In 2019, archaeologists scrambling up the flanks of Nicaragua’s Masaya volcano—an active crater that’s been spewing sulfuric fumes since before Columbus showed up—stumbled across something that made absolutely no sense. Carved into hardened lava flows were human footprints, animal tracks, and geometric symbols. Thousands of them. Someone had been here, etching messages into rock that could melt them alive at any moment.
Here’s the thing: we’ve been finding these volcanic petroglyphs all over the world, and they’re forcing us to rethink what we thought we knew about ancient peoples and risk assessment. Sites in Hawaii, Iceland, Mexico, Chile—everywhere humans lived near volcanoes, they apparently couldn’t resist the urge to graffiti the most dangerous real estate on the planet.
Why Would Anyone Climb an Active Volcano to Doodle on Rocks Anyway
The Masaya carvings aren’t even the wildest example.
On Chile’s Isluga volcano, at 15,000 feet where oxygen gets scarce and your lungs feel like deflated balloons, researchers documented over 2,000 petroglyphs in 2003. Some date back roughly 1,500 years. People hauled themselves up there—past the tree line, past any reasonable definition of “safe”—to peck images of llamas and geometric patterns into volcanic stone. And they did it repeatedly, generation after generation, like the world’s most inconvenient art gallery.
Turns out these weren’t just random acts of ancient vandalism. The symbols cluster around specific geological features: fumaroles, lava tubes, thermal springs. Places where the earth literally breathes. Archaeologist wrote in a 2015 study that many Andean cultures viewed volcanoes as living entities—gods, basically—that controlled weather, water, and whether your crops lived or died. The petroglyphs weren’t decorations. They were prayers carved in permanance.
When Your Canvas Might Explode That’s Just Extra Motivation Apparently
Wait—maybe that’s exactly the point.
At Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano, petroglyph fields stretch across old lava flows like ancient comic strips. Some images sit on rock dated to eruptions from the 1400s and 1500s. The Hawaiian word for these carvings is “ki’i pōhaku”—rock images—and they mark trails, births, deaths, and victories. But they also document something else: the volcano’s own tantrums. When Kilauea erupted in 2018, destroying over 700 homes, it buried modern neighborhoods but somehow spared most of the ancient petroglyphs, which had been positioned with suspicious precision away from the most volotile zones.
These ancient artists knew what they were doing. They weren’t reckless thrill-seekers; they were obsessive observers who’d watched eruption patterns for centuries and mapped safe zones with their feet and their lives. The petroglyphs are proof they’d cracked volcanic behavior long before we had seismographs.
The Messages We’re Still Failing to Decode Properly Because We’re Not Paying Attention
In 2017, researchers at Mexico’s Ceboruco volcano found petroglyphs showing spiral patterns and what look like explosion symbols. Ceboruco’s last major eruption happened around 1870, but these carvings are way older—possibly a thousand years. Were they warnings? Maps? Mythological storytelling? Nobody knows for sure, and that’s maddening because the answers are right there, hammered into stone, screaming at us across milenia.
Modern volcanology uses satellites, chemical analysis, ground-penetrating radar. Ancient peoples used observation, oral tradition, and apparently an unshakeable compulsion to document everything on the least stable surfaces available. And somehow, their low-tech approach kept communities alive for generations in places where one bad day could bury entire villages under pyroclastic flows.
The Masaya petroglyphs are still being studied. Researchers use photogrammetry and 3D modeling to map every scratch before the next eruption erases them. Because that’s the brutal irony—these messages carved into volcanic rock to outlast their creators are themselves temporary. The same forces that made the canvas eventually destroy the art. Some petroglyphs discovered in the 1990s are already gone, swallowed by fresh lava flows or eroded by acidic gases that eat stone like its cotton candy.
We’re in a race against geology itself to document what ancient peoples wrote on the landscape’s most dangerous pages. And every symbol we lose is a conversation we’ll never get to finish.
