![]() ![]() ![]() Fate Bell is incredibly important for a handful of reasons including (but not limited to): its size, its location within in a major canyon with springs feeding into the Rio Grande, and the preserved perishable artifacts recovered in various excavations.ĭuring the documentation of any given site for the Alexandria Project it always begins by the crew walking in, placing our packs down, and taking a look around. ![]() That’s right, the majority of a shelter that is over 157 meters long is almost completely covered in rock art! Add to that a small collection of figurative petroglyphs, and Fate Bell truly has it all. For our non-metric friends, those measurements are about 515 feet by 98 feet! The sheer volume of archaeological features is truly astounding: a massive burned rock midden occupies the interior section of the site, bedrock grinding features and deeply incised grooves adorn the tops of boulders scattered across the site, and the majority of the shelter wall is covered in rock art. Fate Bell spans approximately 157 meters across by 30 meters at the deepest point and contains countless shelter wall faces and angles. In the end, it was all worth it… This is our story of the Alexandria Project documentation of the pictographs at Fate Bell Shelter in Seminole Canyon State Park.įor those of you who aren’t familiar with Fate Bell Shelter, It is located within Seminole Canyon State Park ( ) and is considered the largest rockshelter in the region. Throughout those 10 days, we worked hard, sweated hard, laughed, cried, shouted with excitement, and shouted with frustration. It was a good thing we had so many sites under our belt (95 when we started Fate Bell) and we were as prepared as we could be, but there are always surprises. When dealing with a handful of problems, especially at relatively small rock art sites, you can manage however, when tackling a site like Fate Bell you are presented with all of these challenges at once and it can become a bit overwhelming. Thus far we have recorded over 136 sites for the Alexandria Project and have found each site presents very specific challenges such as poor lighting, odd viewing angles, obstructions blocking the rock art, low or high ceilings, and many more occur regularly-and that’s ok. If we had tried to tackle this site at the beginning of the project it easily would have taken us twice as long. By the end of it, Fate Bell took 10 days of field work to complete. A typical rock art site may take us only a few hours to complete our baseline level of documentation, while a larger site will turn into a multi-day endeavor. We knew from the beginning of The Alexandria Project that documenting Fate Bell Shelter was going to be a monumental task. ![]()
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