I am uniquely capable of doing it.

Oh, that's.

That sounds like an immodest statement.

But it isn't really that immodest.

The simple proof of the matter is that nobody's done it or come close.

I suppose I've probably discovered 100 new rock painting sites.

At least discovered them to the outside world.

And it's due to the fact that I've learned that I can sit on a mule as well as the next man.

I can speak Spanish.

I get alon well with the people down there.

I enjoy doing things tha some people would find hardships without.

I hasten to say, claiming that they are hardships, I think.

Hardship.

The concept of hardship is a very subjective one.

And the weather in Baja California in the mountains tends to be beautiful, and the food is perfectly all right.

And the exercise, I'm sure is good for you and I don't want comment is a hardship.

Other people obviously do because they've avoided those mountains.

And.

Central Baja California is is a piece of the old continental shelf that's broken off from the western part of the state of Sonora, and it's shifting northwest along the line of wha we call the San Andreas Fault.

And as a piece of the old continental shelf it's mainly alluvium underneath.

But I'm told by geologists, about 20 million years ago, possibly as much as 50, it was heavily intruded upon from beneath by volcanic material, which is spewed out in very perceptible localizations and spread over the top of th the old continental shelf piece.

So what you have is relatively recent volcanic on top of sedimentary material.

And these volcanics have created a sort of a fantastic environmen because they're the remains of not that old, tall, but reasonably tall, possibly 5000ft to 6000ft volcanoes, which were made, interestingly enough, out of sort of alternating layer or different flows of very hard, fractured basaltic rock and very soft layers of volcanic tuffs and branches that they call them, which is really sort of a conglomerate ash.

And that ash material erodes relatively quickly, and wind erosion and water erosion has cut deeply dow into these several thousand foot thick volcanic layers, creating deep, deep canyons.

Thousand foot canyons are commonplace, and I mean thousand foot narrow canyons so that you go to the bottom unless the sun is at exactly the right angle, you're in deep shade, maybe down amongst green palm trees and with water all around you, with straight sided wall leading up to the mesas above, which are just as arid and dry as the Sahara Desert.

The area I'm concerned with is the relatively high, mountainous central par of the peninsula, and isolated in that group of mountains is a special type of rock painting, highly realistic, stylized animals and man.

And it's totally unlike the rock things found in any of the other parts of the peninsula.

Although to me at leas personally, the most fascinating paintings on the peninsula, they're also the least known because of their inaccessibility.

My interest in archeology and rock art predates any of my experiences in Baja California.

Actually, I've had a lifelong interest in both of them.

I remember one of the first books I ever owned.

At least one of the first adult books was called Prehistoric and Roman Britain, and I loved it.

I memorized every word and ever picture, every artifact in it.

I was a psychology major in college, and on the basis of my pre-medical program, and the fact that I, incidentally had finished a chemistry major, I went into a high school science teaching.

And this, I think, is a it's a broad, general background which led me on into other things.

After 12 years of science teaching in high school and having built a couple of houses in that time and designed a few things.

I went into photography and illustration, and in the course of this I traveled.

I went to Mexico, and I did a lot of architectural stuff, photographing colonial architecture, photographing Mexican antiquities, and pursuing my general interest in archeology.

I have a good deal of experience in Mexico, principally in Sonora, and it was on the basis of this experience, not in archeology specifically, but my general experience in Mexico that I was hired to illustrate a book on Portilla and Sarah which put me in Baja California.

I actually had had no experience in Baja California before that at all.

And doin this book entailed a mule ride over the old Jesuit mission trail from Loreto, near the southern end of Baja California, all the way to San Diego.

And the mission trail happene to lead through the mountains, and it happened to lead righ by places that had these ancient Baja California rock paintings.

And.

I.

The Jesuit missionaries came in 1697.

They found that the people knew about some paintings.

They did not find that they were making paintings.

So matter of fact, the people told them that they specifically did not make the paintings, that they were made by their ancestors, or by the ancients, or by giants from the north who had lived long before their time, and various other myths and legends concerning them.

The first recorded encounter between a missionary and a painting dates from about 1732, when a young Spanish Italian missionary named Sigismundo Taraval wrote about som paintings of men decently clad, and he was referring to a situatio where some of the human figures in one of the cave had what appeared to be pants on the unusual thing the Indians going naked almost entirely.

I remember in 1894, a young Frenchman made a several month tour of the whole peninsula of Baja California and collected 30 different painted sites.

And his name was Leon Diguet.

And he becomes really the father of the study of the cave paintings, because he was the first one to describe them accurately and scientifically, and in terms that we would recognize the first one to list them and give their precise sights and locations.

Some 70 years after Leon Diguet published his report, the first outsider added to it and really reawakened interest when Erle Stanley Gardner, the well known mystery story writer, reported in life magazine.

A great, splashy picture and story about cave painting on a large scal in Baja California, it exploded like a brand new thin on the horizon of all the people who were interested.

He called it the case of the Baja Caves to mak it sound like his mystery story.

