New Mexico Rock Art, Petroglyphs & Pictographs — A Collector’s Guide to the Literature

Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred

Why the rock art book literature deserves its own collector reference

Rock Art & Petroglyphs books, including Indian Rock Art of the Southwest (1980), are sought-after collectibles commanding premium prices among Southwest and Western Americana collectors. New Mexico contains more published, formally documented rock art than any other state in the American Southwest. It is home to two of the largest rock art concentrations on the continent — Petroglyph National Monument on the basalt escarpment west of Albuquerque (over 25,000 images) and Three Rivers Petroglyph Site on a rhyolite ridge in the Tularosa Basin (over 21,000 images) — and to dozens of additional sites with concentrated rock art panels: the Galisteo Basin sites south of Santa Fe, Comanche Gap on the Galisteo River, La Cieneguilla near San Felipe Pueblo, Huapoca Canyon in the Gila Wilderness, Pueblo Blanco in the Estancia Basin, and the rock art embedded in and around the great houses of Chaco Canyon. The publication record that documents this visual heritage is large, spans more than a century, and ranges from institutional monographs of genuine scholarly importance to field guides of modest research value to popular treatments that have shaped — and sometimes distorted — public understanding of what petroglyphs mean and who made them.

Collectors intersect this literature from several directions. The archaeology collector building a New Mexico shelf needs to know where rock art scholarship fits relative to the broader archaeological literature. The Southwestern art and culture collector recognizes that the visual iconography of rock art — the fluteplayer, the horned serpent, the kachina mask, the spiral calendar marker — flows directly into the living ceremonial traditions of Pueblo peoples and into the commercial art traditions of Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos; understanding the source literature places the derivative materials in context. The visual-culture collector is drawn to rock art books as documents of a pre-literate visual tradition that is both archaeologically attested and culturally continuous. And the general New Mexico regional collector encounters rock art titles constantly in donation piles and estate dispersals without always knowing how to distinguish the landmark scholarship from the tourist-grade field guide.

This pillar was built to address that problem. It identifies the essential titles, establishes the three-tier collector market, documents points of issue for key editions, explains the scholarly controversies that define the field, and situates the literature within the broader context of New Mexico archaeology publishing. As with all NMLP pillar pages, it is part of the reference infrastructure supporting the operation of NMLP’s central New Mexico book donation service: knowing what a Schaafsma 1980 SAR hardcover looks like means it is recognized when it comes through a donation pile rather than being routed to landfill alongside mass-market paperback tourist guides. Donor contributions fund this specialized identification work, and my book evaluation services ensure trophy items reach appropriate collectors.

Polly Schaafsma and the systematic study of Southwestern rock art

Polly Schaafsma is the central figure of Southwestern rock art scholarship and the author whose work defines the intellectual framework within which all subsequent researchers have operated. Her career is inseparable from the institutional infrastructure of Santa Fe anthropological publishing: her two principal monographs were published by the School of American Research and the Museum of New Mexico Press, the same institutions that produced the majority of significant New Mexico archaeology and anthropology scholarship across the twentieth century. Understanding Schaafsma’s work — its scope, its methodology, its arguments, and its limitations — is the necessary prerequisite for understanding the entire rock art book literature.

Schaafsma is a painter as well as a scholar, and her sensitivity to visual form shapes the quality of her documentation and analysis in ways that distinguish her work from purely archaeological treatments of the same material. She approaches rock art as a visual tradition with identifiable stylistic conventions, regional variants, and historical development — applying the same kind of art-historical style analysis that one would bring to, say, a regional tradition of European manuscript illumination — while grounding the stylistic observations in archaeological context. The combination is what gives her work its lasting authority.

