Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Unknown Artists: Marpole Phase
1st-millennium BCE, 1st-millennium CE
Bainbridge Island, WA: Agate Point Neighborhood
50%
Haleets Rock. c1000 BCE-400 CE
These petroglyphs are almost completely obscured by barnacles. When I visited the site, I could make out a carved half-circle and two small divots (a face?) poking out from the clustered crustaceans in the top right corner of the big stone's sea-facing side. So, it's basically impossible to judge this thing aesthetically. (I've seen some photographs of the glyphs cleared of sea critters, but I'm not about to do criticism based on those alone.) The only relevant things that can be said concern the site itself, which is inevitably an aspect of your total experience of the carvings. The petroglyphs' substrate is a giant chunk of glacial erratic sandstone on the shore of an island in the Puget Sound. The huge, geologically anomalous rock sticks out like a sore thumb and is immediately visible both from the water and the land, which is why it's been guessed that its original function was navigational. But why decorate a thing that by virtue of its bigness and weirdness would, sans-ornamentation, have easily served its landmarking purpose? My (uninformed and aesthetical) guess is that the carvings were originally less functional than they were cosmic: a bid at explaining, or pointing at the inexplicability, of a strange feature of the landscape. Would that we could still see the pictures. (TFS, 2026)