After Gardner's initial discovery of cave paintings, he organize the more elaborate expedition, and they went down there and spent about six days in the immediate area of the great painted center o the Sierra, the San Francisco, and they specifically visited three caves on the ground, which for the basis of most of the reports that have been made up to this time in writing about what I call the great murals, the giant rock paintings, wall paintings of Baja California.

Well as soon as I'd convinced myself that I was really dealing with unknown rock art, things that had never been see or reported by outsiders before, I decided that I should record it as well as possible, always bearing in min that I had no sort of permission to dig or move it, or change it in any way.

Three and a half years ago, I organized the first expedition, and gradually in the course of that first trip, which was over a month long, I evolved the technique of local inquiry.

I simply get a, a man I know that I know has a fine reputatio who's honest and who, by common consent, knows the mountains as well or better than anyone else.

And I make him the head, and I ask him to hire a second man that can help him.

And I arranged usuall through him, to hire animals and rent them for the time we need them both riding animals and pack animals.

I provide all the food, all the gear, except for the saddles and bridles and that sort of thing.

And we set out and go and visit every single spot that we have heard, reported, has paintings, and we visit every ranch.

And we talked to everyon from the 12 year old goat herds on up to the 80 and 90 year old man who were once 12 year old gold herds now hunters, particularly thos that have hunted a lot or rather inclined to went into paintings in the remote parts of the mountains of the central peninsula.

Now it's true.

I have discovered a few caves, absolutely independently.

And in a sense that's a really original discovery.

But I don't make any big thing out of this at all.

I think it's it's immaterial.

The point is, they need recording and they need reporting to the outside if they're going to enter in any way into the mainstream of knowledge, if they're going to have an effect on people, if they're going to be study, if they're going to be understood and if we're going to use them to understand better.

The general picture of Indians in this area, which is an extremely cloudy picture, mysterious, remote.

And these paintings certainly are the only good evidence we have of the people made them.

The rest of the artifacts that are on the ground today may or may not relate to the cave painters.

You can't assume, for instance, that because something is buried in the floor of a cave and there's a painting on the wall above it that there's any relationship, whatever you would have, for instance, to find artifacts buried that were used to grind the paint, and they'd have to be identified chemically as being the same paints on the wall, or you'd have to find fallen bits of the paintings, which I'm sure exist, by the way, in the layering of the cav floor, and be able to establish its intimate relationshi with artifacts and other objects until archeology on that level has been done.

And up until now, none like that has been done.

And I emphasize none, Not just the level or some, or not enough for definite conclusions, I want to emphasize that there has been no archeology, which clearly establishes any sort of relationship between the paintings and other artifacts.

So I feel that my fundamental missio is recording in every possible way the paintings themselves, because they are the manifestations of the cave painters who were where they were and whatever they were.

The question often comes up, exactly what am I doing here working in this field?

Uh, it's not my natural field.

My background, at least in terms of formal education, doesn't really qualify me directly for it.

And I mysel have to wonder at times exactly why I, for instance, stopped teaching and went into photography which also was out of my field.

I had absolutely no background in visual arts of any kind, and I think the answer to it lies in the having a broad background knowledge and a lot of fields based on reading and interest and the fac that I had taught for 12 years, I think I'd come to the point where I was, well, unfulfilled and unsatisfied with the idea of merely purveying other people's idea and other people's discoveries.

A teacher and I'm not running teaching down.

I enjoyed teaching an I felt successful at teaching.

But a teacher nevertheless i creative only as an instrument.

Here things passed through you to your students.

You don't really originate much of what you teach, at least not in fields like science an art teacher perhaps is more creative.

I think that I went into photography because I wanted to say something.

I wanted something that was original with me, my vision of the world to be presente to people in some form or other.

And I got a great deal o satisfaction out of photography.

But I also felt I have felt that numerous occasions that the photography in itself was a rather hollow thing, in that it was unrelated.

I, I didn't create during my commercial years as a photographer, at least any integrated statements through photography.

I said this for one client and that for another client.

And I think that this business of getting into the field of the rock paintings is much more satisfying, because even though my pictures of them aren't creative, I'm merely trying to record them the best I can.

I nevertheless have the satisfaction of making an original contribution instead of just transmitting information.

I am gathering information in the field.

It's a minor form of science.

And the thing that' particularly compelling about it is the idea that I can do it now.

These trips las up to two months in the field.

I've gone as much as 45 days on a mule back without coming back to a town or any place where there was a road of any kind.

We have to carr a lot of equipment with us over long periods, and th difficulties that are involved compel me to the idea that we ought to do as much as possible while in the field.

I've trained the guides as best I can to be observant of the kind of things I'm looking for.

And by carrying 3 millimeter equipment on my belt that I obviously carry with me at every step I take up to the top of any peak, I go up to look around.

I can take photographs at any time.

I carry a very portable tape recorder with which I record trail notes as I ride along, or whenever I stop, whenever I go to a cave site.

