This National Park, just east of Holbrook AZ, is an unusual place. There is the painted desert which is very colorful landscape, ancient pueblos with petroglyphs, rock formations with more petroglyphs, and then fields of petrified wood of various colorations.
The village on the Rio Puerco (Puerco Pueblo) is a prehistoric settlement built of shaped sandstone blocks by ancestral Puebloan people. It was inhabited between 1250 and 1380 AD. At its peak the pueblo had over 100 rooms, with a possible population of 200 people. During the village’s occupation, fields of corn, beans, and squash sustained by the summer rains would have filled the river’s floodplain.
Kiva, a large room that is used for spiritual ceremonies and a place of worship.Puebloan ruins.Summer solstice marker. Prehistoric peoples used solar calendars to plan their lives around the changing season. Solstice days also marked important days for annual ceremonial cycles. The rising summer solstice Sun flows down the cleft in the boulder, creating light and shadows on the spiral petroglyph, changing daily until the light touches the center of the spiral.Petroglyphs.More elaborate petroglyphs.More Puebloan ruins.Newspaper rocks, with a plethora of petroglyphs.Notice the hand picture on the left.The TepeesAnother Tepee.A petrified tree, called the Agate Bridge.A petrified tree.Petrified logs.Beautiful colors.All of these log segments are petrified wood.
