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Full Description
Winner, Society for American Archaeology Book Award, 2017
San Antonio Conservation Society Publication Award, 2019
The prehistoric hunter-gatherers of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas and Coahuila, Mexico, created some of the most spectacularly complex, colorful, extensive, and enduring rock art of the ancient world. Perhaps the greatest of these masterpieces is the White Shaman mural, an intricate painting that spans some twenty-six feet in length and thirteen feet in height on the wall of a shallow cave overlooking the Pecos River. In The White Shaman Mural, Carolyn E. Boyd takes us on a journey of discovery as she builds a convincing case that the mural tells a story of the birth of the sun and the beginning of time-making it possibly the oldest pictorial creation narrative in North America.
Unlike previous scholars who have viewed Pecos rock art as random and indecipherable, Boyd demonstrates that the White Shaman mural was intentionally composed as a visual narrative, using a graphic vocabulary of images to communicate multiple levels of meaning and function. Drawing on twenty-five years of archaeological research and analysis, as well as insights from ethnohistory and art history, Boyd identifies patterns in the imagery that equate, in stunning detail, to the mythologies of Uto-Aztecan-speaking peoples, including the ancient Aztec and the present-day Huichol. This paradigm-shifting identification of core Mesoamerican beliefs in the Pecos rock art reveals that a shared ideological universe was already firmly established among foragers living in the Lower Pecos region as long as four thousand years ago.
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Archaic Codices
Chapter 2. The Painted Landscape
Chapter 3. Transcribing and Reading Visual Texts
Chapter 4. A Primer: Abiding Themes in Mesoamerican Thought
Chapter 5. Pilgrimage to Creation: A Reading of the White Shaman Mural Informed by Huichol Mythology
Chapter 6. Return to Creation: A Reading of the White Shaman Mural Informed by Nahua Mythology
Chapter 7. The Art of Transcendence
Notes
Bibliography
Index