And with that, I can record many aspects of the environment of these caves and paintings.

And of course, by inference, the environment of the people who painted the caves.

I have learned enough about the plant life of Baja California, to be able to name almost everything that grow above the size of a few inches, and by keeping lists of these for each mesa, each arroyo, and so forth, I can suggest what the food supply might have been like for the people.

We also try to collect observations about the rock and observations about any gross features of the landscape, or let's say, the larger environment which the people lived in.

Things like water supplies, thing like local catchments or springs or Indian trails that are observable in the area, or traditions about the fact that this was an old Indian route.

This type of tradition survives amongst the older people.

In some cases, I can get a great deal of information.

Get a long list of place names that relat to Indian remains in the area.

And so what I'm trying to do is in depth to build up a sort of a total picture of the places in which the paintings are found, so that people using paintings themselves my images of the paintings and all will also have correlative material that they can draw on in fleshing it out, so that they won't be just sort of like postage stamps.

A picture of a cave painting and a dot on a map.

And speaking of maps, that also leads to the fact that I've had to make map mostly from aerial photographs, which are available in Mexico Cit with a great deal of difficulty, and that these maps are detailed on being on a scale of something less than 1 to 50,000.

They allow me to pinpoint the cave location, which means I have over two inches to the mile, and we can usually find that we can locate the caves within, probably 50 yards with a high degree of probability, becaus they usually are on rock faces or things that can be identified in the aerial photographs.

This gives a very certain, very secure sort of identification for any future people who wan to go back there and find them.

Quite a poin has been made about the urgency or the lack of urgency, as far as recording these cave sites and paintings is concerned.

The official Mexican governmen stand on antiquities in general is that they are not going to give permission to study them or dig them up until they have brought them up in their own order of events and study them on their own timetable.

And in general, I think archeologists would agree that things that are buried are pretty safe.

They're pretty well protected.

So as far as your conventional archeological site is concerned, it is not too threatened by being put off for some time in the indefinite future.

To study the same thing doesn't apply to the rock paintings at all.

As a matter of fact, one of the points I think is extremely important to make is that the sites you are seeing here photographed, are among the very best preserved that remain, and that for every one that's this well preserved and that can be shown by direct photographic methods, there are at least ten others that are in much poorer shape right down to the point of being just barely above the threshold of being detectable.

And each storm each passing year with wind erosion and so forth, dusts off or removes another tiny fraction of the paint from all of them.

And localized disasters can destroy a whole cave.

And what I think the most compelling argument for recording the paintings now is the fact that they are being lost, either by slow attrition or by catastrophe, almost literally daily.

To me that land is an important place.

It's a mysterious place.

It's a beautiful place.

But it's pre-history is there to be seen.

And it hasn't been recorded and it hasn't been studied.

And I am dissatisfied with what's been done with it.

In the past, in trying to satisfy my own curiosity, I've gone to the library and gone to all the usual places in a lot of unusual places.

I've hunted up manuscript materials and gone into the far recesses of of man's knowledge.

As far as Baja California is concerned.

In research for my previous book, and in trying to get a background for these cave paintings, and I must say that I find that the place has been very poorly studied, and a great many of the people who have studied it have not, in my opinion, had a real love and respect and most above all, a real understanding of what it's all about.

And the thing I think that drives me along more than anything else is the idea that I can go down and use my background and my eyes and my ability to record and bring home the units, which could be synthesized into a better picture of things, often that have never been recorded, certainly not been recorded accurately.

I know, for instance, that if we had such things from 19th century and 18th century observers, we would be immensely richer.

for it.

We all have the tendency to say, well, but it's too late now.

My point, I think, here is that it's not too late now.

It's better to do it now than it will be to try to do it 20 years from now.

And I'm involved.

I've become sort of hopelessly, emotionally involved in the idea of getting into the farthest crannies, nooks, recesses, whatever you want to call them of that difficult place, and seeing it and understanding it and knowing its people and getting it all down in at least notational form so that it can be to some extent reconstructed.

And that, I think, above all else, is the thing that drives m along, is the idea of having a, a personal part of being personally involved.

Maybe you could get it into just such crass term as being a footnote in history.

My name, a memor that somebody wanted to do that badly enough to make the individual effort to leave his field and leave what he might have done more comfortably and to have done that.

But in a sense, that's making a martyr out of myself, because I don't really have the field the feeling of martyrdom at all.

On the contrary, I'd rather be doing this than anything else I can possibly think of.

The ol guy has come down off the wall and really speak to you, and I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that the same kind of feelings that inspire people to go and gawk at the Sistine Chapel and feel honored and rewarded and privileged to be there, and to see what Michelangelo painted, that I get exactl the same feeling from the Caves plus a, a sort of a smu kind of feeling of uniqueness.

I'm not in a big crowd of people in the Sistine Chapel.

I'm her virtually alone with the aura, the the sense, the mood of these strange, lost, unknown people.

And it's as if they were talking to me.