The Lower Pecos Canyonlands – where the Pecos and Devils rivers join the Rio Grande – contain globally significant rock art. Hundreds of intricate murals – some hundreds of feet long – are painted on cave walls here. And, as scientists at the Shumla Archeological Research & Education Center have discovered, this distinctive pictograph style was created for more than 4,000 years, from about 3500 BCE to 900 CE.
But these same shallow caves have preserved much else from prehistory: bits of tools and textiles, plant and animal remains. And these materials shed light on the daily lives of those who created the monumental paintings.
Dr. Phil Dering is an archeologist specializing in plant remains, or paleoethnobotany.
“It's probably several lifetimes of archeology still be done out there,” Dering said of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands. “What we do know is we have a very good idea of how they used several of the plants, which plants were the most important to them in terms of living off the land.”
Dering and his colleagues have analyzed tiny seeds, charred food remains and fibers in nets and sandals. They’ve found that, among plants, there was a “big three” for the people of the Lower Pecos.
First were the “desert rosettes”: lechuguilla, sotol and yucca. In earth ovens, canyonlands people slow-roasted the hearts of these plants, to render them edible. And archeologists have found “turtleback scrapers,” used to separate fibers from the leaves. Lechuguilla was especially key.
“I used to call it the buffalo of the Lower Pecos because it was so important,” Dering said. “They made implements from it. They made netting from it. They made sandals from it. They ate the heart. They fished with it. They made twine with it.”
The other two main plants were prickly pear cactus and mesquite. Prickly pear seeds are calorie-rich, and mesquite beans were pulverized into a nourishing flour.
In painting murals high on cave walls, the creators likely built scaffolding from sotol stalks. And plants were used in applying the paint as well.
“In fact, we suspect that some of the finer work done in the murals was done by not just animal-hair brushes,” Dering said, “but by yucca fiber brushes. It's a smaller fiber. It's more gracile. It works really well.”
Deer are depicted in rock art here. But smaller game was the staple. The caves have yielded a variety of traps – likely used to catch rodents. Archaic nomads probably depleted such “ground meat” quickly – and then traveled on.
“If you're a farmer, you're stuck there,” Dering said, “and you have to increase the number of calories you can get out of your plot. But if you're a forager, you just move on and let the plot replenish itself.”
Thirty-two hundred years ago, the climate grew wetter, and bison arrived. New spearpoints also appeared. It’s uncertain whether Lower Pecos people embraced this bison-hunting technology, or if northern bison hunters moved in, pushing the existing population south. Regardless, Pecos River Style rock art endured through this time.
“Was there a revival, or was there simply a continuation of it?” Dering said. “The idea either way is that it persisted through a pretty obvious environmental and cultural disruption.”
With their complex imagery, the Pecos murals remind us that these hunter-gatherers lived with myth and meaning. That extended to desert plants.
“It was so much more than just going out and grabbing a bunch of agave crowns and slicing them up and throwing them into an earth oven,” Dering said. “All the plants and animals were charged with and imbued with agency and meaning.”
Dering said archeologists have only “scratched the surface” here. These West Texas canyons have more secrets to share.
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