Reading the White Shaman Mural
Paintings in a Texas canyon may depict mythic narratives that have endured for millennia
By ERIC A. POWELL
Monday, November 06, 2017
The White Shaman rock shelter in southwest Texas is the site of a prehistoric mural, some 13 feet tall and 26 feet wide. The painting is still visible in the protected, concave area beneath the shelter’s overhang
In the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas, a mile upstream from where the Pecos River flows into the Rio Grande, the White Shaman rock shelter is carved into a cliff face at the end of a limestone canyon. Here, in a small alcove, a 26-foot-long collection of pictographs stretches across a smooth wall that faces west. The pigments have faded over time, but a dense profusion of surreal figures, some highly abstract, others seemingly human or animal-like, are still visible. The setting sun can intensify the figures’ yellow and red colors, while a full moon illuminates white images, including the elongated headless human figure that gives the site its name. Similar rock art figures, some up to 20 feet high, decorate more than 200 rock shelters within a 90-mile radius around the confluence of the Pecos and the Rio Grande. Hunter-gatherers who lived here from about 2500 B.C. to A.D. 500 created these paintings, which belong to a tradition known today as the Pecos River Style.
https://www.archaeology.org/issues/274-1711/features/5996-reading-the-white-shaman-mural
