Heritage, Volume 12, Number 2, Spring 1994 Page: 17
30 p. : ill. ; 28 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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A rchaeology is often described
as the science of stones and bones, the most
durable elements left behind by our varied
and widespread ancestral people. On rare
occasions and under special circumstances,
vestiges of the more intangible results of
human behavior are preserved in the form
of ceremonial gear, mortuary goods, and
ritual art. One such example is the diverse
and elaborate body of Native American art
found in the dry rock shelters of the middle
Rio Grande, on the border between Texas
and Mexico. There, surrounding the
confluence of the Devils and Pecos Rivers
with the Rio Grande, more than 250 cave
paintings convey to modern viewers one of
the most ancient religious systems in the
world - the shamanistic beliefs of early
hunters and gatherers who lived in this
near-desert area some four millennia ago.
This art style is known as the Pecos River
style, so called for the river where the
paintings were first brought to the attention
of archaeologists and art historians. The
name the people gave themselves will never
be known but popular literature has opted
to call them the Pecos culture, after a place
they never knew and in a language they
never heard.
Their paintings rank as some of the
North America's most intellectually sophisticated
yet they were created by supposedly
simple or primitive people, nomads
who lived in caves and relied upon an
elementary technology to supply their
needs. Many of the scenes are larger than
life, the most monumental figures reaching
11 feet in height, implying the use of scaffolds
or ladders. Mineral pigments, in hues
of red, yellow, white and black, were ground
from pebbles found in the canyon gravels
and applied with fingers, fiber leaf brushes,
or crayons made of compressed powder.
The labor invested in the production of art
suggests that it was a task undertaken
communally, with ordinary people supplying
the artist with materials, logistical
support, and an audience for the work. The
artist is believed to be a religious practitioner,
illustrating for all time the ancient
people's belief in a supernatural world, inhabited
by spirits and shamans who were,
by virtue of their special talents, able to
assume the form of a familiar animal, suchas a mountain lion or bird.
The pictographs are estimated to be
about 3,000 to 4,000 years old, a dating
tentatively confirmed by preliminary experimental radiocarbon assays. Over time,
nature and culture have conspired to erase
hundreds of figures and dozens of sites, so
what is visible today is perhaps less than a
quarter of what once delighted the eye of
prehistoric people.
With this in mind, work began in earnest
in the 1970s, hoping that the remaining
art works could be recorded for posterity
before they were rendered unintelligible by
vandalism or natural deterioration. During
the past 15 years, intensive research has
almost tripled the inventory of pictograph
sites in this region and extended the sample
to include a number of shelters in northern
Mexico, as far as 90 miles south of the Rio
Grande. Five prehistoric art styles have
been defined, a relative sequence derived
from stylistic analysis and experimental
radiocarbon dates, and the interpretive
arena has been entered by a few hardy
individuals, willing to offer educated
opinions about the meanings and reasons
behind the paintings.
Once upon a time, in the first blush of
their romance with computers and statistics,
archaeologists espoused the notion that
archaeological remains could be sampled.
This idea was rooted in the assumption that
human behavior is patterned and that once
the pattern is recognized, additional data
become redundant, superfluous, and
prodigal of time and money. Ironically, one
of the ways of separating ritual art from the
myriad other reasons people might paint on
cave walls is its redundancy. Like all other
forms of public information, ritual relies on
repetition to drive the message home, to
reify the social order, and to explain the
inexplicable to the general populace. Thus,
these two views are based in contradictory
assumptions one derides redundancy,
the other embraces it.
Despite all that has been learned about
the Lower Pecos pictograph traditions, recent
site recordings along the Devils River
demonstrate that there are patterns within
patterns; differences in themes, motifs, and
composition that are subsumed by the superstructure
that is the art style itself. These
paintings contain some new artistic conventions,
show regional differences in both
topics and the manner in which they are
presented, and illuminate the complex supernatural
world of people who lived at themost elemental technological and social
level.
Surveys of two previously inaccessible
holdings, one east and one west of the
Devils River, produced a number of archaeological site recordings, including at
least a dozen with some rock art. Five rock
shelters were distinguished by large panels
of colored pictographs in the Pecos River
style and four contained examples of the
rare miniature pictographs called the Red
Linear style, increasing the sample to 14.
The paintings (of
the Pecos culture)
rank as some of
North America's
most intellectually
sophisticated yet
they were created
by supposedly
simple or primitive
people, nomads
who lived in caves
and relied upon an
elementary
technology to
supply their needs.
The three sites on the east bank of the
Devils River are within a few miles of each
other but they display a wondrously varied
repertoire of motifs. The largest site,
41VV1230, is a curious amalgam of timehonored
Pecos River style themes and new
ways of elaborating upon them. A number
of the central characters are obviously human
but with the animal characteristics
that led Dr. W. W. Newcomb Jr. to first
identify them as shamans, perhaps dressed
in their ritual garb. One of the most basic
beliefs of shamanism is animal transformation,
the capacity to shift between animal
and human form that is bestowed upon the
shaman by his unique abilities and his
training. In the Lower Pecos River region,
the bestiary includes countless deer, birds,
serpents, and turtles, but the only animal
consistently shown on a par with human
figures -is the mountain lion, colloquially
called panther. Usually, the panther is
shown leaping through the air, his tailcurled over his back, his claws extended,
and his fetid breath steaming from his
mouth, perhaps symbolizing the roar of the
lion. Often, two identical cats are drawnHERITAGE * SPRING 199417
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Texas Historical Foundation. Heritage, Volume 12, Number 2, Spring 1994, periodical, Spring 1994; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth45413/m1/17/: accessed April 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas Historical Foundation.