Along the Pecos River in West Texas, an Artistic Tradition Unbroken for 4,000 Years

Carolyn Boyd wasn’t a trained archaeologist when she first visited the rock art sites in West Texas along the Pecos River. She was an artist. Being one and not the other allowed her to see something one, but not the other could.

“I saw compositions,” Boyd, Shumla Endowed Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Texas State University, said. “Highly sophisticated, well-planned compositions with rules in terms of the way that they applied the paint making it even more complicated.”

Hitherto, researchers believed the massive rock art murals – some stretching as long as 100-feet, with individual figures nearly 30-feet tall – were produced over multiple generations.

“(Previous scientists) saw multiple images,” Boyd explained. “They thought somebody painted this figure, and then somebody painted this figure on top of it, and then somebody painted this, but they're not that way. They're woven together. They're interlaced because they were painted at the same time, just like an artist would do now, just like I did when I was painting murals myself.”

Boyd the archaeologist/anthropologist has now confirmed what Boyd the artist suspected, one of a series of stunning discoveries made in collaboration with a team of scientists.  Their findings, “Mapping the chronology of an ancient cosmovision: 4000 years of continuity in Pecos River style mural painting and symbolism,” are published in the journal Science Advances.

“The (radiocarbon) dates within many of the murals (are) clustered so closely as to be statistically indistinguishable, suggesting that they were produced during a single painting event as a visual narrative,” Boyd said. “This contradicts the commonly held belief that the murals were a random collection of images that accumulated over hundreds or thousands of years.”

Boyd and her colleagues obtained 57 direct radiocarbon dates and 25 indirect oxalate dates for pictographs across 12 Pecos River rock art sites. They estimate that the Pecos River style murals began between 5,760 and 5,385 years ago and ended between 1,370 and 1,035 years ago.

“Using the same graphic style, symbol system, and rules of paint application, they continued to create these visual manuscripts for more than 4,000 years,” Boyd added.

Amazing.

These weren’t the team’s only breakthroughs. Maybe not even their most astonishing breakthroughs, but first, some context.

Archaeologists from Texas State University and the Shumla Archaeological Research & Education Center working on the Panther Cave mural in Seminole Canyon State Park and Historic Site. Photo by Olive Talley.

Who Made the Pecos River Rock Art Murals?

Forager societies in what is now southwest Texas and northern Mexico painted multi-colored Pecos River style murals—known as pictographs—in limestone rock shelters. Who, exactly, the artists were is one answer Boyd does not have.

“When I go to the ethnography, the folks that I find the strongest parallels to are Uto-Aztecan speaking peoples,” she explained. “That said, there are aspects in the different stories and particular motifs that I would say you could tie to just about any Native American group in the Americas.”

Indigenous languages of the Americas interpreter service Maya Bridge states: “Named after the Ute language of Utah and the Nahuan languages of Mexico, the Uto-Aztecan languages form one of the most widespread and historically significant Indigenous language families in the Americas. 

“Spoken from the Great Basin in the United States to Central America, this family includes Nahuatl, Hopi, Comanche, and over 60 other languages and variants.”

The dates of the Pecos River rock art sites predate Uto-Aztecan speaking people, making these artists their ancestors, Proto-Uto-Aztecan, speaking an ancestral language shared by the subsequent groups.

“These are nomadic groups, so they're small, family related, but traveling in together from distant areas, so you might have a very large group of people that came in for ceremonial purposes,” Boyd explained.

Those ceremonial purposes could have been related to the summer or winter solstice or spring and fall equinox. Small family groups dispersed over hundreds of square miles convening around the rock caves at set times during the year and producing the murals. Some could have been painted in a matter of weeks; others would have required work over multiple ceremonial cycles. Radiocarbon dating isn’t that precise.

