Utah In Focus

Newspaper Rock in San Juan County, Utah, as photographed in May 2022. This panel features rock art from many different Indigenous groups, including the Basketmaker and Ancestral Puebloan cultures, possibly dating as far back as two thousand years ago. More recent petroglyphs come from the Ute and Navajo peoples, who still live in the region. The panel includes bighorn sheep, elk, bison, wheels, six-toed feet, and people on horses, which means that some images came after the Spanish introduced horses in the sixteenth century. The artists etched their drawings into desert varnish, a layer of bacteria and iron deposits. The rock itself is a cliff of Wingate Sandstone, dating back around two hundred million years ago. Euro-American settlers named the panel Newspaper Rock, while the Navajo name, Tse’ Hane’, means “rock that tells a story.” However, no one is sure what story it is supposed to tell. Newspaper Rock was dedicated as a state historical monument in 1961. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.