The White Shaman mural is a spectacular prehistoric composition on the wall of a small cave on the Pecos River in southern Texas. It measures some twenty-six-feet wide by thirteen-feet tall and consists of multiple figures in richly painted colors in white, black, yellow, and red. It is only one of a number of similar rock art locales in the Lower Pecos River canyons of southwestern Texas.
Author Carolyn Boyd is an artist turned Ph.D. archaeologist associated with Texas State University at San Marcos who has spent the last twenty-five years systematically researching the abundant rock art of the Lower Pecos Valley. Until now, scholars and amateurs alike have viewed Pecos rock art as random and indecipherable. Using the latest in scientific rock art analysis that is informed by ethnology, art history, and archaeology, Boyd is able to put Pecos rock art in the tradition of Native American mythologies of Uto-Aztecan cultures that include the ancient Aztecs and present day Huichol, who live some 600 miles to the south in Mexico.
Boyd closely observes the panel’s connections with Shamanism and peyote, but rejects it as a representation of a drug induced vision. She concludes that the White Shaman mural is a visual narrative of interrelated ideas traditionally associated with complex agricultural societies of Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. The rock art is a graphic vocabulary that conveys sophisticated mythological concepts, and in particular a myth that is recounted by Southern Uto-Aztecan speakers. It has far more to do with the artist’s mental conceptualization than with an altered state of consciousness.
The scientific study of ancient rock art is a very new field. This study breaks new ground in seeking to use multi-disciplinary techniques to reach a deeper understanding of ancient visual imagery. Lavishly illustrated and written in a very readable style, The White Shaman Murals appeals to everyone, amateurs and professionals alike, with an interest in ancient art. —Mark Michel