The “Bowman” representing a hunter, is the most well-known of the Sanilac petroglyphs.
Many hunters and trappers try to “psych-out” their prey; that is, they use knowledge and intuition to predict where and when their prey will appear, where they live and eat, and what their habits are. This is usually enough to give a good chance of success, though no guarantee. But for hunters and gatherers, both prehistoric and, in some rare cases even today, hunting success was a matter of life and death and required more certainty than modern hunters do: they needed hunting magic.
The Maasi in East Africa still perform ritual dances to get into the best possible state of mind before a traditional lion hunt, and while today this is illegal in some countries, it is still practiced. In South America, Amazonian tribes perform elaborate magical ceremonies before hunting, often including snorting, smoking or drinking concoctions made from hallucinogenic plants, to get into the mind or spirit of the target animal and either acquire the creature’s power or obtain power over it.
Another form of hunting magic, that anthropologists refer to as sympathetic hunting magic, is the practice of creating an image of the prey animal, again theoretically gaining power over it, or getting power from the creature itself. This idea has been used to explain the magnificent prehistoric cave paintings of horses, bison, woolly rhinoceros, and other animals, created in some cases over 30,000 years ago. (The paintings of these extinct animals help to date the art.) Other rock and cave paintings depicting hunting and prey animals are found in South Africa and the Sahara from the era when it had water.
Even here, we find ancient Native American carvings and paintings depicting animals that may well have been intended for use as hunting magic. Over forty years ago, I did a photographic study of three prehistoric art sites: pictographs (paintings) at Burnt Bluff in the western Upper Peninsula, the Agawa pictographs in Ontario’s Lake Superior Provincial Park, and the Sanilac petroglyphs (carvings) in Michigan’s Thumb. My work was supported by a research grant from the University of Michigan Rackham School of Graduate Studies.
Today, the Burnt Bluff pictographs, the only known rock paintings in the U.S. east of the Mississippi, are protected under the auspices of Fayette State Park and are completely inaccessible to the public, both by park policy and by their dangerous cliff side location. While interesting, they do not depict any animals and are therefore not pertinent to this discussion.
The Agawa pictographs, on a rock face on the shore of Lake Superior, about an hour’s drive north of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, while the site of contemporary tribal rituals, is open to the public, though access is on a narrow, precarious, wave-washed ledge. They depict not only animals, but people in canoes and mythological creatures. While photographing at this site, I wedged my foot and my tripod into a small crack in the ledge in front of the paintings, while Lake Superior splashed over my knees. A woman on the observation platform above told me she was waiting to see if I would be washed away, not that she would have helped me.
The Sanilac petroglyphs consist of about 165 carvings on a 1,000-square-foot sandstone outcrop lying in the 240-acre Sanilac Petroglyphs Historic State Park near Cass City. They are the largest assembly of prehistoric rock carvings in the United States east of the Mississippi (there is a larger site at Peterborough, Ontario) and include carvings of human and animal figures, tracks, handprints, and abstract designs. While the Saginaw Chippewa tribe helps administer the park and claims some relationship to the carvings, they are estimated to be between 300 and 1400 years old, which may put them well before the arrival of the Ojibwe in Michigan in the 1600s and 1700s. It should be noted that it is impossible to accurately date any rock art unless the subject matter itself provides clues. They were discovered in the late 1800s after fires swept through the area, removing all of the ground cover.
Today, the petroglyphs are protected by a roof and a high fence, and access can be prearranged by visiting the website. Forty years ago, this was not the case. In fact, although there was a locked fence, the key of which could be borrowed from a neighbor, the carvings themselves were walked on, one had actually been chopped out and removed, and others had been lined with white chalk to make them easier to photograph. For my project, I hauled a gas-powered generator and flood lights a quarter mile from the parking lot to the rock so that I could better reveal the relief of the carvings. Some of the photographs appeared in an issue of Michigan Natural Resources Magazine in the mid-1980s.
Though there are not many animal carvings at the Sanilac site, the most well-known image is of a hunter, rabbit tracks and a line of geese crossing the rock, which is evidence of probably hunting magic.
