From the intro page El Morro National Monument.
Imagine the comfort and refreshment of finding water after days of dusty travel. A reliable waterhole hidden at the base of a sandstone bluff made El Morro (the headland) a popular campsite for hundreds of years. Here, Ancestral Puebloans, Spanish and American travelers carved over 2,000 signatures, dates, messages, and petroglyphs. We invite you to make El Morro a stopping point on your travels.
Slim and I came here, last April, to see this astonishing watering hole situated in the midst of an arid, but beautiful landscape. Indians, Spaniards, mountain men, American soldiers all left their marks in the soft rock. This all poses the question of what is the boundary between defacing sacred objects and historical artifact. When Napoleon's soldiers were in Egypt in 1798, they not only scratched their names into the ancient monuments, they did so over Roman graffiti.
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| From National Park Service website, inaccurate, Puebloans were there first, "The first inscription carved at El Morro was that of Governor Don Juan de Onate in 1605, 15 years before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock." |
The National Park Service is concerned about saving the graffiti but no contemporaneous or new inscriptions are allowed. Again I quote from their website about their concerns and efforts to preserve them from natural erosion.
The processes of erosion, weathering and plant growth all take their toll. Sand grains wear away, rocks crumble and fall, and lichens and clay deposits cover the historic carvings. Important inscriptions become illegible or fall from the face of the bluff. A part of the evidence of our heritage is crumbling away.
The National Park Service hopes to preserve this evidence for as long as possible by assessing, monitoring and treating the inscriptions and the rocks in which they are carved. Dowload our Monitoring and Preservation brochure (608k PDF file) to learn more about the projects underway at El Morro National Monument.
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