people who were literate the same with the paintings in Baja California and I think like you would go in in the church inside ignacio you go to one station that had a certain amount of saints there and you knew who they were and you. Pray and talk to them and then another time you'd go to another station somewhere else and and so that way you'd you'd know how to pray for what you what you wanted and and and hoped you could get and I think there was really no difference between both of those. Cathedrals one to the Catholic Church and another to native indians were all for people who were non verbal and the mythic in the okay so there's that overview then. We know something too about um the ah there was a lot of shamanistic belief systems woven into the um ethnography of baha california and a lot of it Bron Smith and 05:58.70 Eve Bernie Jones and Ken Hedges all agree and poly shafts me agree that it was very shamanistically oriented but not entirely because shamanism really talks more about an individual's ah. Experience with the with the sacred and these were communities of people there paintings everybody is touching. Um, um, John Harmon the and the inventor of d stretch. He did a paper explaining that all the paintings in the site that he was talking about which I think was called Santa Hertrutus Norte and he talked about how every figure was touching another figure so you're talking about a community of people. That are interrelated with the animal world. So anyway, so my introduction after we left quava fletches which is quite an extraordinary site in itself. We went down the canyon and then up right up underneath from the stream bed. Up the old rough trail that goes right up and about halfway up that slope I looked up and oh my god over my head was this extraordinary panel of paintings. There's the sea lion that at the time everyone still thought it was a whale but. 07:30.29 Eve But but it's not It's a sea lion there. That's fifteen feet tall in other words, most or a number of figures were about 15% larger than life and I think that's pretty indicative of mythic storytelling. Either things or spots of times they're smaller than life and lots of times they're larger than life and a Dr Chen I think I can't remember his name correctly Chen or Chen he's the first one that talked about how many of the important figures were larger. Then life about 15 so here are these ah cavalcade of animals ah charging and ah my friend Ellenie Moore who has studied and reproduced the paintings and and separated the layers of paint and duston and. Extraordinary job had a ah one woman show at the museum of man another one in um, in um, mexicali and she her her joy was to pull out the the figures mine was to figure out. What are they trying to say why are they here? Why are and so my felt like what I wanted to do was like listening to the birds in the Forest when I was a kid I wanted to hear them I wanted to hear what they had to say what they were thinking. 09:03.92 Eve And um, and then ellenie pointed out that that the animals run in one direction and then they take a switch back turn and they go in another direction and another switch back turn and eventually go out the top of the cave now switchbacks is how you get up and down these. Tremendous passes and ah it's sort of the natural way to do things when what I discovered is that the end of a run like you take all of the animals that are at the base that are running out to the right and ah. 1 so extraordinary thing is there is a black woman holding out her hand underneath the chin of an enormous red deer that has a spear in its back and it's the cave that receives the first light. Sunlight of the day just around one o'clock in the afternoon and the pintata faces the west but I'll talk about more about pintata later but I just wanted to go back to this the the belief system american. Belief system Jeffrey Quilter who is head of ah at the time he wrote the book of a pre-columbian world. He edited that book with Mary Miller ah he talked about that the that there's uniformity in a lot of basic. 10:34.99 Eve American beliefs for example, dualism is very very important and um ah and and the dualism is is is the and in Baja California rock art. We see it in the black and red deer and in the black and red. Ah, painted? um ah human figures. Um, and what does that mean that ah means a tremendous amount. Um, ah and and it's a binary system. But the other thing that quilter talked about is that the binary system is not equal. It's not perfectly balanced so you and like take the red and black figures. The red figures they have um the black and red figures people. The left side is black. But the head and the right side is red. Of course there are exceptions to this as there are and in in so many things but 1 interesting thing now does it hold true as it does throughout much of the world that the mythology starts out. When animals were people therefore you are related because all the first animals in the first plants in the first rocks and first everything we're people so you're all interrelated and then how do you. 12:06.67 Eve Kill your relatives to eat because that's what you're going to have to do and how do you How do you make that okay with the the animals that you are ah killing because throughout the Americas there is a belief system that you cannot kill a deer. Or a mountain sheep or a beer without its permission and the permission has to come from the master of animals and he's not going to help you a bit if you break a taboo or do something and and so. This this interconnectedness is just fascinating because we know that the deer throughout the american north american continent is considered the messenger and he talks so ah he talks in 1 of the chapters in his book he talks about or the lady that wrote that particular chapter talks about how animals act as intermediaries intermediaries between the worlds. There are 3 major worlds in all early societies. There's the sky world the earth world. Middle World you might say in the underworld which is the sea and the water and the streams and all of these layers of of ah it may be each layer may have many many layers of its own but it doesn't matter. They're all interconnected in 1 way. 13:39.92 Eve In the in the North America it's the big cosmic tree the belief that there's a giant tree with its leaves in the heavens its branches and trunks in the middlew world and its roots in the underworld and that is then ah translated and used in the southwest. More like the one pole ladder the trunk of the tree is the axis it's the center of the world and so the axis mundi or the world. Ah Monday axis monday is what they believe. Ah. Is is what's what it's all about and so when I on and going around looking at rock art with Ken Hedges field trips in northern baha and in northern ah San Diego County and stuff. Ah. We'd see sometimes see singlepole ladders. Well there's good place in ah in around the um the Sears point area. Ah and Gillespie Dam area and you see these singlepole ladders. Well. And what it represents is the axis munddi the spirit trail if you will to the sacred world above or below and below so get down to Baja California think well where's trees I don't I don't see any trees painted heroes. 15:07.63 Alan Shit. 15:07.85 Eve Ladders I don't see any ladders where where what? How do? how does this happen and yet all these animals are all running out of the cave there. They're going somewhere and I'm looking at this and I'm looking at this and then I see a gigantic crack. That goes from the bottom of the shelter in Pintata for example to the top of the skyline and there are many times where people are painted in relationship to that ascent. Ah, you see it in in sangrogoo one you see it in the serpent cave you see it which is very subtle that one you see it in um, ah, ah, different. There's many different sites that have it and. 16:01.29 Eve Elbateki is probably 1 of the famous ones at the right hand side deer are running up a crack and all these animals sort of in relationship to this ascent where are they going why all these things began to fascinate me. And I began to be fascinated with these crap cracks that were clearly discussing the axis money mi the act ascent to the sky world above or the underworld below and ah, what what? what are they. 16:33.50 Alan That's a that's a that's a good place to stop for the second segment. Ah yeah, we will continue. We will continue this discussion for no no, you're doing great. Absolutely fabulous. 16:36.00 Eve Okay I don't know there's so much I so much I haven't been able to add because I'm I'm just winging it. 16:49.96 Alan And this Axis Monday in the study of the cracks is something of course that eve pioneered people didn't realize that that was something so very very important. So the crack lady. 16:59.31 Eve No, and in fact I used to be teased by it. Why I was called the crack lady and then finally a few years ago. Ken came up to me and he said well eve because he published a lot of my my early articles on on the cracks and stuff and. Ah, he came up to me says Eve how does it feel to be going mainstream because what? yeah Paul these other archeologists came along and they realized ah okay. 17:23.21 Alan Ah I think that's great see in the flip flop gang. Thank you eve.