Polly Schaafsma is a Research Associate at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe . She is a recent recipient of the Emil W. Haury Award from the Western Parks Association and the Byron Cummings Award from the Arizona Historical and Archaeological Society (coming). Among her books are Indian Rock Art of the Southwest, Rock Art in New Mexico and most recently Warrior, Shield, and Star, and New Perspectives on Pottery Mound Pueblo (editor).

Pueblo expression of "the way things are" was given visual form through rock art and kiva murals, in an artistic florescence between c. AD 1350 and 1600. Petroglyph National Monument is centrally located in the midst of this development. Although the imagery contained in this art consists of symbols of metaphors that order a complex Pueblo cosmology, the differing physical contexts of these two types of graphic renderings and the meanings and values ascribed to the locations in which they occur, effected both the choice of imagery and the various functions and meanings that it served.