• Avoid Touching the Petroglyphs: Look and observe, BUT DO NOT TOUCH!
• Stay on the Trails: Stay on the most used trails when visiting sites, and don't create new trails or trample vegetation.
• Photography and Sketching is Allowed: Do not introduce any foreign substance to enhance the carved and pecked images for photographic or drawing purposes. Altering, defacing, or damaging the petroglyphs is against the law -- even if the damage is unintentional.
• Pets: Keep pets on a leash and clean up after them.
• Artifacts: If you happen to come across sherds (broken pottery) or lithics (flakes of stone tools), leave them where you see them. Once they are moved or removed, a piece of the past is forever lost.

Welcome to "Perfect Kiva" in Bullet Canyon (formally Graham Canyon). You are standing at one of the most recent sites to be occupied on Cedar Mesa and one the first to be excavated, if not the first. Archaeologists have established a chronology for the prehistoric people of the Southwest that lists Archaic (6500 B.C. to 1500 B.C.), Basketmaker (1500 B.C. to A.D. 700), Pueblo (A.D. 750 to 900), Pueblo II (A.D. 900 to 1150), Pueblo III (A.D. 1150 to 1300), Pueblo IV (A.D. 1300 to 1600), and Pueblo V (A.D. 1600 to present). Some of the rock art present at "Perfect Kiva" indicates that the site was first established during the Basketmaker period. The structures you see now are from the Pueblo II and III periods. The first recorded or documented discovery of the site occurred in 1891.

The Navajo call the people that inhabited the Cedar Mesa area the "Anasazi". Many decedents, the Hopi in northeastern Arizona, the Zuni in west central New Mexico, and the Pueblos along the Rio Grande in New Mexico prefer that they are called Ancestral Puebloans. The Hopi refer to them as Hisatsinom. The oral traditions of the Hopi tell of many migrations among their ancestors in the American Southwest. The Hopi believe that these clans left markers through pictographs and petroglyphs to show that they had been at these places or performed certain ceremonies. Many archaeologists also agree with the Hopi migration beliefs. They believe that these migrations took place during three distinct time phases with two to three hundred years in between. These periods are approximately A.D. 200 to 400, A.D. 650 to 725, and A.D. 1060 to 1270.

EARLY EXPLORATION AT "PERFECT KIVA"
Charles McLoyd and Charles Cary Graham of Durango, CO organized the first expedition into Grand Gulch for the purpose of archaeological excavations in January of 1891. Many people feel that these early expeditions by McLoyd, Graham, and others like Richard Wetherill were primarily hunting missions with no archeological training. One has to remember that archeology was a very new field/science at the time and that very few standards had been established.

Before McLoyd and Graham could begin excavating in Grand Gulch and its many side canyons, they first had to find a way to get their horses and supplies down into the canyon bottom. To do this they established a trail into Bullet Canyon a few miles above "Perfect Kiva" on the south-facing canyon side using rock cribbing. This must have been a tremendous amount of work, but work that would have been considered completely worthwhile once they discovered pristine sites like "Perfect Kiva" and "Jailhouse". In the crude field notes that still exist from the McLoyd and Graham expedition, they labeled "Perfect Kiva" Cave #1 and "Jailhouse" Cave #2. This suggests that these might have been the first two sites that the men excavated if their system was in sequential order. Many of these early explorers left their signatures in charcoal or bullet lead on the alcove's walls and rocks. Some of these signatures can be seen here at "Perfect Kiva".

The Wetherill-Grand Gulch Research Project (1986 to 1990) used these signatures of explorers to trace and confirm the early routes of their expeditions. They proved to be a valuable insight into what people associated with the project have termed "reverse archaeology", so please respect and do not touch these valuable signatures. It is a well-known fact that hundreds of artifacts and human remains were sold and shipped to museums throughout the United States, some even to Sweden. Although many of the museums have known the collections were from the Grand Gulch / Cedar Mesa area, it has not been known from which exact site location the artifacts were originally found. The Wetherill-Grand Gulch Project succeeded in establishing the location of many artifacts to specific sites, thus the term "reverse archaeology" or working from original notes, and photographs back to locate the site.

Welcome to Sheiks Canyon and the Green Mask Site

The rock art is the most notable feature of the Green Mask site, including the green mask for which the site is named. Based on the rock art styles in this alcove, this site has offered shelter to people for thousands of years. There is evidence of occupation dating from the Archaic period (6500 - 1500 BC) through the late habitation of Puebloan people around 1260 AD.

On the eastern end of the alcove, high on the wall and the ceiling is the colorful work of the artisans of the hunters and gatherers of the Archaic Period (6500 - 1500 BC). In pigments of black, red, white, and cream are abstract paintings of plant and insect-like forms, as well as other typical images of the period.

The large rock boulders around you on the alcove floor and the reddish rock scar on the wall directly below the Archaic paintings indicate there may have been a rock shelf used to access the upper wall. Basketmaker Period (BC 500–750 AD) style rock image over the rock scar reveals the shelf may have fallen before the occupation of the site.

Painted images midway and lower on the back wall of the alcove are also Basketmaker style. The Basketmaker style includes square-shouldered humanlike figures often with headdresses, positive handprints, bighorn sheep, lines, dots, and zigzags.

High on the far east end of the alcove is the elaborately painted mask-like figure in green, yellow, white, and red pigments. In a Basketmaker Period burial site in northeast Arizona, a full-face scalp or mask was found that had green and yellow stripes and red bobbed hair, almost identical to the mask painted on this wall.

The rock art of the Pueblo period was often less abstract than that of previous periods. These styles included shield-like figures, concentric circles, spirals, pawprints, handprints, bighorn sheep, birds, and mud balls.

It is thought that this site may have had as many as 13 structures. There are several small below-ground storage units called cysts, and two above-ground structures on the lower level of the site that have curved walls could have been kivas.

In the 1890s, early explorers Charles McLoyd, C. C. Graham, C. H. Green, and their teams excavated human burials for private collections and museums. Many of the artifacts were exhibited in major cities and sparked public interest in the archaeology of the Southwest.

On the upper level of the southwest end of the Green Mask site are signature inscriptions of “C. McLoyd and C. C. Graham.” The signatures are an essential link to the story of the site. Archeologists and historians have traced some of the extracted artifacts back to the specific site from which they were taken by using these inscriptions along with expedition journals and statements of expedition participants.