COMSTOCK – Standing at the edge of a steep gorge on a private ranch here in the desert canyonlands of the Lower Pecos River, I look down at a notch in the canyon rim and a narrow cantilevered path known as a “bench” that I’ll be traversing shortly. I try to assure myself that I’m not afraid of heights. If the precocious 11-year-old girl in our group can make it, so can I. “PAY ATTENTION!” I tell myself. “Don’t let your mind wander.”
Taking that first step downward through a jumble of rocks and small boulders, I realize I’m not so much afraid of heights as I am making a fool of myself if I take a tumble, picking up rock abrasions and prickly-pear punctures as I pinball downhill, not to mention a broken neck. It’s hot on this March afternoon, and I descend slowly, watching where I plant my foot.
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Actually, the trip down turns out to be not all that harrowing, and what we found after a short hike along flat ground triumphed over any anxiety we felt. A dozen of us from around Texas, we were headed back in time, back at least 2,000 years to view the oldest “books” in North America. The books, if you will, are narrative murals, some of the most significant bodies of Native-American rock art in the world.
Our four guides were with the Shumla Archaeological Research & Education Center, a 25-year-old nonprofit organization based in Comstock, about 30 miles west of Del Rio. The group is dedicated to preserving and recording the ancient paintings found on rugged limestone walls throughout the 8,000-square-mile stretch of canyonlands between the Pecos and Devil’s rivers. Most of the art, more than 300 sites discovered so far, is on private land. Shumla has to work closely with sometimes suspicious ranchers and landowners, making every effort never to abuse their trust. Sites painted by hunter-gatherers living in this desolate area between 1,600 and 4,500 years ago are still being discovered.
Our destination is the “Halo Shelter,” an intricate, multi-figured painting applied by unknown artists to a limestone “mural” under a parabola-shaped overhang. On a private ranch near the Devil’s River, the site is 50 feet long and 15 feet high. Shumla has discovered some paintings that are up to 30 feet high, which means the artists had to use some kind of scaffolding to complete their work.
Just before we get to the site, we pause for water and to catch our breath. Katie Wilson, a preservation archaeologist and Shumla’s outreach coordinator, requests that we approach the art in silence, giving thought to the fact that the images we’re about to see represented a sacred experience for their creators.
She has one more request: “Don’t touch. Don’t lick. Don’t spit.”
Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center, based in Comstock 30 miles west of Del Rio, offers day-long treks to rock art sites in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands through May before taking a break during the heat of summer. For information, visit the website at shumla.org, email [email protected] or call 432/292-4849. San Antonio’s Witte Museum and the nearby Seminole Canyon State Park also offer scheduled tours.
My three new acquaintances – Houston retirees Patrick Cox, Quin Harris and Paul Penning – promise to abide by the rules. So do wife Laura and I. The Houstonians have arrived by kayak, so to speak. Members of the Houston Association of Sea Kayakers, they have been on a Pecos River paddling adventure before joining the trek. Cox, formerly an ESL instructor at Houston Community College, tells me he has made five or six rock-art treks with Shumla.
We stand beneath the overhang and try to comprehend the strange, elaborate images, brushed on in strokes of red, yellow, black and white, the paint derived from crushed minerals mixed with water and animal fat. Gradually we begin to make out recognizable figures – deer, birds and human-like drawings archaeologists call anthropomorphs. Squiggly lines represent what Katie interprets as “a pulling and twisting and winding energy.”
Staring at the rock, my eyes are drawn to a row of miniature deer, like Santa’s reindeer I think to myself. I try to make sense of a long, narrow figure with what resembles a halo around its head (thus the name of the shelter). The clustered figures are connected; the complex creation is telling a story. What I’m looking at, Shumla executive director Jessica Lee Hamlin has said, is as significant archeologically as Stonehenge or the Sphinx.
“They applied the black paint first, then all red, then all yellow and then all white,” Katie explains. “It took weeks to paint a mural this big. The motif is planned. The figures are pulled together.”
The paint, several thousand years after being applied, isn’t fading, but it’s inexorably being covered over by water accretion. Climate change is likely having an effect. Many sites over the years have been lost to vandals and looters. Soldiers and railroad workers coming through the area in the 1800s added their own graffiti. We lost even more to nearby Amistad Reservoir, dammed in 1969. Cliff paintings like Halo lie submerged beneath the water.
“The sites are really, really vulnerable,” Katie reminds us. “Part of Shumla’s documentation is for when they’re no longer visible.”
Carolyn Boyd, Shumla’s founder, first encountered the Pecos River paintings in 1989. She was a professional muralist at the time, with a studio in north Houston. The experience changed her life. She finished a doctorate in archaeology at Texas A&M in 1998 and has since become a world-renowned expert on the Pecos River Style.
Relying on an artist’s eye, she has pioneered what she calls an ethnographic approach to how the paintings are interpreted. They’re coherent compositions, she contends, not random elements added over the years. She finds similarities between the Pecos River style and artistic expressions of both living and historic cultures in northern Mexico and throughout the Southwest. They seem to be depicting archetypal myths of the great Mesoamerican civilizations, including the Aztecs, the Mayans and the Huichol.
After an hour or so at the Halo Shelter, we trudge up the bench and jounce along rough ranch roads back to Shumla’s offices in a building that used to be a Border Patrol headquarters. Two jail cells, the doors decorated on the inside with what you might call scratched steel-door art, actually preserved inmate graffiti, are now used as offices.
Rudy Banny, a young archaeological chemist, explains to us the workings of Shumla’s plasma oxidation laboratory where he and students from Comstock High School – Shumla Scholars, they’re called – prepare rock samples for radiocarbon dating. Rudy sends their findings to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California to do the actual carbon dating.
“We’re basically the only people in the world doing what we do out here in Comstock,” Rudy tells us. “We’ve worked with rock art from Colombia, Spain, all over the world.”
Tour completed by mid-afternoon, most of the group scurried across state Highway 90 to J&P Bar & Grill for burgers, beer and, at Katie Wilson’s hearty recommendation, fried pickles. Comstock’s only eatery looks almost as ancient as rock art, but looks deceive. The food is good.
Headed back home that evening, the sun sinking over rugged West Texas mountains, I kept thinking of those people, those artists who stood before a rock “mural” several thousand years ago and with paintbrush in hand sought to communicate something of ultimate significance. What it was, we’ll never know for sure.
What we do know is that they were here. Leaving their marks, their signs and symbols on rock walls, they were here for much longer than we have been. And then they were gone.
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