Preservation
The cave is located near the historic Chumash settlement of Hu'wam, along upper Bell Creek, and Fernandeño settlement Jucjauynga. In 1971, Fernandeño Indians asked Rocketdyne to safeguard the cave drawings. At the time, Fernandeño tribal leader Rudy Ortega, Sr. said, "We really know very little of our heritage. ... The paintings are one of the few physical links to our heritage. We hope one day to interpret their stories for our people."
Tribal leaders expressed concern about damage that could result from vandals or weather and asked Rocketdyne to enclose the drawings in glass. Rocketdyne officials fenced off the area, which was still being used to test rocket engines, and tribal leaders next petitioned to have the site declared a state or national historic monument. The site was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. In 1978, the pictographs were the subject of the documentary film, "Cave Paintings of the Chumash Indians." The Santa Susana Field Laboratory is now closed and undergoing a complex toxic-radionuclide pollution analysis for a subsequent cleanup. Historical Resource studies and protection are part of the process. The land is to become a park when the cleanup is done.
Rocketdyne occasionally allowed Chumash descendants to visit the site. In 1995, a Chumash holy man, Mati Waiya of Newbury Park, visited the site along with a group that included a Los Angeles Times reporter. Waiya performed a ceremony involving eagle feathers, dried tobacco leaves, shaking a wooden rattle in front of the paintings, and chanting. At the time, the Chumash tribe renewed its request for Rocketdyne to return the site back to the tribe or grant access to the state parks department for better security and public access. Since the passing over of the complex from Rocketdyne to Boeing, access to site, at least for tribe members, has become ameliorated.
In order to guard the pictographs, the exact location of the cave is kept secret, its location not marked even on Boeing company maps. Archeologists are not allowed to view it without special permission. After concerns were raised again in the 1990s about the security of the cave paintings, Rocketdyne officials declined to discuss its specific security and surveillance measures, but noted that the location was restricted to prevent trespassers and vandals. A company official noted, "Those are probably the most protected of any pictographs in Southern California, and the fact they're the only ones that haven't been desecrated I think is proof of that."
Read more about this topic: Burro Flats Painted Cave
Famous quotes containing the word preservation:
“It is my hope to be able to prove that television is the greatest step forward we have yet made in the preservation of humanity. It will make of this Earth the paradise we have all envisioned, but have never seen.”
—Joseph O’Donnell. Clifford Sanforth. Professor James Houghland, Murder by Television, just before he demonstrates his new television device (1935)
“The bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self.... And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
“Men are not therefore put to death, or punished for that their theft proceedeth from election; but because it was noxious and contrary to men’s preservation, and the punishment conducing to the preservation of the rest, inasmuch as to punish those that do voluntary hurt, and none else, frameth and maketh men’s wills such as men would have them.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)