Burro Flats Painted Cave
|
|
Location | Simi Hills, Ventura County, California, United States |
---|---|
Nearest city | Bell Canyon, California |
Architect | Chumash people |
Architectural style | Pictograph Rock art |
NRHP Reference # | 76000539 |
Added to NRHP | May 05, 1976 |
Burro Flats Painted Cave is in the Burro Flats area of the Simi Hills between the Simi Valley, and West Hills and Bell Canyon, in Ventura County of Southern California, United States. It is a Cave containing Chumash Native American pictographs. The cave is near the historic Chumash settlement of Hu'wam, along upper Bell Creek, and Tongva/Fernandeño settlement Jucjauynga The cave is located in the southwestern corner of Area IV of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory on private land owned by Boeing, formerly operated by Rocketdyne for testing rocket engines and nuclear research. The Burro Flats Painted Cave is not accessible to the public. Panorama of Burro Flats cave art here
Among the pictographs at Burro Flats are two human stick figures wearing headdresses with lines radiating from the heads. There are also stick-figure animals with four fingers, a circle with a star inside, a plant resembling a cornstalk, and more abstract groupings of circles and trigrams. The cave is a small, hollowed-out portion of a long, low rock set into a grassy slope. The Burro Flats pictographs have been termed "the best preserved Indian pictograph in Southern California." Archaeologists estimate the drawings are several hundred years old. There is a replica of the pictographs at the Southwest Museum in Highland Park, Los Angeles.