"Twenty-four thousand sacred images carved where the Earth's interior meets the sky"
Petroglyphs National Monument
Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States
Along a 17-mile basalt escarpment on Albuquerque's western edge, approximately 24,000 petroglyphs line volcanic rock born of eruptions that brought the Earth's interior to the surface. For the Pueblo peoples who carved the majority of these images and who still conduct ceremonies here, the petroglyphs are not ancient art. They are living pathways connecting the human world to the spirit world, as active now as when they were first cut into stone.
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Quick Facts
Location
Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States
Coordinates
35.1387, -106.7109
Last Updated
Feb 25, 2026
Learn More
The monument protects approximately 24,000 petroglyphs carved primarily by Ancestral Pueblo peoples between 1300 and the 1680s, with some images dating to 3,000 years ago. The geological canvas, a 17-mile basalt escarpment formed by volcanic eruptions, is itself central to the site's sacred character. Established as a national monument in 1990, the site is co-managed by the National Park Service and the City of Albuquerque, serving simultaneously as public parkland and active sacred ground for multiple Pueblo communities.
Origin Story
The volcanic landscape came first. Approximately 156,000 to 200,000 years ago, eruptions in what is now the Albuquerque Volcanic Field sent lava flowing across the West Mesa, creating a 17-mile basalt escarpment and five volcanic cones. Over millennia, the basalt developed a dark desert varnish, manganese and iron oxides that gave the rock its characteristic dark surface.
When ancestral Pueblo peoples settled on these lands around 1300, they found in the escarpment a canvas prepared by the Earth itself. By pecking through the dark desert varnish to the lighter rock beneath, they created images that stood out sharply against the blackened surface. The volcanic origin of the rock was not incidental. In Pueblo understanding, the volcanic landscape represents the Earth's direct connection to deeper forces, and the images carved upon it serve as pathways between the human world and the spirit world.
The petroglyphs record visions and spiritual encounters: masked beings, horned serpents, flute-players who echo the ancestral figure known across the Southwest, star-beings whose forms resist easy interpretation, spirals that may mark celestial events, handprints that anchor a human presence to stone. Apache, Navajo, and later Spanish colonial settlers added their own images. The Spanish carved Christian crosses and livestock brands, inscribing a different sacred claim on the same volcanic surface.
Key Figures
Conroy Chino
cultural interpreter
Emmy Award-winning journalist from Acoma Pueblo and author of 'Petroglyphs of the Southwest: A Puebloan Perspective.' His writing provides one of the most articulate and publicly available expressions of how Pueblo peoples understand the petroglyphs as living sacred entities and communication pathways to the spirit world.
Ancestral Pueblo peoples
original creators
The primary creators of the estimated 24,000 petroglyphs, who settled on these lands around 1300 and carved images of their spiritual encounters into the volcanic basalt. Their descendants in the contemporary Pueblo communities maintain the sacred relationship with the site.
SAGE Council
Save the Petroglyphs / SAGE Council
conservation advocates
Coalition of indigenous leaders, environmental organizations, and concerned citizens who led opposition to the Paseo del Norte road extension through the monument in the 1990s and 2000s. Though the road was ultimately built, their advocacy raised national awareness of threats to the monument.
National Park Service and City of Albuquerque
co-managers
The monument is co-managed by the NPS and the City of Albuquerque's Open Space Division, a partnership established in the 1990 enabling legislation that reflects the site's position between federal cultural preservation and local land management.
Spiritual Lineage
The lineage here is unusually direct. The Pueblo peoples who conduct ceremonies at the monument today are the descendants of the people who carved the images centuries ago. This continuity is not metaphorical. The same communities, the same languages, the same cosmological frameworks persist. The petroglyphs are not the work of a vanished civilization interpreted by outsiders but the living heritage of peoples who remain and who continue to add to the spiritual relationship their ancestors began. The Spanish colonial period added a layer of complexity. After the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Catholic suppression of indigenous practices drove many ceremonial traditions to become more private, a pattern that persists in the Pueblo communities' preference for keeping specific ceremonial details out of public discourse. The establishment of the national monument in 1990 created yet another layer: the formal partnership between Pueblo communities, federal government, and city government in managing a landscape that carries fundamentally different meanings for each.
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