A crucial precursor to both of Schaafsma’s major books is her 1975 publication Rock Art in New Mexico issued by the New Mexico State Planning Office (Santa Fe, 1975) under the Cultural Properties Review Committee program. This is an entirely separate publication from the 1992 Museum of NM Press book of the same title — a fact that causes persistent confusion in dealer listings and library catalogs. The 1975 State Planning Office volume was produced as part of a state cultural resource survey program and had a limited institutional print run. It is genuinely scarce on the open market and represents the first systematic published inventory of New Mexico rock art sites as a cultural resource management document. When it surfaces in donation piles or estate dispersals, it is almost always misdated or mislabeled as the 1992 trade publication. Collector market: the mid-range collectible zone when correctly identified; frequently misprice at field-guide values by dealers who conflate it with the 1992 book.

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The Kokopelli literature — Slifer, Duffield, and the fluteplayer monograph

Among the hundreds of recognizable motifs in Southwestern rock art, Kokopelli — the humpbacked fluteplayer — has achieved a cultural afterlife entirely disproportionate to its frequency in the archaeological record. The figure appears on t-shirts, restaurant logos, jewelry, welcome mats, and yard ornaments throughout Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and every tourist market in the Southwest. This commercial ubiquity has had a paradoxical effect on the book collector’s market: it has generated enormous popular interest in the fluteplayer image while making it difficult for non-specialists to distinguish between serious scholarship and tourist-grade picture books using the same subject.

The fluteplayer figure has deep roots in the prehistoric Southwest. Images of a flute-playing figure appear in rock art from at least the Basketmaker period (roughly 1–500 CE) forward, with the frequency and geographic distribution increasing significantly during the Pueblo III and Pueblo IV periods (1100–1600 CE). The precise cultural meaning of the figure varies by region and period and has been interpreted through multiple frameworks: a deity associated with rain, crops, and fertility; a traveling trader bringing exotic goods and possibly genetic exchange to isolated communities; a shaman figure associated with music and altered states; or a clan or lineage symbol specific to particular Pueblo communities. The erotic or phallic variant of the figure — common in some regions — connects the fluteplayer directly to fertility and reproductive symbolism. In the living Hopi tradition, Kokopelli (known in Hopi as Kookopölö) is identified with specific kachina figures and ceremonial roles, providing an ethnographic anchor for at least some of the prehistoric imagery.

Dennis Slifer’s follow-up monograph is a second essential title in the fluteplayer and related imagery literature.

The Martineau controversy — translation, pseudoscience, and cultural politics

No book in the rock art literature has been more influential with general audiences and more thoroughly rejected by specialists than La Van Martineau’s The Rocks Begin to Speak (Las Vegas: KC Publications, 1973). Understanding why the book was written, why it became popular, and why professionals reject it is necessary background for any serious collector or researcher who will inevitably encounter enthusiastic recommendations for it from non-specialists.

La Van Martineau grew up on the Southern Paiute reservation in Utah, was adopted into the Beaver Band of Southern Paiutes, and spent decades studying petroglyphs across the Great Basin and Southwest. He proposed that Native American rock art constitutes a systematic writing system — a language of visual symbols with consistent grammatical rules that can be translated into English propositions about history, territory, migration, and event. He claimed to have derived these rules from oral tradition preserved by Southern Paiute elders and from his own pattern analysis. The resulting “translations” he applied throughout The Rocks Begin to Speak convert petroglyph panels into specific historical narratives: accounts of battles, treaties, territorial boundaries, warnings to travelers.

The professional rejection of Martineau’s system is not a matter of academic gatekeeping or cultural dismissiveness toward a self-trained Native researcher. It rests on methodological failures that are fatal to any knowledge claim: the proposed grammar is untestable because it cannot be applied independently by a different analyst to produce the same translation; the “translations” are not corroborated by any other evidence from the sites in question; and when independent researchers attempted to apply Martineau’s rules to panels he had not analyzed, the results were inconsistent and not replicable. Schaafsma, David Whitley (whose The Art of the Shaman presents the competing neuropsychological model for Great Basin rock art interpretation), and the broader professional community have been consistently critical since the book’s publication.