“The key takeaway here is that for so long, people thought nomadic hunting and gathering societies such that produced these murals didn't have the sophistication to produce something like this,” Boyd said. “You think of monumental architecture, and you think of the Maya and the Aztec, and everybody goes, ‘Ooh and ah,’ but these hunting and gathering peoples produced monumental art. The planning and execution that went into the production of the murals and the cosmology represented in these murals completely turns our understanding of hunting and gathering peoples on its head. They had the same mind that you and I have.”

What Are Pecos Style Rock Art Murals?

Hundreds of rock art sites exist around the region where the Pecos River meets the Rio Grande about 250 miles due west of San Antonio near the small border towns of Del Rio, TX and Ciudad Acuña in Mexico. The area represents a cultural keystone landscape. More than 300 are known north of the border and Boyd estimates there’s at least another 100 south. Together, they establish one of the most distinctive rock art traditions in the world: the Pecos River style.

“It's a rock art style characterized predominantly by polychromatic, beautiful, multicolored murals, often monumental in scale, almost all of them requiring scaffolding to produce,” Boyd explained. “Typically human-like or anthropomorphic figures, again, composed of multiple colors. They have a variety of different types of headdresses and body adornments, like wielding an atlatl or spear thrower and darts that are loaded into those atlatls, and they've often got staffs and power bundles–what we refer to as power bundles–associated with the opposite hand. Zoomorphs, in particular deer and felines, but also snakes and birds and an occasional canine. Lots of enigmatic figures.”

A quick glossary of terms. The West Texas rock art murals are pictographs–painting on rock. Petroglyphs are rock carvings.

These pictographs featured black, red, yellow, and white paint produced from earth minerals, animal fat, and plant extracts, likely from yucca, as an emulsifier. The desert climate has preserved the art works exceptionally well.

“We found that they were following a very rigorous painting sequence, applying the black paint before they applied the red paint, and then the yellow and then the white,” Boyd said. “It sounds like that's no big deal, but if you think about that from the perspective of the size of the murals and the amount of planning that would have to go into that, it's pretty crazy.”

That color sequence is critical.

“One of the recurring figures in the rock art is an anthropomorphic figure wearing antlers, and they're red antlers, and at the tips of the antlers are black dots,” Boyd explained. “As an artist, if I was to paint that, I would paint the red antlers, and then I would apply the black dots at the tip. That's not what they did. They painted the black dots and then they applied the red antlers. It's a counterintuitive painting sequence. The planning, again, that you would have to go through to do this across the length of these murals is phenomenal.”

This is how the figures–painted more or less simultaneously–became interlaced, an intricacy overlooked by generations of scientists.

The Halo Shelter spans 100 feet long and contains an array of multicolored human and animal-like Pecos River style figures. Photo courtesy of Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center.

“It's not like they painted this figure, then they painted this figure, and they painted this figure,” Boyd said. “They painted the black in this figure, and then they painted this figure that went over the top of it, and then they applied the yellow of that figure on the top of that one; it's remarkable in terms of the complexity.”

The colors are not merely aesthetic. Boyd learned this from the Wixáritari/Huichol elders in northern and central Mexico she’s consulted with on her research. When inquiring about the paint sequence, they gave her a strange look. Why was it done this way when it would have been so much easier to put the paint down a different way?

“I was told that they're essentially painting creation into the mural,” Boyd said. “You put down the black first, because black is associated with primordial time. It's the time before there was fire, before there was sun. It was the very beginning of the watery underworld associated with femininity. They would let that dry and then apply the red. Red is associated with sun when it's just at the horizon. That beautiful, crepuscular light. Yellow is the color of the sun as it bathes the Earth at dawn, and then white is the light of the noonday sun. They're painting creation into (the murals), going from primordial time to the time just before the sun is born, to the time that the sun is born, to the time that the sun reaches the zenith and then sets.”

Incredible.

Doubly incredible that this visual “language” would be understandable to contemporary Indigenous people in the region, again, almost 6,000 years later.

Think about that.

What Do the Pecos River Rock Art Murals Mean?

