- Author: Robert J Keiffer
There are two types of Native American rock-art found at the UC-Hopland Research and Extension Center. The more recent work (<1800 years) was done by the Pomo tribes and examples are scattered around Mendocino County. However, there is a very ancient rock- art style that is from a pre-Pomo era, and probably was created between 2000 and 8000 years ago. The style of rock-art has been termed "Pecked Curvilinear Nucleated" (PCN) in the science of archeology. The term was originally proposed by Teresa Miller and Reed Haslam in 1976 to described this widespread type of rock carving in western North America.
It is characterized by a circular or oval groove (curvilinear) that has been hammered out with a tool (pecked) and usually results in a raised center area (nucleated), however occasionally the center area has also been removed (as the far right one in the photo shows).
This rock-art style is quite prevalent in California (about 84 sites in all) and Mendocino County has a few of them, with the majority of those (seven of them) found at HREC. Usually found on serpentinite rocks, one such rock at HREC has split in half at some point in time, and split a PCN also in half, allowing archeologist Donna Gillette to investigate the era of the split, thus hopefully revealing the most conservative age of the rock-art. Further information can be found if you google or bing "PCN + rockart".