Origins and Tenacity of Myth: Part I—Archaeology

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.

Origins and Tenacity of Myth is a comprehensive study of Pecos River style (PRS) pictographs in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. It is a collaborative project between Texas State University and Shumla Archaeological Center. This presentation addresses the archaeological component of the project and two of the study’s research questions: (1) Are PRS murals single compositions or a random collection of images? (2) Did the artists follow strict painting conventions in their creation? To answer these questions, we used digital microscopy to systematically analyze intersecting paint layers in three complex PRS rock art panels. We graphically diagrammed the microscopy results using Harris Matrix Composer software to establish the murals’ stratigraphy and then used Adobe Photoshop to replicate the paint sequence through digital, layered illustrations of each rock art panel. The results demonstrate that the paint application order of the murals was rule-governed and that they were rendered during a single painting event. Further, recent radiocarbon ages for PRS demonstrate that artists strictly adhered to this paint application sequence in mural production for at least 3,500 years between 5500 and 2000 cal BP.

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): 38997.0