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Field guides and reference works — Patterson, Cole, and the popular literature

Below the tier of major scholarly monographs, the rock art literature includes a substantial body of field guides, site guides, and popular surveys that circulate widely in the used-book market. Knowing these titles — their relative quality, their collector values, and their relationship to the scholarly literature — is essential for anyone processing donation piles or estate dispersals containing Southwest regional books.

Also in the popular register: Rock Art of the American Southwest, which has appeared under various author attributions in the Timber Press and similar trade paperback programs. These are visually attractive survey books with strong photographic content and thin interpretive apparatus. They trade common reading copy range and are common in thrift stores throughout the region. The primary collector utility of these books is that they were often purchased alongside better scholarly titles and travel together in estate dispersals; finding one of these in a donation pile is a signal to look carefully for a Schaafsma or a Slifer in the same collection.

Key sites and their documentary literature

The rock art book literature is structured in part around specific sites, and collectors need to know both the general scholarly literature and the site-specific publications that document individual concentrations of imagery.

Petroglyph National Monument, Albuquerque

Petroglyph National Monument, established in 1990, protects approximately 7,244 acres along the seventeen-mile-long West Mesa escarpment on the western edge of Albuquerque. The monument contains over 25,000 images — the largest single concentration of rock art within a major American metropolitan area. The images span roughly 3,000 years of occupation: the earliest are abstract marks associated with Archaic-period peoples; the most numerous are Rio Grande Style petroglyphs created by ancestral Tiwa-speaking Pueblo peoples during the Pueblo IV period (1300–1600 CE); Spanish colonial inscriptions and crosses appear in the historic period; and recent additions (some deliberately made by contemporary Pueblo artists as ceremonial acts) continue the living tradition of the escarpment as a place of cultural significance.

The management of Petroglyph National Monument is unusual: the monument is administered jointly by the National Park Service and the City of Albuquerque (through the Albuquerque Open Space Division), and the Pueblo of Laguna and Pueblo of Acoma have formal consultation relationships with the monument. This complicated jurisdictional structure has been a source of political conflict, particularly over proposed road extensions through the monument and over land transfers at the Boca Negra and Rinconada Canyon units. The NPS produced a series of management and interpretive publications through the 1990s and 2000s that document the imagery and the controversies; these are not widely circulated on the commercial book market but surface occasionally in estate dispersals and are worth identifying.

Three Rivers Petroglyph Site, Tularosa Basin

Three Rivers Petroglyph Site, administered by the Bureau of Land Management’s Las Cruces District, is a BLM National Back Country Byway and Special Recreation Management Area containing over 21,000 petroglyphs concentrated on a north-trending rhyolite ridge approximately five miles north of Three Rivers, New Mexico, at an elevation of around 5,000 feet in the eastern foothills of the Sierra Blanca range. The imagery is classic Jornada Mogollon Style: elaborate mask-like faces with large staring eyes and complex geometric infill; horned and feathered anthropomorphs; macaws and parrots (reflecting the sustained Mesoamerican trade connection that brought live macaws northward through Casas Grandes / Paquimé in Chihuahua); mountain lion and mountain sheep hunt scenes; and geometric patterns of extraordinary complexity and precision. The concentration of imagery — panel after panel for over a mile of ridge — is unlike anything in the Rio Grande region and constitutes the largest and finest expression of the Jornada style anywhere.

The site is also directly associated with a ruined Jornada Mogollon pueblo (listed on the National Register of Historic Places separately from the petroglyph ridge) and with a nearby partially-excavated structure. The documentary literature for Three Rivers is thinner than for Petroglyph National Monument: there is no equivalent of the Schaafsma synthesis focused specifically on the site, and the BLM site guides are brief. The best scholarly treatment remains the relevant chapters in Schaafsma’s 1980 and 1992 books, supplemented by articles in the American Indian Rock Art annual proceedings volumes of the American Rock Art Research Association (ARARA).

