Sphinx, Garden of the Gods, Chatsworth, Calif.
Anyone know what Tongva carvings look like? The carvings in the rock area seen above, on the south side of Sphinx, have been referred to as ancient Native American carvings, but I've never seen convincing evidence one way or the other.
Here's a closer look. I can easily make out a fish and a horse, but that doesn't mean they're actual ancient carvings. If they are in fact Native American in origin, then they're almost certainly attributable to the Tongva.
This angle might bring out the horse a little better, just to the right of the fish. It's hard to duplicate the three-dimensional qualities that surface when viewing them in person, but the set of carvings includes a number of other images that are harder to see than the fish and the horse.
Sphinx is easy to find in Garden of the Gods, and if you can find Sphinx you can find the carvings.
The Tongva occupied much of what is now Southern California — including the San Fernando Valley and the land that later became the Iverson Movie Ranch — for thousands of years before the Spanish missionaries arrived in the 1770s. You may be interested to know that many of the place names in use in the region are Tongva in origin. Among them: Topanga, Cahuenga, Tujunga, Pacoima, Cucamonga and Azusa — even though many of us were brought up to believe Azusa stands for "everything from A to Z in the USA."
If you're interested in learning more about the Tongva — and getting the real lowdown on the history of, among other things, the Iverson Movie Ranch, long before the glamour days of the movie business — I can point you to a few books offered by Amazon to get you started. Check out the links below ...
