Last month, vandals defaced a panel of rock art in a cave located in Red Rock Canyon just west of Las Vegas, bringing up a dilemma: there is ancient rock art all over southern Nevada (expertly indexed and photographed in detail here, and the source of the above photo) and people like me love to visit the sites, but if the locations of the rock art is made public it puts the art at great risk of vandalism. The current solution to this problem is to publicize only a few major locations (Red Rock Canyon, Valley of Fire, and to a lesser degree, Sloan Canyon, Keyhole Canyon, Grapevine Canyon – all of which I’ve been to except for Sloan and Grapevine), leaving the more obscure sites for historians and locals in the know. This seems to be a rather pragmatic approach, but unfortunately, with the massive growth Nevada has been experiencing and will continue to experience, petroglyph sites are becoming more vulnerable than ever.

All of which makes me wonder if there is a better, more technological, solution to the rock art problem. I’d like to imagine an ideal world where someone has created a Google Map resource pinpointing every rock art location in the Southwest, and perhaps this already exists in an unpublicized academic setting. (If not, I’d like to offer my services to make one – check out the Google Map tool I created to help Clark and Washoe county voters to find their nearest polling place.) But such a tool has the potential to be a vandal’s paradise, as long as they have a high-clearance vehicle, a GPS device, and a spraycan.

So I’m putting this question out there: does anyone have any ideas as to how to protect a historic resource that is somewhat abundant, geographically decentralized, and vulnerable to sharp objects? The problem is made more difficult with the rock art being out in the open desert and in places without electricity and phone reception. Things like video cameras or sensor networks come to mind, but the environmental conditions are less than ideal. Human volunteers can do only a limited amount of surveillance. I’m stumped and am pessimistic about the future of rock art protection. Ideas?

Just as a side note, I plan to visit Sloan Canyon in the near future, once I have some time and access to a high-clearance vehicle. (Our Honda Civic isn’t quite cut out for it.) I also regret missing the Great Gallery during my visit to Canyonlands National Park in 2005, where there are human-shaped pictographs up to twelve feet tall. These were featured in the beginning of Koyaanisqatsi, one of my favorite films. Utah isn’t too far from me, so hopefully I’ll make that trip soon.