Two very impressive rock art sites are located within Valley of Fire State Park Northeast of Las Vegas. Both provide an interesting contrast with the other sites discussed in this guide because the prehistory of the Valley of Fire region differed in some significant ways from that of the rest of the Far West. During the period from approximately AD 1 to about 1200, the Valley of Fire region was occupied by pit house dwellers and eventually by farmers living in small permanent villages. They were similar in many ways to the prehistoric Anasazi or Puebloan peoples of Arizona and New Mexico, rather than to the archaic Hunter-gatherer cultures typical of the larger Great Basin. This period corresponds to a more favorable, wetter climatic regime that essentially allowed rainfall agriculture to spread northward beyond the Colorado Plateau onto the fringes of the Great Basin. Whether the farmers who occupied this region during this period were Great Basin peoples who adopted agriculture and a Pueblo lifestyle, or alternatively whether the ancestral Basin hunter-gatherers temporarily were pushed aside by Puebloan groups moving north, is not known. Many archaeologists favor the hypothesis that the Valley of Fire was occupied by Puebloan peoples who pushed northward.

  It is clear, however, that after about AD 1200-1300, a time of great drought, the Numic ancestors of the Southern Paiute occupied this portion of southern Nevada. More to the point is the fact that Altatl Rock contains petroghyphs that are fully characteristic of the prehistoric and ethnographic cultures of the Great Basin, but it also contains some motifs that are more typical of Puebloan rock art sites and presumably date to the period when farming was practiced here. These include birds drawn in profile, plants, outlined stars, and phallic stick-figure human motifs with bent arms and legs. Although we do not know whether the Puebloan style rock art was also made by shamans to depict vision quests, like the Numic petroghyphs, it is clear that Altatl Rock was a place where cultures intermixed, and a place that all groups signaled as sacred. Regardless of a specific culture responsible for any given petroglyph, the Altatl Rock petroghyphs exhibit a strong Numic influence. Indeed, the similarity in subject matter between Altatl Rock and other Numic sites is so strong it precludes the possibility of coincidence, suggesting that we may use Numic ethnography to speculate about the meaning of these petroghyphs more generally.

 Like many other rock art sites, including those of the Numic speakers, the Altatl Rock petroghyphs are dominated by the entoptic patterns common during the initial stage of a vision. A smaller number of other petroglyphs, including bighorn sheep, human figures, footprints, and a horned lizard (the "horned toad"), are also present. Particularly notable at the site and the reason for its name is a realistically engraved throwing board or atlatl. Indeed, this is one of the best prehistoric renderings of an atlatl in North America; more typically, atlatl petroghyphs appear to have been schematized as a small circle bisected by a long line. As has been noted previously, atlatls were used as hunting implements to launch small dart-like spears prior to the appearance of the bow and arrow, which occurred at approximately AD 500. Although the complete replacement of the atlatl by the bow and arrow may have taken a few centuries to effect, as a general rule of thumb we can consider atlas motifs to be greater than 1,500 years in age. We can infer, then, that at least some of the petroglyphs at Atlatl Rock are 1,500 years old or more, although it is also likely that some of the engravings at this site were made both earlier and more recently.

  The presence of what seem to be relatively large numbers of atlatls and, subsequently, bows and arrows in rock art, along with depiction's of "game," "hunters shooting game," and so on, led many early researchers to hypothesize that the art largely concerned hunting, in general, and perhaps "hunting magic" specifically. We now know that this hypothesis was incorrect: Such hunting-theme art is actually relatively rare overall, thus indicating that the hunting magic hypothesis would only explain a small portion of the art any way. The ethnographic record provides us with an alternative understanding of the origin and meaning of the art. In Nevada, for example, hunting-theme art constitutes less than 10 percent o the known petroglyphs. We obtain an inflated perspective of the importance of hunting-theme motifs because our attention is draw to such identifiable designs much more than to the considerable, more common, more elusive, entoptic patterns Hunting weapons like the atlatl, and hunting metaphors like killing a bighorn sheep, were commonly employed in shamanistic rituals and beliefs because, in the Far West, shamanism was largely an adult male activity and the creators of this art were hunters. In the historical period, shamans were said to sometimes " receive" through visions bows and arrows as ceremonial objects, and would use them as ritual paraphernalia during curing ceremonies. Similarly, they would occasionally receive the supernatural power in their trances to cure arrow wounds or, subsequently, gunshot wounds as signaled by visions of weaponry and warfare. At this point in time, our best hypothesis is that the earlier creators of the atlatl motifs maintained similar beliefs; thus, it is likely that this motif represents the work of an Atlatl Shaman, an individual who specialized in the treatment of spear wounds.