The large figures scratched out of the ground at the lower reaches of the Colorado River are called "intaglios" by a term from the field of stone engraving. There are several hundred of them in the south-west of the USA, as far as Mexico, and they are one of the unsolved mysteries of modern archaeology. That the intaglios were created by Indian tribes is obvious in this region, but exactly which tribes did it is disputed. And when it comes to the age of the intaglios, scientists' opinions differ completely. The discussion ranges from a few hundred to a few thousand years.
Most intaglios were discovered only with the beginning of air travel, in the early 1930s. Who knows, maybe some of them are not very old at all and were only scratched into the ground shortly before that time. The Kokopelli, west of Blythe, bears little resemblance to a prehistoric scrape, but more to an early cartoon character, doesn't it?
Images courtesy of Google Earth™
