There is a big international black market for rock art – petroglyphs and cliff paintings – ancient sacred images that depict traditional knowledge rooted in the landscape. In southern Utah, people are using battery-powered saws to cut sandstone slabs off cliffs, which end up hanging in living rooms in New York and Tokyo. I’ve been looking for a graphic example of an attempt to steal a petroglyph for 20 years.

In the Altai, tourists can buy a boulder with a thousand year-old carving at a roadside stand for $30. At Chui Oozy Nature Park, which was formed to protect the rock art from vandalism and thieves, I finally found solid evidence to illustrate the problem.

The person trying to steal this image of an Argali mountain sheep had started to remove a circular piece of rock, but made a bad hammer stroke that broke off one of the animal’s horns. Having ruined the image, the thief gave up and walked away. This image illustrates the need for protection of sacred sites through community involvement and better public education, and demonstrates the need for more resources to fund ranger patrols and law enforcement. (Click on the image to enlarge it.)