Description: The first inhabitants of the southwest, the Native Americans, often made complex and meaningful designs on rock faces and pottery. Their language, however, was entirely oral; nothing like a written language existed for any of the prehistoric tribes living in the area. When the Spanish arrived up from Mexico in 1540, they brought written language: Spanish. It wasn't long thereafter that inscriptions on rock faces and written reports began, documenting what life and times were like in the Southwest throughout its radical changes that the Spanish brought, all the way up to modern times.