Petroglyphs and Pictographs

I've just read this article about Lee University's excavation at a Central Western Colorado rock shelter site: http://www.chattanoogan.com/articles/article_208795.asp. This site has the potential to yield data about Colorado's prehistory and was inhabited by the Fremont and Anazasi cultures. The article is pretty superficial in regard to the extent of information revealed about the excavation, but it made me think of my own experiences with petroglyphs and pictographs at my field school this past summer in the San Jacinto Mountains of Southern California.
One of my field school professors, Daniel McCarthy, is a tribal relations program manager who has over 30 years of experience in Southern California archaeology. One of Daniel's specialties is rock art, among other things such as ethnobotany, aboriginal trails, and lithics. On our weekend field trip to Joshua Tree National Monument, Daniel showed us several petroglyphs (carved rock art) and pictographs (painted rock art) primarily produced by the Cahuilla and Serrano Native Americans. Daniel had a special type of software on his camera called D-Stretch, which enhances the color and quality of the pictographs. With this, we were able to see details a lot better. There are too many photos to post, so I'll only post a couple samplings. One really neat thing we were exposed to was the harsh reality behind what Daniel called "paper pushers" - meaning people who work for the park services as archaeologists and simply "push paper" so that there aren't any problems. A clear example of this was at Disney Rock (figure to the right) where when the Disney movie Chico the Coyote was being filmed, the producers wanted the real petroglyphs to be more visible and vibrant for them film, so they vandalized and defaced the rock art and produced their own false pictographs. This film is locked away in the Disney vault, naturally. The park service remains ambiguous to this case, and instead of providing historical context of the original petroglyphs, or stating the injustice caused by Disney film producers, the sign only hints at this by stating: "[petroglyphs] have been traced over with paint. This type of vandalism prevents others from seeing the petroglyphs in their original form. Please help us by reporting any vandalism you observe."
We saw several pictographs which depicted the rites of passage women took when they went through puberty. The ritual that ensued was that these young women would paint diamond shapes on the rock and be buried in the sand for days during their menstruation period. Us womenfolk joked about what it must've been like to be buried in the sand when you're cramping! Petroglyphs and pictographs are an important parts of the archaeological record and give insight into what people saw, what they did, what they ate, etc.