The first stop was at some aboriginal carvings. I just assumed these would be on the side of a cliff or cave. Instead, we found that the sandstone (which is mostly what the ground is made of) is called “tessellated pavement”, meaning that it has deep lines that make “pavers” on the ground. It looks very much like a sidewalk or patio that someone had laid, except the lines between the pavers are deeper.
Anyhow, these carvings are in the flat stones, like a little kid would write on the sidewalk with chalk. The pics are a little tough – they obviously don’t want you walking on them, so there’s some distance, and it was raining again, so everything was wet. They don’t have any idea when they were done or how old they are, either, since the culture didn’t date things in that way. There tend to be anatomically correct men and women, fish, and animals. The thought is that in their belief system, drawing pictures of the critters would make for a good hunt.
It was fascinating to see these things and recognize that they’re thousands of years old and still there. Although they’re not sure exactly how the were made, they theorize that individual holes were chipped in the stone and then the dividers were broken out to make the lines.
A number of aboriginal words have made their way into location names here. Being used to Pushmataha, Osage and Pottawatamie Counties, this didn’t surprise me. Words that are repeated are used to emphasize the “moreness” of something. Thus, Woggawogga means “deep water”. Curracurra (I think) is now a town and was an original location of a “borra ring”, where young boys were initiated into manhood in the aboriginal culture. This involved burning, tattooing and scarring, among other things, and was apparently quite involved. If I got my notes right, Curracurra means something along the lines of, “place where young men begin a long journey of life”.
