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without any optical means of assistance, such as that afforded by raking arti¤cial or early morning light. Our recording of the majority of the glyphs was made possible only by touch, in which engraved surfaces are only distinguishable by their satinlike, smooth surface. Even at their most legible, the precise edges of each image had to be interpreted, as there is no precise boundary evident to hand or eye. The uncarved crystalline limestone surface is rough and irregular. The glyphs are visible to tourists today only because they have been ¤lled in with black crayon, a technique deplored today by rock-art specialists and conservators but not recognized as a problem in the pioneering 1960s era of Canadian rock-art research. The limestone surface surrounding the deepest crevice, in particular, which bisects the site diagonally at a width of about 1 foot and a depth over 10 feet, gives evidence of innumerable eroded carvings, dense and completely indistinguishable to either hand or eye or to any scienti¤c optical device. The Canadian Conservation Institute commissioned a costly remapping of the site, skeptical that one person’s interpretation by hand and eye provided a suf¤ciently accurate record. Their map coincided perfectly with our original map, with the exception of a minor deviation in one glyph. The most ancient glyphs have eroded so completely that the entire surface is satiny smooth and the only reason any glyphs in that area can be distinguished at all is that the more recent glyphs are larger and more deeply carved into the limestone surface. It is clear that the petroglyphs were not carved all at once by either Natives or Norse in one campaign and it is entirely possible that the earliest glyphs were carved during the Early or Middle Woodland period (1000 b.c.–a.d. 500) or even during the Archaic period (5000–1000 b.c.). But this latter fact, the density and obscurity of the oldest glyphs, made our interpretation of the outlines and boundaries of the more recent glyphs that overlapped them a considerable challenge. This was particularly the case with the largest boat image in that area (Figure 16.1a), the same boat that Kelley claims to resemble the Bronze Age Bohuslan ship carvings. To this day, we have qualms about the accuracy of that recorded image, owing to the innumerable worn-out glyphs that it overlaps and the uncertainty of whether the sun-topped “mast” belongs to the boat or to an older underlying sun-¤gure akin to the larger sun-¤gure to the upper left of the area in question, as well as the uncertainty of whether the strange shape above and the “steering sweep” below are similarly unrelated. The important point to be made here is that the mapping of the site is our interpretation, our reading, and for both Fell and Kelley to rely upon our book alone as their method of “scienti ¤c” inquiry is downright laughable as well as bad “science.” Even if our recorded interpretation of the boat image is correct, Kelley’s comparison of it to the Bronze Age Bohuslan ship carvings would still not The Peterborough Petroglyphs 283 hold water for more than one reason. The boats carved at the Peterborough Petroglyphs site may exhibit some general similarity to pre–Bronze Age Scandinavian rock-art images, as we ourselves originally noted (Vastokas and Vastokas 1973:123), but we also noted at the same time that boats with central “masts” topped by a round or solar disk are abundant in the rock-art of Siberia and northern Russia (see Okladnikov 1971; Ravdonikas 1936, 1938), a fact that Kelley completely overlooks or chooses to ignore. Moreover, in the Bohuslan ship carvings the associated sun motifs are represented not as rayed disks, but as spoked wheels. This is a crucial difference in iconography and meaning. The spoked wheel motif, which permeates the iconography of Bronze Age Scandinavian rock-art, is a widespread and central icon of the European Bronze Age in general. It is a motif that originated sometime between 4000 and 3000 b.c. in association with the domestication of the horse and the development of the wheel somewhere in central Eurasia. Likely originating in the steppes of Russia and the Ukraine alongside the domestication of the horse and wheeled vehicles, the motif spread with the Indo-European diaspora eastward to northern India and westward to Europe (see Gelling and Davidson 1969; Green 1991; Mallory 1989; Sandars 1968:180). While native...

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