This is the second part of my column on Carved Stone Model Landscapes.
There are examples of boulders carved to resemble landscapes much closer to home as well. In 2017 Rory P. Gauthier and Emily J. Brown published a paper about carved landscapes on the Pajarito Plateau in New Mexico. These were carved into volcanic tuff boulders. The first one described was on the Tsankawi Unit of Bandelier National Monument. “LA 65742 is known as Doll House, an apt name. It is situated at the base of an unnamed mesa separating Los Alamos Canyon from Pueblo Canyon in the Tsankawi Unit of Bandelier National Monument. It consists of three carved tuff boulders. The most elaborate is the Doll House—a boulder .8 x 1 m in size carved with two ascending roads leading to a house with five or six stories that is 50 x 50 cm square. Two staircases have been carved into the northeast and southwest ends of the house; of all the carved boulders we documented, this is the only one that exhibited stairs. They lend credence to the interpretation that it represents a miniature pueblo, and it is somewhat reminiscent of North House at Taos Pueblo.” (Gauthier and Brown 2017:93-94)
The next two examples are found in a large site that Gauthier and Brown refer to as the Hannaford Site. “Named for archaeologist Charles Hannaford (who, as a small boy, played around this cluster of carved boulders on the rim of Pueblo Canyon) and situated on the south rim of Pueblo Canyon, the Hannaford Site has two loci separated by a residential street.” (Gauthier and Brown 2017:95)
The one they identify as feature 5 resembles a stereotypical pueblo. “Two features in particular are remarkable for the extent of the carving and their representational qualities. Feature 5, titled Home Sweet Home, is a large bedrock boulder with an extensive complex of roads, courtyards or plazas, and houses, some of which are multistory. The buildings vary in shape and are rectangular, triangular, D-shaped, L-shaped, or simply irregular. A small hole on the north side of the rock may be a purposefully carved cavate; it is 8 cm in diameter. The boulder would appear to represent an entire village or pueblo.” (Gauthier and Brown 2017:95)
Then Gauthier and Brown’s feature 12 was named for its resemblanc e to the Inca carved boulders showing agricultural terraces. “We called Feature 12 Inca House for its resemblance to extensively terraced Inca agricultural sites. Made up of three tuff bedrock boulders, the feature lacks the road and house creations carved into so many of the other boulders at the site. Instead, the large boulder was carved with ten levels of terraces over an area 3.5 x 1.8 m in size. They generally follow the contours of the rock, but employ straight lines and angled corners rather than curves to do so. The much smaller ancillary boulder to the southeast has three incised pits. On the west side, another smaller boulder exhibits a deeply carved road or cleft that angles directly toward a small cavity in the main boulder that may represent a cavate.” (Gauthier and Brown 2017:95) Gauthier and Brown’s ‘Inca House’ very much resembles the examples found in the Sondondo Valley of Peru.
They note a number of other examples of worked boulders and bedrock at this Hannaford Site but their descriptions of these sound much more like traditional rock art with carved faces, lines, and pathways. Based upon lichen growth on the carvings and dendochronological dating of a fir tree growing out of a crack in a boulder with signs of carving on it Gauthier and Brown assign a tentative date of between 1910 and 1940 to the carved models. (Gauthier and Brown 2017:103)
So, who made these? They appear to be fairly young and show tool marks that imply metal tools. “Manufacturing techniques: Some of the features at the Tsankawi sites and those located on the rim of Los Alamos Canyon exhibit manufacturing scars indicative of metal tool use. Many of the features are sufficiently eroded to give no indication of manufacture techniques, but given the soft nature of tuff, the stone can even be shaped with a sharp stick. Obviously the marks left by metal tools (possibly a hatchet or chisel and the claw of a hammer or crowbar) indicate a historic date of manufacture.” (Gauthier and Brown 2017:103)
There was a private school that might have been implicated in the creation of the carved stones. “We believe the most likely suspects were students from the Los Alamos Ranch School. The school catered to young men from east coast, well to-do families, and endorsed outdoor activities— favoring horseback riding, camping, and hiking— as well as academics. The school was established in 1917 and closed in 1943 when it was taken over by the United States Army for the Manhattan project. This is the same timeframe in which our research suggests the model villages were created. In addition to matching the timeframe, there are other lines of evidence that point to the students at the Ranch School. The horseback riding and hiking that were part of the school’s curriculum utilized a number of local trails and roads for these activities, including a trail that entered Pueblo Canyon near the location of the Hannaford site, the Breakneck Trail that entered Los Alamos Canyon, and the original road to Los Alamos, all of which gave access to the Tsankawi area.” (Gauthier and Brown 2017:105). This school, dedicated to healthy outdoor activities and college preparation was where Los Alamos is today. “The students lived near the Hannaford Site, had easy access to it, and probably used the area as a place to get away from the daily regimentation of the school. They would also have had the time to create the many boulder sculptures. During their outdoor activities, the students would have had access to the Tsankawi Unit as well. In addition, the students would have traveled in the northern Rio Grande region and would have been familiar with nearby Native American and Hispanic settlements as well as the Ancestral Pueblo site of Puye and those located at Frijoles Canyon, Tsankawi and Otowi. They therefore would have had the knowledge of the local architecture and could have recreated these details in their sculptures.” (Gauthier and Brown 2017:106)
I would be very interested to find more material on these carved stones. If any of my readers have images or knowledge of them please contact RockArtBlog. Thank you.
NOTE: Some images in this column were retrieved from the internet with a search for public domain photographs. If any of these images are not intended to be public domain, I apologize, and will happily provide the picture credits if the owner will contact me with them. For further information on these reports you should read the original reports at the sites listed below. Additionally, some of the quotations I have included have had citations removed from their text. These can also be acquired from the original texts.
REFERENCES:
Christie, Jessica Joyce, 2012, A New Look at Q’enqo as a Model of Inka Visual Representation, Reproduction, and Spatial Structure, Ethnohistory 59:3 (Summer 2012). DOI 10.1215/00141801-1587478.
Cmielewski, Bartlomiej et al., 2020, Digital close-range photogrammetry of El Fuerte de Samaipata, Architectus, Vol. 2, No. 62, pp. 35-42. DOI:10.37190/arc200206. Accessed online 30 September 2026.
Gauthier, Rory P., and Emily J. Brown, 2017, Does Size Really Matter? Carved Boulders on the Pajarito Plateau, pp. 91-107, from Parallel Passions, A Life Together in Archaeology, Papers in Honor of Karl W. Laumbach and Toni S. Laumbach, Papers of the Archaeological Society of New Mexico, Volume 43, Edited by Emily J. Brown, Carol J. Condie, and Helen K. Crotty.
Nina, Freddy Leon, and Antonio
Pizarro Ñahui,
2025, Petroglyphs and Pictographs:
Interpretation of rock art linked to water sources, terraces and astronomy,
Kazakhstan Archeology 2 (28), https://doi.org/10.52967/akz2025.2.28.159.180.
Accessed online 24 September 2026.
Pazstory, Esther, 1998, Pre-Columbian Art, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Powell, Eric A., 2026, Cultivating Fields of Stone, Archaeology, Vol. 79, No. 5, pp. 36-41.
Wikipedia, El Fuerte de Samaipata, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Fuerte_de_Samaipata
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