“Layers of history and culture are visible on the landscape of Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah. Thousands of fragile sites are spread across the rugged backcountry. Each artifact tells a centuries-old story that is part of a longer narrative with deep meaning for the area’s Indigenous people.”
In this Visit Utah video from their 2018 Voices of Bears Ears series, archaeologist Jonathan Till, curator at the Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum, and Nate Thomas, archaeologist with the Bureau of Land Management, visit just a few of the national monument’s 100,000 protected archaeological sites.
In 2022, the federal government and five Native American Tribes—the Hopi Tribe, Diné/Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Zuni Tribe, and the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah & Ouray Reservation—teamed up in a historic agreement to jointly manage Bears Ears National Monument, giving the tribes collaborative power to protect their ancestral homelands and heal the ecosystems with sustainable land management.
Take a closer look at House on Fire, Cave Tower, River House, and Petroglyphs of the 120-mile-long Comb Ridge.
Newspaper Rock is famously where the area’s Native American peoples—Ancestral Puebloans, Fremont, Ute, and other Indigenous groups—have been engraving and drawing for more than 2,000 years. From Visit Utah:
“The rock is called Tse’ Hane in Navajo, or ‘rock that tells a story.’ There are hundreds of Utah petroglyphs here that feature a mixture of forms, including pictures resembling humans, animals, tools, and more esoteric, abstract things. The 200-square-foot rock site is a part of the cliffs all along the upper end of Indian Creek Canyon.”
In July 2026, the Inter-Governmental Cooperative Agreement was thrown into question by a federal proclamation; the Bears Ears Commission responded by reaffirming their commitment to protect the landscape, underscoring that their sacred duty to steward the land exists independently of boundaries drawn by shifting political winds.
Take a closer look at Newspaper Rock with this SketchFab 3D Model from Ancient Art Archive.
Watch these handpicked videos next:
• Who left these ~23,000-year-old footprints in New Mexico’s White Sands?
• The prehistoric cave paintings of Caverna De Pedra Pintada
• The ice age cave paintings of Pech Merle
• Genevieve von Petzinger & the invention of graphics on cave walls
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Sentinel — Human
This text reads like carefully curated journalism, blending on-the-ground context with historical and administrative details, suggesting a foundation in human research and synthesis.