The White Shaman Mural

On a shelter wall above the Pecos River, about a mile up from where it joins the Rio Grande, there is a painting twenty six feet long and thirteen feet high holding more than a hundred figures. It is roughly two thousand years old. For most of the last century Lower Pecos rock art was read as the record of individual visions, and the pale headless figure near the centre of the panel was taken for a shaman, which is where the name came from. The archaeologist Carolyn Boyd spent decades arguing that this was the wrong way to look at it, and that the wall is not a collection of images at all. Working from the panel itself, and from the mythology of Huichol and Nahua peoples in Mexico whose ancestors may have carried the same traditions, she made the case that the mural is a single composition meant to be read in sequence: an account of the birth of the sun and the beginning of time. If she is right it is among the oldest surviving narratives in North America, a text rather than a picture. The method is genuinely contested among archaeologists, and the argument is not settled. Boyd founded the Shumla research centre at Comstock in 1998 to record panels like this one before they weather away, and published her reading of the mural in 2016. The shelter is a preserve now, looked after by the Witte Museum in San Antonio, which runs tours to it on Saturdays through the cooler months.