Haleets, Native American petroglyph site on Bainbridge Island, US
Haleets is a 5-foot-tall, 7-foot-long sandstone glacial erratic boulder with pecked petroglyphs, sitting about 100 feet offshore at Agate Point on Bainbridge Island. The Suquamish Tribe claims the rock, known in English as Figurehead Rock, as part of its heritage.
The Suquamish people carved petroglyphs on this glacial boulder over several centuries as part of their cultural practices. Later, land surveyors added their own marks beginning in the 1800s, including a geodetic marker in 1934.
The Lushootseed name x̌alilc, meaning "marked rock", gives Haleets its name; English speakers also call it Figurehead Rock. The Suquamish Museum curator and archivist Charlie Sigo suggested the carvings may have served as a boundary marker, though their purpose is not confirmed. An amateur astronomer has proposed that the rock has a calendrical function.
Haleets sits about 100 feet (30 m) offshore at Agate Point, so it is reached only when the tide exposes the intertidal zone; check a tide table for Agate Passage and go near the lowest low. The crossing is over wet, uneven shore, and the boulder is best seen from the beach rather than boarded.
While the original Suquamish carvings are several centuries old, the surveyor marks added later are equally visible on the stone. This layering of different time periods on a single rock shows how the site has been marked and remarked by different people across generations.
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