Galisteo Basin, Comanche Gap, and Chaco Canyon

The Galisteo Basin sites — a cluster of large Pueblo IV period pueblos in the basin south of Santa Fe, including San Cristobal, Pueblo Largo, Pueblo Blanco, San Marcos, and others — contain extensive rock art panels that are among the best documentation of Rio Grande Style imagery in its peak period of production. The association with large aggregated pueblos (each of which may have housed thousands of residents during the 1300–1600 CE period) makes the Galisteo Basin a crucial test case for understanding rock art as a component of Pueblo IV social life rather than as isolated marking of territory or resources. Comanche Gap, a specific pass in the Galisteo sandstone formation, contains a concentration of warrior and hunt imagery that has been interpreted as associated with both ceremonial and territorial functions. The Basin is extensively covered in Schaafsma’s 1992 book.

Chaco Canyon contains rock art that is distinct from the dominant Rio Grande Style in both imagery and function. The most famous Chaco rock art feature is the Fajada Butte sun dagger, documented by Anna Sofaer and colleagues beginning in the late 1970s: a spiral petroglyph on the east face of Fajada Butte that is bisected by a dagger of light at summer solstice noon, and bracketed by two daggers at winter solstice, with a horizon marker for equinox. Sofaer’s 1977 discovery and subsequent documentation (reported in Science magazine and in the documentary film The Sun Dagger, 1982) brought archaeoastronomical rock art research to widespread public attention and stimulated a decade of work on astronomical alignments at Chaco great houses and in the canyon’s broader road system. The Chaco archaeoastronomy literature — Sofaer, Kim Malville, and others — is a distinct publishing stream within the rock art literature with its own collector identity.

Tsankawi, Bandelier, and the Pajarito Plateau

The Pajarito Plateau — the tuff mesa country between Los Alamos and Española, drained by canyons running east to the Rio Grande — contains significant rock art embedded in the cliff faces and cave dwellings of the same ancestral Tewa-speaking communities that produced Tsankawi, Otowi, Tyuonyi, and the other large Pueblo IV settlements documented by Edgar Lee Hewett in the early twentieth century. Bandelier National Monument preserves the most accessible of these; Tsankawi, a detached unit of Bandelier north of Pojoaque, contains a particularly fine panel accessible via a short trail. The Pajarito Plateau rock art is primarily Rio Grande Style but with specific features associated with the Tewa-speaking pueblos of the northern Rio Grande — distinctive mask types, particular bird imagery, and connections to the modern ceremonial traditions of San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, Pojoaque, Nambé, Tesuque, and Ohkay Owingeh pueblos. The rock art here is not well served by a dedicated monograph; the best coverage is in Schaafsma’s books and in various Bandelier National Monument interpretive publications.

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The two great New Mexico rock art styles — Jornada Mogollon and Rio Grande

To engage seriously with the rock art book literature, a collector needs to understand the fundamental distinction between the two principal style traditions of New Mexico rock art. Polly Schaafsma named and systematically described both in her 1980 book; subsequent researchers have refined and debated the details, but the essential framework remains hers.

The Jornada Mogollon Style is associated with the Mogollon people of the desert basins and low mountains of southern New Mexico and adjacent areas: the Tularosa Basin, the Jornada del Muerto (the “journey of the dead man,” the waterless stretch of the historic Camino Real south of Socorro), the northern Chihuahuan Desert, and westward into the Gila country. Jornada rock art is concentrated from approximately 900 to 1400 CE, with the peak of production around 1000–1200 CE. Its distinctive features: elaborate anthropomorphic masks with large circular eyes and complex geometric infill (believed to represent deity or spirit beings analogous to the kachina figures of later Rio Grande tradition); horned and plumed serpents that connect to Mesoamerican iconographic traditions; parrots and macaws whose feathers and live birds were obtained through long-distance trade with Casas Grandes (Paquimé) in northern Chihuahua; abstract geometric designs of extraordinary complexity; and fertility imagery including the fluteplayer and phallic figures. Three Rivers is the premier site; Hueco Tanks (in the Franklin Mountains near El Paso) and numerous smaller sites throughout the Tularosa Basin and adjacent ranges express the same tradition.

