About the Chumash Indians

The paintings (circa 1000 ad)

The Chumash, according to the explorers, made lavish use of color. They painted their faces and their bodies, their spears and bows and arrows. The women stained their buckskin skirts red. The planked canoes were painted red, and painted boards and poles marked their cemeteries and ceremonial enclosures. Of their color work, nothing remains but the mysterious rock paintings on cliffs and in caverns hidden from the sight of the Spanish in the remote and rugged mountains. Such painted rocks are called pictographs to distinguish them from petroglyphs, which are designs pecked, incised, or abraded in rock.

The Chumash neither thought as we do, nor did they interpret their ideas as we would. To them the supernatural was as real and as readily visual as the natural. It seems likely that most of the abstract paintings in the Chumash country are visualizations of supernatural beings or forces to be used ceremonially in much the same manner as the Navajo sand figures. Many of their pictures certainly represented things that existed only in the mind of the painter. Others were regional and stylistic formulas to represent objects, creatures, and phenomena known to the shamans of the area. In the western states, there are doubtless some rock pictures that record events, but this does not seem to be true of the southern California abstract pictographs.