Archaeologist-artist Carolyn Boyd has prepared this dazzling study of some of the Southwest’s most dramatic and little seen rock art. In the harsh environment of southwestern Texas and northern Mexico, known as the Lower Pecos country, Native Americans eked out a living for some 4,000 years by hunting and gathering. They also painted images on the walls of the region’s magnificent canyons, whereas pecking images into the rock was the more common artistic technique in much of the Southwest.
The pigments are derived from deer bone marrow and yucca root and show vivid scenes of humans and animals bearing wings, antlers, rabbit ears, and spears and tell us much of these ancient people’s belief systems, ritual practices, cosmology, land usage, technology, and social organization. Modern science is now using carbon-14 and other methods to date the art, thus placing it in an historical perspective.
For many years rock art was dismissed as “graffiti” or idle-time activity. But today’s scholars are unraveling the narrative that it tells in a strong spiritual context. Boyd uses the latest methods to interpret the religious practices of the artists as they travel on shamanic journeys to the spiritual world. Boyd argues that they are real time histories of important spiritual events. The rock art was thus an integral part of the lives of these nomadic people that remained important for thousands of years.
Rock Art of the Lower Pecos is a well written and superbly illustrated study of some of North America’s most import rock art and should be read by anyone interested in the prehistory of the Americas.
