2022
Calico Rock is a small town in the Arkansas Ozarks. It is named after a bluff that sits along the White River. The exposed rock in this bluff is so colorful that when the town was colonized, westerners named the town after a textile known for its flower patterns.
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Calico refers to Chintz , derived from the Hindi word for ‘speckled’ or ‘spotted’. This woodblock printed, painted, stained or glazed textile was from South India and influenced by Mughal art.
Cheap versions of this were imported to Europe from Calicut (hence ‘calico’) after Europe reached India in 1498. It became popular for decoration — and handed down to servants who made them into clothing — until the 1600s when it was outlawed in France and England. Cheap British imitations then became popular in the 1700s, and the word chintz eventually came to mean any overly ornate industrially printed cotton.
Calico Rock’s resilient pink quartzite is spotted with light green crustose lichen, a symbiotic matrix of algae and fungus that grows in damp environments.
The quartzite, or quartz arenite, is a lacework of quartz deposition and growth that has been happening since Paleozoic times.
