They look a little like doodles, whimsical Chinese characters or graffiti carved into rock by a Stone Age tagger.
The ancient markings are almost imperceptible until Gary D. Eyler, an Alexandriapicture framer and collector who discovered them while hiking a Potomac River tributary nearly 20 years ago, runs his finger over the tiny, human stick figures incised in stone.
The ancient carvings Gary Eyler discovered in Great Falls, Va., have been spray-painted all around them with graffiti but survived.
(Frank Johnston - The Washington Post)
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One is poised to hurl a spear. Another seems to have already chucked a spear using an atlatl, a hooked, sticklike device that propels a dart or spear with greater force.
The third figure stands splay-legged, holding the atlatl, or perhaps a pouch, or a dead animal, with one hand and pointing, or perhaps grasping a faintly drawn spear, with the other.
Viewed together, the figures seem to convey an animator's step-by-step illustration of the art of spear-throwing, a sort of cartoon for cave dwellers etched on a lichen-encrusted rock. Below, Difficult Run twists and splashes through a polished stone gorge in a brown-and-white ribbon of foam.
Eyler, who has made a livelihood of buying and selling documents and manuscripts from the Colonial era, has visited the site countless times over the years, and he still can barely contain his excitement.
"You can see what a cool spot this is, for guys to say, 'Man, this is Zen right here,' " said Eyler, 40, for whom the spot carries a special aura. "But this is the earliest depiction of human figures in the area. It's man's first art, and it's on our back door, which is even neater."
He suspects that he's not the only person to have happened on the carvings. "Someone's bound to be sitting with a fire here and be staring at the rock and go, 'Wow!' "
Though prehistoric rock carvings with human figures are almost unheard-of in the eastern United States, some anthropologists who have studied the site, located a few miles from the nation's capital near Great Falls in Fairfax County, believe the petroglyphs are genuine artifacts dating back hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
"I think they do represent a scene frozen in time," said Stephen R. Potter, a regional archaeologist for the National Park Service who has studied the carvings. He worries about publicizing the site -- and The Washington Post is not giving specifics -- because it may attract vandals.
The carvings, cut into the face of a metagranite boulder with a stone tool, are unique because they were only the second such find in the Potomac River valley and because human representations are rare in the Middle Atlantic states, Potter said. The only other such carving found in the area was a stylized fish located across the river in Maryland. Like many petroglyphs, the human figures are difficult to date because they lack contextual clues, such as nearby pottery shards, or organic material that could be radiologically tested, he said.
The images are small -- each an average of three inches high and two inches wide -- probably because of the difficulty the artist encountered carving in such hard rock. Potter said he thinks that the images are the work of one artist and that they record a group hunt.
"For all these reasons, it's very special and exciting," he said.
Others have argued that the petroglyphs offer new evidence that aboriginal people used the atlatl in prehistoric Virginia. The device, typically associated with Australia, also was used by Aztecs, who gave it its name, as well as Mayans and Inuit.
W. Jack Hranicky, a member of Virginia's Rockart Survey, has suggested that early Americans also might have used the elevated site as an observatory or for religious ceremonies tied to the winter solstice.
Writing in the Quarterly Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Virginia, Hranicky said the rock's large, flat facade is illuminated year round, except for a few days in December around the winter solstice.
Hranicky hypothesized that priests might have used the stone as a calendar that recorded the sun's lowest point. Or perhaps priests reinforced their claim to domination over the natural world by conducting ceremonies in which they pretended to control the seasons by "hiding" the sun, he said.
With scriggles of shoulder-length blond hair flying everywhere and a ring of stubble on his boyish face, Eyler looks more like someone skipping spring classes than an amateur anthropologist leading the way to a prehistoric find. Dressed in baggy black shorts, a Key West T-shirt and sneakers (no socks), he stoops on the washed-out trail to examine white hunks of quartz that, he hopes, might be arrowheads.
Eyler was doing something like that 18 years ago when he spied the petroglyphs. After reading about other petroglyphs in a National Geographic magazine article, Eyler notified Potter, who consulted with other experts. Potter said he was amazed that Eyler spotted them.
"You had to have a set of eyes to look for these things," Potter said.
Eyler, who grew up in a military family that moved around, said it was routine for him to find petroglyphs while living in Hawaii. Looking at the rock carvings on Difficult Run, he suggested that the sequence commemorates an awesome hunt by three hunters who were working cooperatively. Eyler also believes that they contain the image -- still unauthenticated, Potter said -- of a stick figure with a bow and arrow. And he marvels at the handiwork they represent, and how they emerged, cut by cut.
"I think people on the East Coast and everyone in the metro area should know about it," he said.
Eyler, a Mount Vernon resident who runs a frame shop in Old Town Alexandria, has made a livelihood collecting manuscripts and documents from early American history by discovering the hidden value of items put up for sale at auctions and estate sales and on eBay. But this, he said, is his greatest find.
"I always told my wife I'd love to discover something worth a million dollars," he said. "But now I can't get it home."
