In rock shelters throughout the Southwestern U.S., ancient paintings weave a grand story that was built over thousands of years. Each mural — portraying humans, animals, and various shapes — acts as a colorful chapter in the Mesoamerican worldview.
A new study published in Science Advances has established a more complete timeline for a particular rock art style known as the Pecos River style, seen across southwest Texas and northern Mexico. This style, first painted nearly 6,000 years ago, was kept alive for 4,000 years. Altogether, the murals offer a glimpse at how indigenous communities interpreted the universe through sacred spaces.
Read More: Echoes Near Stone Age Rock Art Suggest Rituals Were Common Practice
Telling a Story with Rock Art
Rock art in the Americas encompasses a range of distinctive styles based in different regions, and each one incorporates pictographs (paintings) or petroglyphs (engravings). The Pecos River style (PRS) is the signature variety of rock art in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, a 3,000-square-mile region believed to have been inhabited by hunter-gatherers for more than 12,500 years.
In this region, limestone rock shelters contain evidence of large-game hunting and of earth ovens used to bake plant foods in pits. The people who inhabited these sites painted on the walls and ceilings, using red, orange, yellow, black, and white pigments to sketch visual stories. The largest of the PRS murals spans 100 feet long and 20 feet tall, requiring makeshift ladders or scaffolding to create.
Those who painted the murals included humanoid figures and animals like deer, felines, birds, and snakes. The figures were also commonly drawn with additional details, including headdresses or adornments attached to other body parts. They were even depicted with tools or weapons on occasion. Some figures, for example, hold atlatls, a device that allowed hunter-gatherers to launch spears or darts with enhanced accuracy and speed, according to the Shumla Archaeological Research & Education Center.
A Time-Honored Narrative
To find out when exactly the Pecos River style was being made, researchers involved with the new study obtained 57 direct radiocarbon dates and 25 indirect oxalate dates from 12 sites. With this information, they estimated that the Pecos River style began between 5,760 and 5,385 years ago, and likely ended between 1,370 and 1,035 years ago.
The murals' dates also suggest they were planned projects, challenging previous assumptions by archaeologists.
“Another huge shocker is that the dates within many of the murals clustered so closely as to be statistically indistinguishable, suggesting that they were produced during a single painting event as a visual narrative,” said study author Carolyn Boyd, an archaeologist at Texas State University, in a statement. “This contradicts the commonly held belief that the murals were a random collection of images that accumulated over hundreds or thousands of years.”
A Cosmovision Coming to Life
The researchers also determined that eight of the murals had an established iconographic vocabulary and were deliberately created to have layers of multiple intertwining figures. As a result, the murals told an overarching story about Mesoamerican beliefs.
The geological features of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, including canyons, sinkholes, caves, and rock shelters, and rivers, held sacred meaning for ancient Indigenous communities and were linked with ritual activity, according to the researchers. The rock art in shelters, then, was made as an expression of the “cosmovision,” a term used to describe the worldview shared by Mesoamerican societies.
Even as climate and land use changed in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, the hunter-gatherers living there passed down the Pecos River style from generation to generation for multiple millennia.
“But perhaps the most exciting thing of all is that today Indigenous communities in the U.S. and Mexico can relate the stories communicated through the imagery to their own cosmologies, demonstrating the antiquity and persistence of a pan-New World belief system that is at least 6,000 years old,” said Boyd.
Read More: Ancient Teotihuacan Murals May Reveal a 2,000-Year-Old Written Language
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
- This article references information from a new study that was published in Science Advances: Mapping the chronology of an ancient cosmovision: 4000 years of continuity in Pecos River style mural painting and symbolism
- This article references information from the Shumla Archaeological Research & Education Center: Atlatls in Lower Pecos Rock Art