Rock paintings and engravings have always fascinated westerners. Indeed, an account of a painted cave is included in Fray Ramón Pané’s An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians, produced circa 1498 at the behest of Christopher Columbus, the first book written in the New World in a European language. Despite the general paucity of archaeological studies of rock art, these sites are in fact common in the Americas. As an example, over 1,500 sites have been recorded in California alone, and these contain (literally) millions of individual motifs. Perhaps the most spectacular and certainly the most detailed corpus of North American rock art is found in the Pecos River region of south Texas and northern Coahuila, Mexico. The Pecos style sites are characterized by finely painted, complex polychrome panels portraying elongated anthropomorphic motifs surrounded by myriad fantastical images: dots impaled by spears, smaller “flying” anthropomorphs, felines, deer, birds, undulating lines and other designs, all in seemingly chaotic juxtaposition. Chronometric dating places these sites between about 4,000 and 1,500 years old, within the North American Archaic Period, indicating that they were created by nomadic hunter-gatherers. Given the age, complexity, and beauty of the Pecos style sites, it is not surprising that they have been studied (even if sporadically) since the 1930s by artists and archaeologists, making them one of the best-documented corpora of rock art in the Americas.

One might conclude, from this research history, that the Pecos style rock art is well understood. The White Shaman Mural, by Carolyn E. Boyd with contributions by Kim Cox, belies that assumption. The book comprises a detailed analysis of a single site in a rockshelter near the confluence of the Pecos River and the Rio Grande, dated to about 2000 years BP. It follows a suggestion by the late Linda Schele to look southward for interpretive inspiration and adopts Alfredo López Austin's arguments for a long-lasting, virtually unchangeable core of Mesoamerican traditions and practices. Through their study, Boyd and Cox change our understanding of the Pecos style art as well as the relationship of southern Texas prehistory to Mesoamerica.

Boyd and Cox's research starts with a key empirical analysis, resulting in a critical conclusion: the White Shaman panel is a true mural, in the sense of a single planned and composed painting rather than a random accretion of unrelated images added over time by different painters—as had been assumed by all previous researchers (myself included). They demonstrate this fact through a meticulous (in cases microscopic) study of the relationship among superimposed paintings on the shelter wall. This yields a Harris Matrix that illustrates the stratigraphic relationship of the motifs, confirming that they could only all have been created in a single event. Not only was the mural planned in terms of the layout of motif forms but also in the sequencing of colors, with black, then red, yellow, and white painted successively.

Their subsequent iconographic analysis follows four principles: (1) the mural reflects ancient, interrelated ideas more commonly associated with agrarian Mesoamerica than the North American hunter-gatherer Archaic; (2) the White Shaman mural is analogous to a Mesoamerican codex, iconographically portraying sophisticated cosmological and mythological concepts; (3) these concepts pertain to the Huichol specifically, and the southern Uto-Aztecan origin myth more generally; and (4) Pecos art does not portray shamanic visionary imagery, as had been widely inferred previously. Demonstrating the efficacy of this argument required an initial comparison of Huichol myth, ritual (especially the Peyote Hunt), and iconography (primarily expressed in yarn paintings) to the individual painted motifs. This provided an initial “reading” of the panel as a cosmogonic tale, the narrative of which follows the spatial layout of the panel. A similar comparative analysis in terms of more generalized Nahua/southern Uto-Aztecan cosmogonic beliefs and central Mexican iconography is provided next, resulting in an equivalent interpretation of the panel: “a visual text documenting the birth of the sun and the establishment of time” (p. 152). As the authors acknowledge, it would be easy to dismiss any of their putative individual correlations between the painted motifs and Huichol and Nahua iconography and beliefs as coincidental. But the number, consistency, and detail of their correlations, across both Huichol and Nahua sources, make their interpretation very compelling. This represents not only an entirely new interpretation of Pecos rock art, but the most detailed interpretation of any rock art corpus worldwide.

The authors are less successful in their avowed claim to explain how the panel was used—that is, what function it (and the rockshelter that contains it) served prehistorically. Although 18 pages of the Codex Borgia may illustrate a creation myth, the extant codices otherwise are divinatory texts that seem to provide no clear parallel. Likewise, there is no direct analog to the panel in Huichol ritual practices. It is easy to suggest a variety of functions based on presuppositions about the use of creation myths, and the relationship of myth to ritual in contemporary western societies, but these are facile and their efficacy difficult to evaluate. As Native American ethnography alone illustrates, the relationship of myth to ritual and art can vary significantly, even among neighboring groups (see Whitley, Pacific Coast Archaeological Society Quarterly, 50:47–60.). I suspect that the function of the panel and the site will only become clear when other Pecos sites and their contexts are analyzed and interpreted, and the rock art corpus can be considered as a whole.

The authors are simply wrong in contending that the “importance of language in the conceptual mythic framework of Native Americans cannot be overstressed” (p. 157). By assuming that a correlation must exist between the cosmogonic myth on the shelter wall and southern Uto-Aztecan speakers, they assume that the cave painters themselves must have spoken some ancestral variant of this language group, thereby expanding its inferred range but limiting their sources for potential ethnographic comparisons and analogies. As the first half century of American cultural anthropological research demonstrated under Franz Boas's leadership, however, the relationship between language, culture, and “race” is complex, and certainly not one-to-one. This includes the relationship between language and mythic and ritual systems (see Gayton, American Anthropologist, 1935). Recent Uto-Aztecan genetic studies emphasize the potential complexity of these historical relationships, especially when variations in maternal (mtDNA) versus paternal (Y chromosome) lineages are considered: Uto-Aztecan paternal lineages tend to follow language distribution, whereas maternal lineages do not, indicating different population histories for men and women (B. M. Kemp et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107:6759–6764) and underscoring the potential complexity of cultural continuity and change. It would be useful if language distributions were always a surrogate for cultural distributions, but they simply are not.

These last two points are minor quibbles, however, that do not otherwise impact the value of (or interpretations offered by) this provocative and remarkable book. It is provocative inasmuch as it forces us to reconsider the complexity of hunter-gatherer religions and their relationships to the belief systems of subsequent larger scale societies. It is remarkable not simply because of the substantive breakthrough that it represents in interpreting the Pecos art, which is in part due to the tremendous amount of research this volume reflects. But it is also remarkable in the quality of the graphic imagery that is included and the production values of the book itself. The White Shaman Mural is then both a watershed in rock art interpretation as well as a critical analysis of early Mesoamerican iconography, and it should be widely read for both reasons.