Origins and Tenacity of Myth: Part II—Ethnography

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Hunter-gatherer artists of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas produced Pecos River style (PRS) rock art as early as 5,500 years ago. In 2016, Boyd identified patterns in PRS murals similar to the mythologies of the ancient Nahua (Aztec) and the present-day Huichol (Wixárika). She advanced the hypothesis that PRS murals are visual narratives containing evidence of an Archaic core of beliefs that has persisted across time and cultural, linguistic, and geographic boundaries. To test this hypothesis, Boyd and Dering traveled to the Huichol community of San Andres Cohamiata, Jalisco, Mexico, and met with seven shaman-elders, whose belief system closely reflects ancient Mesoamerican cosmological concepts. Conducting and recording open-ended interviews, they shared illustrated mural panoramas with the elders to determine the answers to two questions: Are PRS pictographic elements and patterns recognizable to present-day Huichol shamans? Can they offer insights into the image-making process of PRS pictography or the visual narratives they portray? In Origins and Tenacity of Myth: Part II, we share preliminary results of our analysis of these interviews and reveal deeply embedded core symbols and concepts in PRS rock art that endure today in the ancestral knowledge of Indigenous Native America.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38160.0