Carolyn Boyd, with Kim Cox, along with a team of technicians and helpers, has established that the painted panel in the White Shaman rockshelter in Langtry, Texas, expresses a creation story. This panel is 8 m long and covers the wall to the height of 4 m (requiring scaffolding when painted). Each of the 42 anthropomorphs, six zoomorphs, and 69 enigmatic shapes was given a code number. Analysis employed portable X-ray fluorescence, lidar, structure from motion, DStretch and digital field photography, a Dino-Lite Pro handheld microscope, and mapping with total station; painting sequences were rendered in a Harris matrix. Four samples of black pigment averaged 2000 BP. This date is surprisingly late, and it suggests a 3,000-year period for the Pecos River–style images. Stylistic analysis also places some elements in a more recent phase of Pecos River–style paintings. Four paint colors were used, always applied in exactly the same sequence: black, then red, then yellow, then white. Boyd argues that this panel depicts an Uto-Aztecan creation story, based in part on the apparent shared symbolism of these colors: red—east, fire, masculine, sun, Morning Star; black—west, underworld, wet season, night, female, stars; yellow—south, dawn, dry season; and white—moon, north, sacrifice.

Chapter 3 is a lesson in how to read texts such as this one using formal feature analysis, iconographic analysis, and structural analysis. Chapters 2 and 4 present background for the archaeology of the region and that of Mesoamerican core concepts. In Chapter 5, first selected motifs are isolated and described, and then hypotheses are formulated using a Wixarika (Huichol) perspective, specifically the creation of peyote, derivative from the Nahua 5 Suns creation story, the perspective of Chapter 6.

Boyd deftly and methodically interprets the meaning of the most obvious figures in this mural as elements in the core Uto-Aztecan story of world creation fitting well into either the Huichol peyote pilgrimage at the dawn of time or the Nahua birth of the Fifth Sun. Five black pilgrims each morph into a cosmic figure—Morning Star, Mixcoatl, Moon Goddess, Evening Star, and earth monster—and stretch between the Underworld land of Black and Red on the right end of the panel to Dawn Mountain on the left end. The “white shaman” in both scenarios is the headless Moon Goddess. Perhaps the book title should have attempted to correct this error.

Boyd considers this and other Pecos Valley rock art panels to be true codices, with sequences of events that would have been sung to an audience by ritual specialists. Two of the most significant discoveries in her research duplicate Nahua practices 1,500 years later. One discovery is the close correspondence between the events depicted at and around Dawn Mountain and the opening events in the sixteenth-century Mapa de Cuauhtinchan—a side-by-side comparison would have convinced the most skeptical reader, but parallels with the White Shaman mural in Texas clearly indicate that that this tribal origin story was not unique to the people of Cuauhtinchan in the Valley of Puebla, Mexico. The second important discovery is the use of several Nahua day names in the panel, such as 16 Itzpapalotl vulture. There are many unaddressed images in this panel, including a second possible earth monster, a second “white shaman,” and a second land of black and red.

For the reader interested in the details of the paintings in this region, this book must be read alongside Boyd's Rock Art of the Lower Pecos (2003), which outlines regional rock art styles and chronology and indicates what motifs in the White Shaman panel are either unique in the region or present at other sites as well. Unlike in the 2003 book, shamanism per se and hallucinogenic plants are not the focus of Boyd's 2016 book, because she now knows that this panel is a well-planned and well-executed origin story. But a possible Datura moth caterpillar and four probable mescal beans hover around the Underworld. For all Boyd and others have said about a core of archaic Mesoamerican beliefs, she is apparently unaware that archaeologists in the eastern United States have been chasing after Mixcoatl and Iztpapalotl in burial practices evident at sites dating as early as 6,000 years ago (Claassen, Beliefs and Rituals in Archaic Eastern North America, 2015) and forward into the Green Corn ceremonialism of contact-period indigenous groups of the US Southeast. There is older evidence as well of the vestigial system in nearby Louisiana, as discussed by John Clark in his chapter of Jon Gibson and Philip Carr's Signs of Power: The Rise of Cultural Complexity (2004, pp. 162–213). But in this beautifully illustrated book, significant for readers interested in rock art and in Mesoamerican culture and history, Boyd has provided a much needed temporal and spatial expansion of what is proving to be a core American story of the creation of this world.