The Rio Grande Style is associated with the western Pueblo peoples of the Rio Grande Valley and its tributaries during the Pueblo IV period (approximately 1300–1600 CE). This was the era when Pueblo peoples aggregated into very large communities (some with hundreds of ground-floor rooms and populations in the thousands), long-distance trade networks intensified, and the kachina ceremonial complex — with its masked-dancer performances, elaborate ritual paraphernalia, and connection to rain and agricultural fertility — became the dominant religious institution across the western Pueblo world. Rio Grande Style rock art reflects this ceremonial florescence directly: it is dominated by kachina masks and figures (sometimes clearly recognizable as specific kachinas still performed in living Pueblo communities), by bird imagery especially parrots and eagles (connected to kachina and warrior ceremonialism), by star symbols, cloud terraces, and rain imagery, and by warrior and hunt iconography. The style is found throughout the Rio Grande drainage from Taos south to the El Paso area, with the densest concentrations at Petroglyph National Monument (primarily Tiwa and affiliated imagery) and in the Galisteo Basin (primarily Towa and Keresan imagery from the large basin pueblos).

The relationship between the Jornada Mogollon Style and the Rio Grande Style is a key research question. Schaafsma and others have argued for significant iconographic continuity — that mask imagery and serpent figures central to the Jornada Style were incorporated into the emerging Rio Grande Style as the kachina complex spread northward through the Pueblo world — and have pointed to sites in the northern Tularosa Basin and the T or C area where the two traditions appear to overlap chronologically and visually. This hypothesis connects the two most important New Mexico rock art traditions to a shared Mesoamerican-influenced iconographic tradition and locates the origins of the kachina complex partly in the desert south.

Dating rock art — methods, limitations, and the literature

One of the most consequential research questions in rock art studies — and one of the most technically demanding — is the question of when individual images were created. Without chronological control, stylistic analysis can describe and compare images but cannot establish whether observed patterns reflect simultaneous production by related communities or gradual accumulation over millennia. The dating literature is technically specialized but has generated accessible discussions in the general rock art literature.

Desert varnish cation-ratio (CR) dating was developed by Ronald Dorn in the mid-1980s as a method for measuring the relative depletion of mobile cations (potassium and calcium relative to titanium) in the desert varnish layer that coats and accumulates over rock surfaces including petroglyphs. The principle: after a petroglyph is created, desert varnish begins re-forming over the carved surface; the cation-ratio of that re-deposited varnish is progressively depleted over time, providing a measure of elapsed time since the petroglyph was made. Dorn applied the method to petroglyphs at numerous sites including Petroglyph National Monument and obtained age estimates suggesting some Albuquerque West Mesa petroglyphs were many thousands of years old. The method attracted intense attention — it appeared to offer the long-sought tool for direct absolute dating of petroglyphs. However, subsequent researchers found the method unreliable: varnish accumulation rates are too variable to support absolute chronologies, and independent blind tests of the CR method produced inconsistent results that undermined its credibility for site-specific dating. The CR dating controversy is documented in a substantial technical literature; it also surfaces in accessible discussions in Schaafsma’s later work and in reviews of Petroglyph National Monument research.

AMS radiocarbon dating of organic carbon in pictograph pigments (when present) or in materials sealed beneath re-varnished petroglyphs can provide genuine absolute dates but requires conditions that are rarely met and micro-sampling techniques that carry risk of image damage. Most pictograph pigments are mineral-based (hematite, manganese) rather than organic; where organic binders (blood, plant gum, fat) were used, AMS dating is in principle possible. The method has been applied successfully to pictographs in the lower Pecos River region (where a series of well-preserved painted sites have been dated to 2,000–4,000 years BP) but has seen more limited application in New Mexico proper.

