Painted on cave walls where the Pecos and Devils rivers join the Rio Grande, the rock art of the Lower Pecos canyonlands casts a powerful spell. Its imagery is intricate, depicting human-like figures with upraised arms, geometric forms and animals like snakes, birds and mountain lions. And its scale is vast. Some panels span a hundred feet or more, and there are hundreds of such sites.
Dr. Carolyn Boyd founded the Shumla Archeological Research & Education Center to study this Pecos River Style imagery. She and her colleagues recently discovered that the distinctive style was used for more than 4,000 years. But they’ve also gained new insights into the meaning of this “painted landscape.”
“White Shaman was, for me, the Rosetta Stone,” Boyd said. “It was the indication that this could be done, that there was so much to learn from the rock art of the Lower Pecos.”
Despite their evident complexity, archeologists long assumed these cave paintings were collections of disparate images. But in a 2016 book, Boyd showed that at least one site – White Shaman Shelter, on the Pecos River – was a single composition, a mural. And, she argued, its meaning could be interpreted: White Shaman contained a creation story, with echoes in historic and contemporary Native cultures. A shaman from Mexico’s Huichol community later validated Boyd’s interpretation.
We often assume that people turn to art and religion only after they’ve achieved a degree of material security. But the Lower Pecos people were nomadic foragers, and they invested tremendous resources in the rock art. They built scaffolding to paint high cave walls. They made paints from minerals mixed with deer-bone marrow. The sacrifice of such a fat-rich commodity reflects how central these murals were.
Because the images, Boyd said, were not simply representations. They were manifestations of the sacred beings upon which the cycles of life relied.
“Creating these murals was bringing that pantheon into their very presence,” Boyd said. “They are living, they are active, and they are engaged in the creation and maintenance of the cosmos.”
At White Shaman, Boyd discovered that, in the scores of images on the panel, all the black paint had been applied first, followed by red, yellow and white. Shumla researchers have since learned the same paint sequence was used across the canyonlands. It’s part of a “graphic vocabulary” Lower Pecos people maintained for millennia.
Huichol elders told her the paint sequence reflected the process of creation, and its daily reenactment – from primordial darkness to daybreak and the Sun’s ascent to its zenith.
“You're painting creation into the murals,” Boyd said. “And so that sequence was as important as anything else, because these colors carry the divine essence of those different elements.”
Boyd shared images of Fate Bell Shelter, an immense pictograph site in Seminole Canyon State Park that can be viewed by park visitors. Independently, several Huichol elders said the mural depicted “the time before the Sun was born.” Boyd suspects Lower Pecos murals reflect different elements of a complex mythology, connected with specific times of the year. Ancient West Texans may have visited them as part of a ceremonial calendar.
“I think that what we will find is that these were seasonal aggregation locations,” Boyd said, “that they came together at specific times of the year to produce these murals and that they would be tied to things like solstice ceremonies, ceremonies of the equinox and so forth.”
Across Native traditions, caves are regarded as places of origin – of ancestors, the gods and life itself. For ancient people, these West Texas caves were likewise charged with sacred power, Boyd said. Her research reminds us – that this hard country has also been holy ground.
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