For more than 4,000 years, Native Americans have been painting rock art depicting their view of the cosmos in what is now southwest Texas and northern Mexico, a new study has found.
Innovative dating techniques reveal that this rock art, known as the Pecos River Style tradition, probably first appeared about 6,000 years ago and lasted for about 175 generations, from about 1,400 to 1,000 years ago.
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“Frankly, we were stunned to discover that murals have been in production for more than 4,000 years, and that a series of rule-bound paintings persisted throughout that period,” study co-author Carolyn Boyd, a professor of anthropology at Texas State University, told Live Science in an email.
She compared the canyon to “an ancient library containing hundreds of books written by 175 generations of painters,” adding, “The stories they tell are still being told.”
Ancient wall paintings found on the limestone outcrops of the canyon region consist of elaborate, multicolored paintings depicting animals, human-like figures, and even cryptic symbols. Boyd said the artists who created them created visual narratives that connected myths and defined rituals.
“Many of the more than 200 murals in the area are huge, some over 100 feet tall.” [30 meters] 20 feet long [6 m] It is tall and contains hundreds of artfully drawn images,” Boyd said.
Boyd said the artists were nomadic hunter-gatherers, but their identities remain unknown.
“They were highly skilled problem solvers with a sophisticated cosmology and a robust iconographic system to convey that cosmology,” Boyd said.
Dating rock art comes with big challenges. However, for their study, the authors used two independent radiocarbon methods that are not typically used together to date paintings from 12 mural sites in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands. This gave the researchers confidence that the dating results were consistent, study co-author Karen Steelman, a chemist and scientific director at the Shumura Archaeological Research and Education Center in Texas, told Live Science.
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The researchers also analyzed the iconography and composition of the murals at the site and found that even though the murals were often created over 4,000 years, the artists seemed to have adhered to a strict set of technical rules and established stylistic conventions. For example, the authors determined that creators typically followed the same steps when applying colored paint to a work of art. This procedure has been passed down through generations.
Boyd said that the consistent appearance of these intricate wall paintings over thousands of years, despite major environmental and technological changes such as stone tools and textile crafts, indicates the persistence of an enduring cosmology that must have been very important to hunter-gatherers. This sophisticated cosmology includes a creation story, a cyclical concept of time, and a complex calendar system.
Researchers have identified elements of this belief system in later Mesoamerican civilizations, such as the Aztecs, and in modern Native American communities, such as Mexico’s Huichol people, she said.
“These paintings may be the earliest surviving visual record of the same core cosmology that later formed the Mesoamerican civilizations and is manifest today throughout Native American tribes,” Boyd said in a statement.
“For indigenous peoples today, murals are seen as living, breathing, sentient ancestral deities who are still engaged in creating and sustaining the universe,” Boyd told Live Science.
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