The White Shaman Mural

Download or read book Painters in Prehistory written by Harry J. Shafer and published by Trinity University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of ancient canyon dwellers along the Lower Pecos and their culture

Download or read book The White Shaman Mural written by Carolyn E. Boyd and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2016-11-29 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, Society for American Archaeology Book Award, 2017 San Antonio Conservation Society Publication Award, 2019 The prehistoric hunter-gatherers of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas and Coahuila, Mexico, created some of the most spectacularly complex, colorful, extensive, and enduring rock art of the ancient world. Perhaps the greatest of these masterpieces is the White Shaman mural, an intricate painting that spans some twenty-six feet in length and thirteen feet in height on the wall of a shallow cave overlooking the Pecos River. In The White Shaman Mural, Carolyn E. Boyd takes us on a journey of discovery as she builds a convincing case that the mural tells a story of the birth of the sun and the beginning of time—making it possibly the oldest pictorial creation narrative in North America. Unlike previous scholars who have viewed Pecos rock art as random and indecipherable, Boyd demonstrates that the White Shaman mural was intentionally composed as a visual narrative, using a graphic vocabulary of images to communicate multiple levels of meaning and function. Drawing on twenty-five years of archaeological research and analysis, as well as insights from ethnohistory and art history, Boyd identifies patterns in the imagery that equate, in stunning detail, to the mythologies of Uto-Aztecan-speaking peoples, including the ancient Aztec and the present-day Huichol. This paradigm-shifting identification of core Mesoamerican beliefs in the Pecos rock art reveals that a shared ideological universe was already firmly established among foragers living in the Lower Pecos region as long as four thousand years ago.

Download or read book Pecos River Style Rock Art written by James Burr Harrison Macrae and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-05 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pecos River style pictographs are one of the most complex forms of rock art worldwide. The dramatic prehistoric pictographs on the limestone overhangs of the lower Pecos and Devils Rivers in West Texas have been the subject of preservation and study since the 1930s, and dedicated research continues to this day. The medium is large-scale, polychrome pictographs in open rock shelter settings, emphasizing the animistic/shamanistic religion practiced by the local aboriginal peoples. Creating large-scale rock murals required intelligence, skill, and knowledge. These enigmatic images, some dating to 4,500 years ago and possibly earlier, depict strange, vaguely human and animal shapes and various geometric forms. While full understanding of the meaning of these images is abstruse, archaeologists and other scholars have identified what they believe to be patterns and religious themes, mixed with what could be figures and objects from everyday life in the local hunter-gatherer culture as it existed in the region centuries before the arrival of colonizing Europeans. Although interpretation of these pictographs remains controversial, in Pecos River Style Rock Art: A Prehistoric Iconography, James Burr Harrison Macrae contributes to the beginnings of a syntactic “grammar” for these images that can be applied in diverse contexts without direct reference to any particular interpretation. “The strength of structural-iconographic analysis,” Macrae writes, “is that it relies on repetitive patterns rather than idiosyncratic information, such as trying to make broad inferences from one or only a few sites.” Pecos River Style Rock Art offers the framework of an empirical methodology for understanding these ancient artworks.

Download or read book The Rock Art of Texas Indians written by Forrest Kirkland and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In The Rock Art of Texas Indians, Kirkland's meticulous watercolor copies of this rich and diversified art are reproduced, 32 in full color, the rest in black and white. The informative and engaging text is contributed by W. W. Newcomb, Jr., former director of the Texas Memorial Museum and author of The Indians of Texas." "Those early Indians, at different times and places and in a variety of styles, carved and painted their art from Paint Rock in West Central Texas to the canyons of the Big Bend, from the Canadian River Valley in the Panhandle to the Hueco Tanks near El Paso. As the form for this art was varied, so too were the reasons for its execution. Much rock art was no doubt born of magical and religious beliefs, or served to illustrate myths, but some apparently commemorated actual events and some seems to have been only tallies or messages. Kirkland recorded it all with consummate skill, preserving for other generations, as he said he would, the often remarkable, always fascinating art of vanished people."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Download or read book The Rock Art of Texas Indians written by Forrest Kirkland and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After viewing Indian rock paintings on a bluff above the Concho River near Paint Rock, Texas, in 1934, the late Dallas artist Forrest Kirkland was seized with an idea. He wrote later, "Here was a veritable gallery of primitive art at the mercy of the elements and the hands of a destructive people. In a few more years only the hundreds of deeply carved names and smears of modern paint would remain to mark the site of the paintings left by the Indians. . . . What was at first merely a suggestion in my mind soon became a solemn command. I was a trained artist able to make accurate copies of these Indian paintings. I should save them from total ruin."Kirkland devoted a good part of the rest of his life to copying pictographs and petroglyphs at some eighty far-flung sites in Texas. In The Rock Art of Texas Indians, his meticulous watercolor copies of this rich and diversified art are reproduced, 32 in full color, the rest in black and white. The informative and engaging text is contributed by W. W. Newcomb, Jr., former director of the Texas Memorial Museum and author of The Indians of Texas.The petroglyphs and pictographs reproduced here, states Professor Newcomb, "are relatively rare and absolutely irreplaceable human documents. They can often reveal much about the ways of ancient men, including aspects of life which otherwise would forever go unrecorded, for they may illustrate how a vanished, nameless people perceived themselves and their world, their relation to God and to each other, and their fantasies and fears. They are, then, a treasure to be valued and a heritage to be preserved."

Download or read book The Cave Paintings of Baja California written by Harry W. Crosby and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Bitter Waters written by Patrick Dearen and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rising at 11,750 feet in the Sangre de Cristo range and snaking 926 miles through New Mexico and Texas to the Rio Grande, the Pecos River is one of the most storied waterways in the American West. It is also one of the most troubled. In 1942, the National Resources Planning Board observed that the Pecos River basin “probably presents a greater aggregation of problems associated with land and water use than any other irrigated basin in the Western U.S.” In the twenty-first century, the river’s problems have only multiplied. Bitter Waters, the first book-length study of the entire Pecos, traces the river’s environmental history from the arrival of the first Europeans in the sixteenth century to today. Running clear at its source and turning salty in its middle reach, the Pecos River has served as both a magnet of veneration and an object of scorn. Patrick Dearen, who has written about the Pecos since the 1980s, draws on more than 150 interviews and a wealth of primary sources to trace the river’s natural evolution and man’s interaction with it. Irrigation projects, dams, invasive saltcedar, forest proliferation, fires, floods, flow decline, usage conflicts, water quality deterioration—Dearen offers a thorough and clearly written account of what each factor has meant to the river and its prospects. As fine-grained in detail as it is sweeping in breadth, the picture Bitter Waters presents is sobering but not without hope, as it also extends to potential solutions to the Pecos River’s problems and the current efforts to undo decades of damage. Combining the research skills of an accomplished historian, the investigative techniques of a veteran journalist, and the engaging style of an award-winning novelist, this powerful and accessible work of environmental history may well mark a turning point in the Pecos’s fortunes.