Rock Art in the Southwest
Rock art of the Southwest originated with indigenous people who inhabited this region for millennia, prior to the arrival Europeans on the American continent. Their canvases were the rock walls that surrounded the canyon country, and onto these surfaces they painted or chiseled their designs.
Rock art can be divided into two categories: designs chipped into the rock itself, called petroglyphs, and designs painted onto the rock surface, called petrographs. The extensive rock art found at the Smith Fork panel are all petroglyphs, while the figures at Defiance House (below) are petrographs.

The Ancestral Inhabitants of Glen Canyon
Between 1957 and 1962, researchers from the University of Utah and the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff attempted to document as much as about the geology, ecology, archaeology, ethnohistory, and history of Glen Canyon, before the waters of Lake Powell buried this record. These researchers were under federal mandate to collect as much information about Glen Canyon and those who were in and around this place for three millennia and more.  What they discovered is that occupancy by the ancestral people was not continuous throughout the area. Of the many ancient structures found in Glen Canyon and its tributaries, most were constructed for food storage, while fewer dwellings were found. The Glen Canyon area was occupied by ancestral people, first during the Basketmaker II era (A.D. 1-500), and later during the Pueblo II and Pueblo III expansion (A.D. 900-1300).

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