What Are Petroglyphs and How Were They Made?

POV Travel
Jul 1
8 min read

Updated: 4 days ago

Imagine carving a picture into solid rock using nothing but another rock.

No metal chisel. No steel blade. Just a hard stone held in your hand, struck against the surface again and again, chipping away one tiny fragment at a time. To create a single figure this way might take hours of patient labour. To cover a cliff with images, the work of days, or of many people across many years.

This is how petroglyphs were made. They are among the most enduring artworks humanity has ever produced, cut so deeply into the Earth that some have survived for tens of thousands of years. Every one of them began with the same astonishing act. A person, a stone, and the patience to turn one into a picture.

What are petroglyphs and how were they made?

Quick Answer

A petroglyph is an image carved, pecked or scratched into rock, as opposed to a pictograph, which is painted on.

Ancient people made them by removing part of the rock surface using stone tools. They chipped away tiny fragments to build up an image, or cut and ground lines into the stone. The work was slow and demanding, often using a harder stone to carve a softer one.

Because they are cut into the rock itself, petroglyphs are among the most durable art on Earth. They survive in exposed landscapes for thousands of years, in places where painted art could never last.

What exactly is a petroglyph?

The word itself tells the story. It comes from ancient Greek, joining the words for rock and to carve. A petroglyph is, quite simply, a carving in stone.

This sets it apart from its painted cousin. A pictograph adds something to the rock, a layer of pigment. A petroglyph takes something away, removing part of the surface to leave an image behind. One is addition. The other is subtraction.

Many petroglyphs rely on a beautiful natural effect to make them visible. Across long ages, exposed rock often develops a dark outer coating, a kind of natural varnish formed by weathering. When an artist carves through this dark skin, the lighter, fresher stone beneath is revealed. The image stands out in pale contrast against the darker surface around it, as though drawn in light.

Over the centuries that follow, the coating slowly begins to re form over the carving, darkening it again. In the oldest petroglyphs, this re darkening can be nearly complete, the image fading back towards the colour of the rock that holds it.

The techniques they used

Ancient carvers did not have one method. They had several, each suited to different effects, often combined within a single work. Understanding them reveals just how skilled this craft truly was.

The most common technique was pecking. The artist struck the rock surface repeatedly with a hard hammerstone, each blow chipping away a tiny fragment. Done thousands of times, this built up an image from countless small marks, like a drawing made of stippled dots. Some carvers struck the rock directly. Others used a second stone as a punch, holding it against the surface and hammering its end, which gave finer control over each blow.

A second technique was incising, or engraving. Here the artist dragged a sharp, hard point across the rock, cutting a continuous line into it. This allowed for fine, flowing detail, the delicate features of an animal, the lines of a human figure.

A third was abrading, or grinding. By rubbing the surface with an abrasive stone, often with sand and water to help, the carver could deepen and smooth an image, creating broad polished grooves or filling whole shapes with worked stone.

Oldest of all, in some places, was the simple cupule, a small round hollow ground patiently into the rock, sometimes in great numbers, among the earliest marks human beings ever made.

A finished petroglyph often used several of these at once. An outline pecked into shape, the details incised with a sharp point, certain areas ground smooth. This was not crude scratching. It was a true craft, with techniques refined across generations.

The tools of the work

What did they carve with? The answer, for most of human history, is breathtakingly simple. Stone.

To carve stone, ancient artists used harder stone. A hammerstone of tough quartzite or basalt could chip away at a softer surface. A sharp flake of flint or quartz could incise fine lines. The whole art rested on a basic principle, that a harder material will cut a softer one.

This is worth pausing on. For most of the time petroglyphs were being made, there was no metal at all. People created enduring, detailed, sometimes beautiful images in solid rock using only other rocks, their own strength, and immense patience. Only in much later periods did metal tools appear, making finer and faster work possible.

The simplicity of the toolkit makes the achievement greater, not smaller. With almost nothing, ancient artists made marks that have outlasted empires.

The patience it demanded

It is hard, in our hurried age, to grasp the sheer labour involved.

Pecking a large figure into rock, blow by careful blow, could take many hours. A great panel of images might represent days of work, or the combined effort of many people across a long stretch of time. There were no shortcuts. Each fragment of stone had to be removed by hand, one strike at a time.

This patience tells us something important. People did not pour such effort into images that did not matter to them. The labour itself is a measure of significance. Whatever these carvings meant, ritual, record, identity, story, they meant enough to justify days of exhausting, repetitive work in sun and wind.

When you stand before a petroglyph, you are looking not just at an image but at an investment of human time and devotion, carved into the hardest canvas on Earth.

Why carve instead of paint?

