The history of the rock at the entrance to South Mountain Park, Phoenix, Arizona


If you live in the Phoenix, Arizona area, you've probably visited South Mountain Park many times, and you may have noticed an interesting rock just inside of the entrance. Nowadays we would call it a petroglyph rock, but when it was first moved in downtown Phoenix, in 1913, it was called a hieroglyph rock, and that it was Aztec.

Before you scoff at their ignorance, consider that at the time this was what they knew. All of the ancient structures that we now call "Hohokam" were mostly called "Aztec". Yes, of course the scholars, like Omar Turney, were working on determining what these things really were, and the vague term of "Aztec" just kinda faded away from use. And to be fair, calling the markings on a stone "hieroglyphs" instead of "petroglyphs" really isn't all that different: glyph means writing, hiero means sacred, and petro means rock. It's really more accurate to say that these were stone writings, because even now we have no idea what these symbols mean, whether they're sacred or just, well, writing on stone.

This rock, which was found near Arlington, Arizona, was transported (all six tons of it) to the newly-created Federal Park Block which is where the modern Federal Building in downtown Phoenix is in a tiny area that was called Aztec Park. It arrived there in 1913, and was moved to its current location just before construction began on the building that sits there today, which was completed in 1961.



Photo at the top of this post taken in 2020. Used with permission.

Here is the link to the 1913 article at the Library of Congress: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/data/batches/az_fairyduster_ver01/data/sn84020558/00202192579/1913061001/0502.pdf
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