When Tim Urbaniak made presentations about American Indian art carved or painted on rock, he discovered that audiences sometimes were as interested in inscriptions made by white settlers at the same site.

In one case, a person in the audience recognized the name of his great-grandfather.

Realizing that more recent rock inscriptions had a yet-unrecognized importance, Urbaniak got a two-year, $65,400 "Save America's Treasures" grant from the National Park Service to document them.

For the last year, Urbaniak, 51, a drafting and design instructor for 20 years at the Montana State University-Billings College of Technology, and the university's archaeology team traveled through Eastern Montana and parts of Wyoming and North and South Dakota to capture images of the inscriptions using hightech equipment.

The team is made up of faculty, students, alumni and volunteers from the community.

It has provided technical expertise to agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service and Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks documenting American Indian petroglyphs and pictographs and other historical sites.

By the time that the grant wraps up next year, the team will have visited hundreds of sites and studied thousands of inscriptions that include names, dates, figures, sayings and livestock brands carved into the rock.

Urbaniak's project primarily studies inscriptions done on sandstone made after Meriwether Lewis' and William Clark's trip through Montana.

One reason Urbaniak chose that era is because American Indian rock art has been and continues to be extensively documented, while more recent inscriptions haven't been studied as much, particularly in Montana.

One inscription that is well-known is Clark's 1806 signature at Pompeys Pillar.

Others quickly followed.

Fur trader Manuel Lisa and explorer John Colter both carved their names at sites in Montana only a few years after Clark.

Urbaniak found American Indian inscriptions of horses or a flint-lock rifle made during a transitional period during which local Indians had contact with whites. Names written on Independence Rock along the Oregon Trail in Wyoming also were part of Urbaniak's project, as well as inscriptions near later trails that veered north.

The ties between inscriptions and historical events sometimes are dramatic.

At Sheridan Butte near Terry, they found that a soldier, J. Bailey, was there on June 21, 1876.

Checking the date with historical documents, the team realized that Bailey was on the butte around the time that soldiers were stacking wood for a bonfire to celebrate the country's upcoming centennial.

Several days after Bailey carved his name, soldiers on the butte saw a riverboat carrying the wounded away from the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Images of cattle began appearing on sandstone after cattle herds arrived in Montana in the mid-1800s. Cattle brands also appear some places

"We draw what we know," Urbaniak, noting that American Indians drew or carved deer and elk.

In the late 1800s, Army scout Luther "Yellowstone" Kelly carved his name many times in the same place, indicating that he passed by several times over a period of time.

Many inscriptions remain a mystery, including "Arisona Kid 1931" found near Igomar.

Even more mysterious was the inscription, complete with misspelling, of "Alfred S. Lian deied Sept. 15, 1925." Urbaniak still wonders if the unfortunate man was actually buried there.

Civilian Conservation Corps and U.S. Geological Survey workers also left their mark in the 1930s and later.

Urbaniak hopes to check out Chinese characters incised into rock in Wyoming.

While most inscriptions are considered to have been carved by the person named, some inscriptions are patently fake, including one that read "Lewis + Clark" surrounded by a heart.

"We're fairly certain this isn't authentic," Urbaniak said.

Dates cut into stone can be misleading. A year could be the year that the inscriber was there, the year of his or her birth, or, later on, the year that a person graduated from high school.

Not everything the team documents is a name or date. A three-dimensional face is carved into a cliff in the Cave Hills of South Dakota.

The project follows inscriptions all the way into the mid-20th century.

On Castle Butte north of Forsyth, Urbaniak found peace signs and names of people he knew, including that of his late brother, Tom.

"It is important to document prehistoric and historic inscriptions before they are erased by either weather or vandalism," Urbaniak said.

At Capital Butte in Southeastern Montana, an 1891 inscription made by a cavalry soldier now is gone after the rock face collapsed.

Urbaniak also has seen places where power tools were used to cut American Indian art out of the rock.

The project has raised interesting questions about what is art, what is history, what is vandalism and when does vandalism become art or history.

The team found places where people carved their names across prehistoric art without regard of what was there.

Although some of the inscriptions that Urbaniak is documenting are what some might consider to be vandalism, he doesn't want that activity to be romanticized or condoned. And he doesn't want people to continue to mark up rock.

Contemporary inscriptions not only may deface older markings, creating them is illegal on public lands.

Urbaniak used 21st-century technology to capture the inscriptions and make the images available to those who want to study them in the future.

The grant provided funds to buy a $30,000 threedimensional scanner that sweeps the surface of the rock or object with a laser and produces a computerized image. Another piece of equipment produces replicas of the inscriptions.

Both pieces of equipment can be used by College of Technology students beyond this project to better prepare them for future jobs, Urbaniak said.

The Heritage Inscription Project will produce a Web site open to the public this fall.

The special collections section of the MSU-Billings Library will house more detailed information, computerized images and a data base of thousands of inscriptions for professional researchers.

Locations of many of the inscriptions will be filed with the Montana State Historic Preservation Office and accessible only to people doing valid research.