Newspaper Rock
— — a thousand years of writing on one rock face.
Not only on a wall.
“A sandstone boulder field above the Puerco River, dense with petroglyphs pecked into the dark desert varnish. More than 650 figures crowd the rock: bighorn sheep, spirals, hunters, hand prints, calendar marks. The work spans roughly 2,000 years, much of it left by the ancestral Puebloans who lived along this river before about 1380. A viewing platform looks down from the rim; the rock itself is not approached. Spotting scopes are mounted along the railing.
Newspaper Rock, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Newspaper Rock is a cluster of sandstone boulders in Petrified Forest National Park, in Apache County, northeastern Arizona, viewed from an overlook off the park's main road between the Puerco Pueblo and the Tepees. The rock faces hold more than 650 petroglyphs, pecked through the dark manganese-rich desert varnish into the lighter sandstone beneath. The site sits above the Puerco River, which drains east toward the Little Colorado. The petroglyphs are attributed to the ancestral Puebloan peoples who farmed this valley, with work concentrated between roughly 650 and 2,000 years before present.
The boulders are blocks of Triassic-age sandstone broken from a cliff edge above the Puerco. Their surfaces wear a dark patina of desert varnish, a thin manganese-and-iron-oxide film that takes thousands of years to form on exposed sandstone. Pecking through that varnish reveals the pale rock beneath, and the contrast is what holds the images visible across centuries. Designs include bighorn sheep, anthropomorphic figures, spirals, and possible solar calendar markers; archaeologists associate the work most closely with the Puebloans who occupied the nearby Puerco Pueblo until about 1380.
Newspaper Rock is reached only from the rim overlook; visitors are not permitted to descend to the boulders themselves. Spotting scopes are mounted along the railing for closer reading of the panels. The site is on the main park road and is open during park hours, with no separate fee beyond the park entrance. The park rotates summer and winter hours and is closed on Christmas Day. The North Rim of the park also holds the Painted Desert, and the Puerco Pueblo, a partially excavated village, sits about a mile north along the same road.