Kokopelli—Casanova of the Cliff Dwellers—The Hunchbacked Flute Player [SOLD]

Kokopelli—Casanova of the Cliff Dwellers—The Hunchbacked Flute Player

by John V, Young

Filter Press, Palmer Lake, Colorado

Softcover, first printing 1990, 29 pages, illustrated

Everywhere that primitive man roamed the American Southwest, as well as in many other places in the world, he left an enduring record of his passing fancies and urgencies in the form of pictures on rocks.

Those painted on rock surfaces are called pictographs.  Those incised in the rock surface by piecing or scratching with a stone tool are called petroglyphs.  To us, many of the designs are undecipherable, but many others seem to be obvious representations of deer, antelope, bighorn sheep, bears, wolves, coyotes, buffalo, turkeys, cranes, serpents, frogs, lizards and insects.

Of the multitude of miscellaneous drawings, paintings and scratchings on the rocks and in the caves of the pre-Columbian people of the Southwest, only one anthropomorphic subject can claim both an identity and a proper name, as well as gender.  Without question, that figure is decidedly male—Kokopelli.