It is a lot more complicated to produce rock art in 2011 than it
was 1,500 years ago, at least that’s what Alutiiq Museum
Executive Director Sven Haakanson found when he set out to try
this spring. The Alutiiq Museum is hosting a year-long exhibit
on Kodiak rock art, a show inspired by Haakanson’s ongoing study
of the Cape Alitak petroglyphs. Petroglyphs are images pecked
into stone, not to be confused with pictographs, which are rock
painting. For the past decade, Haakanson has been spending a few
weeks of each summer investigating the rock carvings at Cape
Alitak, a wind and wave pounded landscape at Kodiak Island’s
southern tip. “The Cape Alitak petroglyphs are the largest known
cluster of stationary rock art in Alaska,” said Haakanson.
“Until recently, they had never been systematically recorded.”
Last summer a crew from the museum took on the maddening task of
documenting the fading artwork and the ancient settlements that
lie behind them. Although pecked into Kodiak’s hard granite
bedrock, the glyphs ar