Style seriation remains the most reliable approach for most New Mexico rock art contexts. This method compares rock art motifs with the same imagery on dated ceramic vessels, architectural elements, and ceremonial objects from archaeological contexts with established chronologies. A mask-type or bird-figure appearing on dated Rio Grande Glazeware ceramics of the 1400–1500 CE horizon provides a date range for rock art panels bearing the same imagery type. Schaafsma’s 1980 and 1992 books are primarily built on style seriation; the method’s reliability depends on the quality of the ceramic chronologies and the specificity of the iconographic parallels.

Superimposition — where one image overlaps another — establishes relative sequences at individual panels: the underlying image must predate the overlying one. At sites with intensive production like Petroglyph National Monument, complex superimposition sequences can document multiple episodes of use. The method is limited to establishing relative sequence and cannot yield calendar dates without additional chronological anchors.

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ARPA, protection law, and the ethics of site disclosure

The legal framework protecting rock art on federal and tribal lands in New Mexico is the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 (ARPA; 16 U.S.C. 470aa et seq.), supplemented by the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA; 1966, substantially amended 1992), the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA; 1990), and relevant New Mexico state statutes including the Cultural Properties Act (1969). Under ARPA, excavating, removing, damaging, altering, or defacing any archaeological resource on federal or tribal land without a federal permit is a criminal offense; penalties range from fines and probation for a first misdemeanor offense to investment-grade prices fines and five years imprisonment for commercial trafficking in archaeological materials. ARPA explicitly covers rock art: chalking petroglyphs (applying chalk or chalk-based dust to increase contrast for photography), rubbing panels, damaging surfaces, or removing flakes with rock art marks are all covered acts on federal and tribal land.

The tension between ARPA protection and publication is a persistent ethical problem in the rock art literature. Publishing precise site locations — GPS coordinates, trail directions to remote panels — can direct vandals and looters to sites that were previously protected by obscurity. Most published books and journal articles in the professional literature deliberately withhold locational data beyond general site names for sites not already known to the broad public; this practice is standard in American Rock Art Research Association (ARARA) publication guidelines and in the editorial policies of the major peer-reviewed rock art journals. Some site guides and popular books, particularly older ones from the 1970s and 1980s, included more specific location information before the current norms were established; these publications have been cited in connection with subsequent vandalism at the sites they describe.

Associated and comparative literature

Beyond the New Mexico-specific rock art titles, a serious collector identifies the broader Southwest rock art literature that provides comparative context for the New Mexico record. The critical titles in this comparative literature:

David Whitley, The Art of the Shaman: Rock Art of California (University of Utah Press, 2000) and the edited volume Handbook of Rock Art Research (AltaMira Press, 2001). Whitley is the principal American advocate of the neuropsychological / shamanistic interpretation of rock art — the theory, derived from cross-cultural neuropsychological research, that much rock art across the world represents visual experiences produced by altered states of consciousness (shamanic trance, vision questing, hallucinogen use) and that the imagery can be analyzed using a universal neuropsychological framework. This approach has been influential and controversial in Southwest contexts; Whitley himself has applied it to Great Basin rock art with detailed case studies. For New Mexico, the shamanic model is relevant particularly to the Archaic-period and early Formative imagery; its applicability to the kachina-complex Rio Grande Style imagery of the Pueblo IV period is more debated.

Campbell Grant’s earlier Rock Art of the American Indian (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1967) was the first widely distributed popular survey of North American rock art and introduced the subject to a generation of general readers. It is out of date as scholarship but important as a document of the field’s pre-professional popular phase. The 1967 Crowell first edition in dust jacket trades common reading copy range in the New Mexico market; it is common in thrift stores and estate sales throughout the Southwest.

