Long before Europeans ventured westward "across the pond," the Native Americans who inhabited North America told their own stories by etching into or painting on stones found near their homes and on their travels.

In Illinois, there are probably hundreds of rock art sites, says Mark J. Wagner, an archaeologist with SIUC's Center for Archaeological Investigations, but only about 50 are designated as "official," or recognized by the state as historical sites.

Petroglyphs (drawings pecked or carved on stone) and pictographs (paintings on stone) are most easily discovered "in the dead of winter," Wagner said. "They're hard to find. I think that what happens is a lot of people walk right by them and never see them."

SIUC Archaeologist Mark J. Wagner and Mary McCorvie, archaeologist with the U.S. Forest Service, work to map rock art in Johnson County near Vienna.

On a late autumn Saturday, Wagner and his wife, Mary McCorvie, an archaeologist with the U.S. Forest Service, led a band of enthusiasts participating in the Forest Service's "Passport in Time" program to rock art sites in nearby Johnson and Pope counties.

First stop was Pope County's Millstone Bluff, an area owned by the forest service that was once home to both Woodland and Mississippian tribes.

At certain places along the trail at Millstone Bluff visitors can get a look at petroglyphs. A site on the bluff's east side is made entirely of birds. Another on the west side reveals serpents. One in the middle, probably the last one done, Wagner said, is a combination of the two.

On this day, with vegetation still lush with autumn color, picking out the figures proved difficult, even with the diagrams provided. Wagner scrambled onto the rocks and used his fingers to outline the figures through the lichen covering them.

At Buffalo Rock in Johnson County, just a few miles away, a trail meanders along a path that was once the old Kaskaskia Trail, a major artery in the early 1800s. Sometimes in the early part of that century, the figure of a bison appeared on one of the huge rocks.

Like many rock art sites nationwide, the bison figure has been defaced over the years not just from weathering, but also from the human element. Some repaint it; some chip into it.

"What they're doing is destroying it," Wagner said. "Some of these paintings are so durable they've lasted 800 years. They fade, and people repaint them all the time."

Trouble is, the Native Americans used an iron oxide-animal fat mixture that would actually bind to the rock. Modern paints don't.

Wagner and other experts suspect scores of rock art sites in this state and elsewhere may have been obliterated by copycats, those who saw what they thought was graffiti and then added their own.

About nine years ago, a site not far from Buffalo Rock yielded a previously undiscovered wall of figures, all done in the distinctive rust-red color of iron oxide. McCorvie and Wagner have mapped the site. Today the group learns how to map a site without harming it.

At the last stop of the day, Clarida Hollow in Pope County, came the chance to glimpse a site "unlike any other in the state," Wagner said.

As every schoolchild -- or anyone who ever saw the movie, "Dances With Wolves" -- knows, Native Americans couldn't grasp the concept of "owning" land or killing more animals than necessary for one's needs.

In the Clarida Hollow paintings, it's not bison but their hides that are shown. Stakes anchor the hide to the ground, arrows lie atop it. Surrounding the hides are large, amorphous-looking, probably amphibian creatures.

Wagner's research tells him that the French established a buffalo-hide tannery along the Ohio River around the year 1700. Members of the Mascouten tribe from the Great Lakes area were recruited to come to Southern Illinois to hunt bison.

Within only a couple of years the Mascoutens had slain more than 15,000 bison.

Wagner knows that the Mascoutens believed both in a bison spirit and in underwater creatures that sometimes had power over bisons. The paintings, he says, are an appeasement to those gods.

When an epidemic broke out about 1705, the Mascoutens lost more than half their number there and blamed the French for disrupting the balance of nature, thus inviting in the epidemic disease. Those remaining trickled home. The tannery was abandoned after its commander also succumbed.

Wagner says that finding rock art is a bit like perceiving the hidden picture in those "Magic Eye" drawings that were popular a few years back.

"Different people have different abilities to see certain things," Wagner said. "I see things now that I didn't see 10 years ago. Sometimes someone will point out something that I haven't seen before. I might have been there a dozen times and I never saw it. If you're there at the wrong time, you don't see anything." -- Bonnie Marx