South Dakota's Oldest Works of Art
Jun 19, 2013
Ancient South Dakotans left their mark on the landscape by pecking, chiseling or carving images into the rocks and cliffs around them. These images, called petroglyphs or pictographs, can be found all over the Black Hills.
Tony Diem, a California native who works for bicycle power meter manufacturers Quarq of Spearfish, recently re-discovered and photographed one petroglyph-rich site near Hermosa. “I had visited the site about 8 years before, but my friend Mike Runge, the City Archivist for Deadwood, forgot the location. My girlfriend and I set out and drove many a road to find them off of Highway 79, including LH Road and Cobb Road, and saw some beautiful country, but we came up empty. I called Mike one more time and out of the blue he gave me the directions that had eluded his memory, verbatim.”
If you’d like to see them for yourself, Tony says, “They’re located just south of Hermosa where French Creek crosses Highway 79. Turn west and follow Downen Road for about a mile and a half.”
Photos by Tony Diem.
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Keiz Shultz accompanied Diem on his petroglyph hunt. -
The battered sign reads "Scored Rock where Sioux Indians fashioned their stone implements and weapons 18th century." -
South Dakota’s earliest petroglyphs are 8,000 years old, but determining their age can be difficult. -
According to the petroglyph story in our May/June 2012 issue, this thunderbird was made within the last 2,000 years. -
Some of the pictures are representational, while others are so abstract it’s hard to fathom their meaning. -
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Diem’s travels also took him past this old stamp mill near Keystone. -
A tunnel on the Flume Trail near Pactola.
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Comments
in the Black Hills. Some of the markers were not made by the Native Americans. Write me if you like my book. fredabrede@aol.com