The American Indian Rock Art annual volumes, published by the American Rock Art Research Association (ARARA) since the mid-1970s, are the primary peer-reviewed venue for current rock art research. Each volume collects papers from the annual ARARA symposium, covering individual sites, methodological questions, interpretive controversies, and regional surveys across North America. The early volumes (ARARA volume numbers 1–10, roughly 1975–1984) are increasingly difficult to find in complete runs; they contain foundational papers by Schaafsma, Wellmann, Cole, and others that preceded or coincided with the publication of the major monographs. A complete or near-complete run of the early ARARA volumes is a meaningful research collection that surfaces rarely and is priced inconsistently on the open market (the mid-range collectible zone per volume when correctly identified, often mislabeled as “newsletters” or “pamphlets”).

Klaus Wellmann’s A Survey of North American Indian Rock Art (Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, Graz, Austria, 1979) is a massive two-volume German-language publication by an Austrian scholar who became one of the most prolific early rock art researchers. The Wellmann survey predates Schaafsma’s 1980 book and covers the entire North American continent; it is more encyclopedic in its geographic scope but less analytically rigorous in its style analysis. For a collector, it represents the European scholarly interest in North American rock art that ran parallel to the American institutional literature during the same period. The Graz two-volume set is uncommon in American libraries and trades respectable collectible value when it surfaces.

The three-tier collector market — prices, identification, and what to look for

Rock art books occupy a distinct position in the New Mexico regional collecting market: less expensive and less hotly contested at auction than the major Southwestern pottery or kachina books, but with a small group of high-value scholarly first editions that are easily missed by general dealers and estate dispersal agents who classify them as “nature guides” or “Southwest art books.”

Tier 1 — Rare and high-value items (upper mid-range collectible value):

• Indian Rock Art of the Southwest, Schaafsma, SAR/UNM Press 1980, hardcover in dust jacket: serious collector territory fine; respectable collectible value good with worn jacket; solid mid-range collectible value without jacket.
• Rock Art in New Mexico, Schaafsma, State Planning Office / Cultural Properties Review Committee, Santa Fe, 1975 (not to be confused with the 1992 Museum of NM Press publication of the same title): the mid-range collectible zone when correctly identified.
• Early ARARA American Indian Rock Art annual proceedings volumes (Vol. 1–5, mid-1970s): solid mid-range collectible value per volume; complete early run serious collector territory.
• Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Reports and Bulletins containing relevant Southwestern imagery studies (Fewkes, Cushing, Mindelöff): respectable collectible value per volume depending on volume number and condition.

Tier 2 — Mid-range scholarly and regional works (the mid-range collectible zone):

• Rock Art in New Mexico, Schaafsma, Museum of NM Press 1992, first hardcover in dust jacket: solid mid-range collectible value.
• Kokopelli: Fluteplayer Images in Rock Art, Slifer and Duffield, Ancient City Press 1994, first edition: solid mid-range collectible value.
• The Serpent and the Sacred Fire, Slifer, Museum of NM Press 2000, first hardcover: solid mid-range collectible value.
• Malville and Putnam, Prehistoric Astronomy in the Southwest, Johnson Books 1989 first: the common reading copy to mid-range zone.
• Sofaer / Solstice Project publications on Chaco solar markers: the mid-range collectible zone depending on publication type.

Tier 3 — Common field guides and popular works (common reading copy range):

• A Field Guide to Rock Art Symbols, Patterson, Johnson Books 1992: common reading copy range.
• Legacy on Stone, Cole, Johnson Books 1990: common reading copy range.
• The Rocks Begin to Speak, Martineau, KC Publications 1973 and later printings: common reading copy range depending on printing.
• Rock Art of the American Southwest, various popular survey titles: common reading copy range.
• Petroglyph National Monument NPS visitor guides and site brochures: modest value.
• Three Rivers BLM site guides: modest value.

