An alcove in Canyon Del Muerto, Standing Cow Ruin, features a historic hogan—a hut built from rocks recycled from an ancient ruin—smooth sandstone walls streaked with a black patina, and pictographs (paintings on the rock wall) from different periods of indigenous habitation. The canyon is part of a national monument that preserves a record of occupancy spanning at least five thousand years, from the Ancestral Puebloans to the Navajo, who began settling in the canyon in the 1700s and continue to maintain traditions of farming and raising livestock.

This photograph shows part of a wall under a large overhang, decorated with images from various eras. A line of pictographs runs along the lower edge of the image, just above the rock ledges where the artists sat while painting on the rock surface. These white and yellow paintings, probably created by the Ancestral Puebloans in the 13th century, include handprints, concentric circles, and anthropomorphic stick figures.

On both sides (out of view) of this long wall's photographed section are important depictions of Navajo history. To the right stands a Navajo hogan beneath a pictograph of a standing cow and other painted figures and designs, likely created by the families that lived there during and before I took this photo 40 years ago. To the left are pictographs depicting a Spanish procession of horses and armed riders from an 1805 campaign that led to the massacre of over a hundred Navajo. Although named Canyon del Muerto (the canyon of the dead) after the discovery of prehistoric mummies in a nearby cave, the canyon also sadly evokes tribal memories of this 19th-century attack.