Over the past centuries, Native Americans left abundant evidence of their culture in the vicinity of Little Lake, which lies along the obsidian trail near a prehistoric obsidian mine. Obsidian was a valuable trade item used in making arrowheads and spearheads, and Native Americans fashioned arrowheads from fine-grained rocks like obsidian and chert. Arrowheads were tools for hunting game and fighting enemies, but also works of art, each with its own elegance that reveals the soul or spirit of the person who created it. Native American art also includes petroglyphs, images made by pecking, carving, or scraping away part of a rock's surface. Bighorn sheep are a common theme in petroglyphs from the desert southwest, and although the specific meaning of rock art may never be known, much of it was religious and related to shamans or medicine mens’ supernatural experiences. American Indians constructed cone-shaped, brush wickiups as single-room dwellings, using fallen limbs and also stone axes to chip down smaller trees; they took shelter in wickiups during winter and stored supplies in them. Rock rings in the desert were used as a foundation to hold down the wood around the base of wickiups. Bedrock mortar pits, a series of depressions on rock outcrops, were used with a rock pestle to grind grain, acorns, and other food products, and clusters of these holes indicate that women of the village gathered together to grind food. Ancient Native American trails can sometimes still be identified across desert pavement, leading to places critical to survival, such as springs, or to culturally important places like petroglyph sites.