The critical identification skill for a dealer or donation-intake processor is distinguishing the Schaafsma 1980 SAR/UNM Press co-published hardcover from the later paperback printings and from the entirely separate 1992 Museum of NM Press Rock Art in New Mexico. The 1980 co-publication has the SAR institutional design (dark cloth binding, SAR colophon on spine or title page), the co-publication statement citing both Santa Fe and Albuquerque on the title page, and the 1980 copyright date. The 1992 Museum of NM Press book has the MNM Press design, a single Albuquerque imprint, and the 1992 copyright date. The 1975 State Planning Office edition (the scarcest of all) has neither commercial-publisher design; it is an institutional document without a dust jacket or standard trade binding.

Frequently asked questions

External research references

• Polly Schaafsma — Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_Schaafsma — biographical and bibliography entry on the preeminent authority in Southwestern rock art.
• La Van Martineau — Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Van_Martineau — biographical entry on the author of The Rocks Begin to Speak.
• Petroglyph National Monument — NPS: nps.gov/petr — the National Park Service site for the monument with visitor and research information.
• Petroglyph National Monument — Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroglyph_National_Monument — overview of the monument, its history, and its management.
• Three Rivers Petroglyph Site — Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Rivers_Petroglyph_Site — overview of the BLM-managed Jornada Mogollon site in the Tularosa Basin.
• Chaco Culture National Historical Park — NPS: nps.gov/chcu — the National Park Service site for Chaco Canyon including rock art and archaeoastronomy resources.
• Archaeological Resources Protection Act — Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeological_Resources_Protection_Act — the 1979 federal law protecting rock art on public and tribal lands.
• American Rock Art Research Association (ARARA): arara.org — the professional organization for rock art research; publisher of the annual American Indian Rock Art volumes and the journal American Indian Rock Art.
• Kokopelli — Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokopelli — overview of the fluteplayer figure, its distribution, and cultural significance.
• Jornada Mogollon — Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jornada_Mogollon — the cultural tradition associated with the principal rock art style of southern New Mexico.
• Fajada Butte / Chaco sun dagger — Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fajada_Butte — the Chaco Canyon butte containing the Sofaer sun dagger petroglyph.
• Museum of New Mexico Press: mnmpress.org — publisher of Schaafsma 1992, Slifer 2000, and numerous other New Mexico rock art and archaeology titles.
• School for Advanced Research: sarweb.org — the Santa Fe institution that co-published Schaafsma’s 1980 magnum opus.
• Bandelier National Monument — NPS: nps.gov/band — the Pajarito Plateau monument containing cliff-dwelling rock art in the northern Rio Grande tradition.

Related on this site

• All Pillar Pages — New Mexico Regional Reference Hub — the full index of NMLP pillar pages covering New Mexico book collecting by subject.
• Collecting New Mexico Archaeology Books — From Bandelier and Kidder to the SAR Press Tradition — the broader archaeology book pillar; rock art scholarship is embedded within this institutional context.
• Kachina and Katsina Books — A Collector’s Authority Guide — the ceremonial figure literature that directly intersects Rio Grande Style rock art iconography.
• New Mexico Native American Literature — A Collector’s Reference — the ethnographic and cultural companion to the visual record of rock art.
• New Mexico Astronomy and Dark Sky Books — A Collector’s Reference — the astronomical context for rock art solar-marker research.
• New Mexico Pueblo Pottery Books — A Collector’s Reference — the ceramic arts literature that shares iconographic traditions with rock art.
• The NMLP Donation Archive — the full open archive of regionally significant donated books.
• Free Book Pickup — Albuquerque — schedule the pickup.

Cite as: Eldred, Josh. “New Mexico Rock Art, Petroglyphs and Pictographs: A Collector’s Guide to the Literature.” New Mexico Literacy Project, May 14, 2026. https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/new-mexico-rock-art-petroglyphs-pictographs-books-collecting