THE PETROGLYPH INQUIRY: Does an Ancient Rock Carving in Chaco Canyon Depict the 1097 Total Solar Eclipse?

Please Contribute Your Thoughts and Ideas!

The Outreach team for the NASA PUNCH mission invites all learners to join us in using historic and contemporary images of the Sun to help evaluate a solar interpretation for an ancient rock carving (petroglyph). Our set of seven images is available in both tactile and visual form, thereby allowing blind and low-vision learners to participate fully in the inquiry.

Tactile sets can be requested via email to punchoutreach@gmail.com. Please also see Facilitator Resources for more guidance.

The first in the set of seven images is a sandstone petroglyph (rock carving) created by Ancestral Puebloan people who were resident in a place called Chaco [CHA-koh] Canyon a thousand years ago. This mysterious rock carving shown below is the focus of the Petroglyph Inquiry.

Sandstone Petroglyph in Chaco Canyon. The ancient petroglyph is pecked into a reddish rock wall. The central disk has
curlicues extending outward from the edge of the disk in all directions, making its diameter double of that of the central disk.
To the upper left of that, there is a smaller disk pecked in a similar style.

The interpretation of this ancient petroglyph can never be known for sure, however some solar astronomers have offered the following hypothesis:

The Eclipse Hypothesis: The ancient Chaco petroglyph represents an impression of the 1097 total solar eclipse with a solar storm in the corona.

While the petroglyph is NOT the first human representation of an eclipse, it is possible that the Chaco petroglyph may be humanity’s first visual representation of a solar storm in the Sun’s corona. This is a big claim, and thus it is especially important to investigate how well the hypothesis holds up when challenged. We invite your help!

We selected six additional images of the Sun to support your participation in an authentic, inquiry into the strengths and weaknesses of the eclipse hypothesis for the Chaco petroglyph. These images represent different ways throughout history that humans have recorded the glowing outer layer of the Sun, called the solar corona. They include an 1860 hand drawing, a 1918 painting, and a pair of contemporary ground-based photographs, all made during the totality phase of a solar eclipse. A pair of spacecraft images made with a NASA coronagraph completes the current set.

The Petroglyph Inquiry involves reading a 2-page section providing essential background information and then guides you through all seven tactile images in a chronological order. The description provided for each image offers new knowledge to support the formation of your own perspective about the eclipse hypothesis for the Chaco petroglyph.

The solar corona exhibits a variety of shapes and structures, including rays, streamers, loops, and storms which make the tactile images fun, interesting, and informative to both see and touch. Write to punchoutreach@gmail.com to request the set and also to send in your thoughts and ideas when you have completed the Petroglyph Inquiry.

We hope you enjoy this journey of learning about ancient and modern Sun-watching and please send us the results of your hard work so we can offer credit in our presentations and research papers!

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