Given how much harder carving is than painting, why did ancient people do it at all?

Part of the answer is durability. Paint sits on the surface and can wash, fade or flake away. A carving is the surface, cut into the very body of the rock, able to endure exposure that would erase a painting in a single season. Where people wanted their images to last, or where the setting was harsh, carving was the wiser choice.

Part of the answer is setting. Pictographs survive best in sheltered places, caves and overhangs that protect the fragile pigment. Petroglyphs, far tougher, could be made out in the open, on exposed cliffs and desert boulders and riverside rocks, where no painting could survive. This is why open, sunlit landscapes tend to hold carvings, while deep caves hold paintings.

And part of the answer may simply be the materials at hand. Carving needs no pigment, no binder, nothing but a harder stone. In a place without good paint materials, the rock itself was the only medium available.

The most enduring art on Earth

This durability gives petroglyphs a remarkable distinction. They are among the longest lasting things our species has ever made.

A painting, however beautiful, is delicate. A building crumbles. Written records decay. But an image cut deep into hard rock, in a dry and stable place, can persist for an almost unimaginable span of time, weathering slowly across thousands upon thousands of years.

Some petroglyphs have survived since the last Ice Age. They have outlasted every civilisation, every language, every belief held by the people who made them. The carvers are gone beyond all memory. Their marks remain, still legible on the rock.

There is something profound in that. Of all the ways humans have tried to leave a trace, the simplest, hardest, most patient method, chipping an image into stone, has proven the most enduring of all.

Where to see great petroglyphs

Carved rock art is found across the world, often in vast open air fields that stretch across whole hillsides and valleys.

Gobustan, Azerbaijan

A remarkable landscape of carved boulders preserving thousands of petroglyphs, images of people, animals, boats and dances reaching back many thousands of years, set among strange mud volcanoes. One of the great engraving sites of the world.

Twyfelfontein, Namibia

One of Africa's largest concentrations of rock engravings, where the animals of the ancient landscape are carved across the desert rock in their thousands.

Saudi Arabia

Vast and still little known to outside visitors, the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula hold immense fields of carvings, among the richest anywhere.

Valcamonica, Italy

A long alpine valley carved with tens of thousands of images across millennia, among the first rock art sites to receive international protection.

Côa Valley, Portugal

A rare and important collection of open air engravings reaching back to the Ice Age, carved along a river valley.

The American Southwest, Scandinavia, the Sahara and many other regions hold their own great galleries of carved stone, scattered across the deserts and uplands of the world.

How POV Travel approaches petroglyphs

We have a particular fondness for carved rock art, because it carries the marks of human effort so plainly.

Our expeditions can take in some of the world's great engraving sites, including the extraordinary carved boulders of Gobustan in Azerbaijan, where you can stand among thousands of images chipped patiently into stone across the ages. We travel with guides who can read these carvings, who understand the techniques behind them and the lives of the people who made them.

To appreciate a petroglyph fully, it helps to know how it was made. Once you understand the patience, the skill, the sheer physical labour of carving stone with stone, the image changes before your eyes. It stops being a simple picture and becomes what it truly is. A profound act of human determination, cut into the Earth to outlast its maker by thousands of years.

That shift in understanding is exactly what we hope to give every traveller who stands before these ancient carvings with us.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between a petroglyph and a pictograph?

A petroglyph is carved or pecked into the rock, removing part of the surface. A pictograph is painted onto the rock, adding pigment to it.

How were petroglyphs made?

By removing rock with stone tools, through pecking with a hammerstone, incising lines with a sharp point, or grinding the surface smooth. Often several techniques were combined in one image.

What tools did ancient people use to carve petroglyphs?

For most of prehistory, harder stones such as quartzite, used to chip and cut softer rock. Metal tools appeared only in later periods. The principle was always that a harder material carves a softer one.

Why are petroglyphs found in open landscapes rather than caves?

Because carvings are far more durable than paintings. They can survive exposure to sun, wind and rain on open cliffs and boulders, where fragile painted art would quickly be destroyed.

How long did it take to make a petroglyph?

Often many hours for a single figure, and days or longer for a large panel. The work was slow and physically demanding, which is part of why it is thought to have held real significance.

Stand before the rock yourself

These paintings are not behind glass in a museum. On the rock faces of Tassili n'Ajjer, deep in the Algerian Sahara, they are exactly where their makers left them over ten thousand years ago: cattle, hippos, swimmers, a whole green world painted onto stone that now stands in the driest place on Earth. We trek in, stand before them in the silence of the desert, and ask what they really tell us about a climate we are so often told never changed.

Explore the expeditions: Petroglyphs & Rock Art →