From an Indigenous perspective, the West Texas rock art paintings are not “art” as contemporary people understand the term.

“They were living, breathing entities,” Boyd explained. “The anthropomorphic, human-like figure, that represents a specific deity or ancestral spirit. It is that ancestor. It lives, it breathes, it speaks.”

The arrangement of the figures and symbols tell stories. Stories told in the murals at the different rock art sites around the Pecos River change, but the characters remain largely the same. Like the “Star Wars” movies. Origins and sequels and prequels, but the same universe.

“The stories that I've been able to tie them to are always coming back to stories of creation. What I've been told (by Indigenous elders) is that you can think of them as the myths of creation, but it's deeper than that, because those living beings, those living entities represented there, are currently engaged in creation today,” Boyd continued. “It's not just a thing of the past. It's an ongoing process of creation that they are involved in, in creation now, in the maintenance of the cosmos, if you will, from that location in these sacred places.”

That’s why it was critically important for these Proto-Uto-Aztecan people to return to these sites over a period spanning nearly 4,000 years. Four thousand years. Continually. Think about that.

“Just like what I was told by the elders, if this is a story about the time before the sun was born, and there are ceremonies associated with celebrating that time, and that would be when you would produce this mural, (painting the murals) would be a part of that ceremonial cycle to make sure that (the sun rising) does take place,” Boyd said.

Amazing.

Amazing.

 

A Rosetta Stone for Indigenous Art

Boyd’s research into the Pecos Style rock art murals predates her latest discoveries. In earlier work at what came to be known as the White Shaman Mural, she connected what’s depicted there to the creation story told by the Aztec and the Huichol.

“What I've learned from subsequent meetings with different elders, and I'm starting to work with different Indigenous groups now, it's starting to bust wide open,” Boyd said excitedly. “We're going to be able to start doing more in terms of reading that graphic vocabulary that they had.”

Boyd believes the White Shaman Mural to have been something of a Rosetta Stone, for lack of a better description. A cypher allowing contemporary people to “read” ancient pictographs across the Americas.

“What I learned at the White Shaman site applies to multiple sites across the region, and that it goes back even further than we ever imagined,” Boyd said. “To be able to start thinking about reading books that are 6,000 years old is very exciting.”

To say the least.

These “books”–the murals–are more than old. Their greater significance, and perhaps the greatest revelation from this research, is how these murals inform contemporary Indigenous spiritual beliefs.

“Today, Indigenous communities in the U.S. and Mexico can relate the stories communicated through the (Pecos River) imagery to their own cosmologies, demonstrating the antiquity and persistence of a pan-New World belief system that is at least 6,000 years old,” Boyd said. “Think about it, the canyons of Southwest Texas house a vast and ancient library of painted texts documenting 175 generations of sacred stories and Indigenous knowledge. As an artist and an archaeologist, I can tell you that this is a breathtaking discovery.”

Sit with what she just stated for a moment.

This research suggests consistent messaging throughout a multi-millennium period despite great changes in material culture, land use, and climate. From the scientific evidence and confirmation of contemporary Indigenous people, Boyd and her colleagues have concluded that Pecos River style paintings faithfully transmitted sophisticated metaphysical concepts informing the beliefs and symbolic expression of Indigenous groups throughout central and northern Mexico persisting to this day.

Boyd suspects the influence extends even further.

“I think we're looking at possibly a pan New World cosmovision that's documented here in this rock art,” she said.

Nothing less than a worldview shared widely by Indigenous people across North America originating nearly 6,000 years ago in the Pecos River valley.

 “You've got 175 generations of books,” Boyd said. “Think of the canyons as being like shelves in a library; each one of these shelters contains a book, and it's 175 generations of books with the same graphic vocabulary, the same style, the same paint sequence rule throughout the region.”

One hundred and seventy-five generations. Unbroken.

Why did it stop?

Another question Boyd doesn’t have an answer to she hopes subsequent research will reveal.