Pictograph Cave State Park - Billings, Montana

Not far from Billings at the end of a winding ribbon of pavement is Pictograph Cave State Park, a cluster of caves where for five thousand years prehistoric hunters and their historic American Indian counterparts left behind a legacy of painted images and artifacts. We stopped here on our way home. Many of the pictures are difficult to see since they are fading. But one of the interesting pictures was the drawings of rifles.

Flanked by Ghost Cave and Middle Cave on one side and a spring on the other, Pictograph Cave is the largest of three rock shelters nestled into sandstone bluffs overlooking Bitter Creek. In the early 1900s the "Indian Caves," as the locals often called them, were a popular stopping place along the stage route between Billings and the town of Coburn on the Crow Indian Reservation. The curious often stopped to explore the caves, while others found the fresh spring water and cool shade of the nearby box elder trees a welcome respite from the dusty road.
Although the paintings of Pictograph Cave were well known to early residents of Billings, the site attracted national interest in 1937 when amateur archaeologists discovered deep deposits of prehistoric artifacts in the cave's floor. Within months the Montana Highway Commission acquired the site and a Works Progress Administration (WPA) excavation was underway, directed by H. Melville Sayre from the Montana School of Mines. Sayre documented 106 pictographs inside the cave. The walls were a collage of red, white, and, occasionally, yellow figures over earlier designs painted in black. Images of coup sticks and warriors in full regalia mingled with turtles, bears, and bison.

Sayre hired Oscar Lewis, an archaeologist from a Glendive WPA crew, to supervise the archaeological excavation at Pictograph Cave. The dig uncovered an assortment of stone and bone tools, projectile points, a carved amulet, pottery shards, and burned bone. The deeper deposits revealed artifacts from the Middle Prehistoric Period (3000 b.c. to 500 a.d.) when roving bands hunted game with stone-tipped spears and darts, but also relied heavily on wild plants and seeds for food. Levels closer to the surface indicated a series of Late Prehistoric occupations (500 a.d. to 1800 a.d.) by nomadic buffalo hunters armed with bows and arrows.

Archaeologists discovered a number of perishable items from this period-basketry, a hafted knife, roasted turnips in hearths, and beds of woven twigs and leaves-that would have been lost in an exposed site. Evidence indicated that nomadic hunters abandoned the shelter of the caves in favor of camping in tepees on the terrace below at about the time the horse was introduced on the plains in the 1700s. "The importance of Inscription Cave [Pictograph Cave], archaeologically," Walter Vanaman, a surveyor for the Montana Highway Commission, wrote in a 1938 report, "is more in the completeness of the picture it presents than in being spectacular in any one phase."

When the archaeologists began investigating the other caves and the surrounding area, they found that late prehistoric groups had also lived in Ghost Cave. Middle Cave, however, had no evidence of habitation. On the terrace below the caves, the crew unearthed historic artifacts and remnants of a prehistoric lodge. They also found the remains of at least nine individuals in and around the caves, including those of one who had been crushed by falling rock. Some human bones had the same burn and teeth marks as bison bones found in the caves, leading to speculations of cannibalism.