Soul Expressions: Speech and Breath in Archaic Period Rock Art

Carolyn Boyd, PhD, Research Professor, Texas State University, San Marcos

At least 5,000 years ago, Archaic Period hunters-gatherers of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and Coahuila, Mexico, began painting complex rock art mural along rock shelter walls and cliff overhangs. Polychromatic images of humans and animals populate the murals and display an array of semantically charged visual attributes, such as headdresses, body ornaments, and paraphernalia. Attributes such as these function like a giant vocabulary and their arrangement in the mural, not unlike syntax, conveys meaning. One of the most ubiquitous attributes is the subject of this presentation: speech-breath. Lower Pecos artists often portrayed dots or lines emanating out of or into the mouths of humans and animals. In this talk, Dr. Boyd will discuss patterns in shape, color, and arrangement of this pictographic element and propose that this graphic device denotes speech, breath, and the soul. Artists communicated meaning through the image making process, alternating brushstroke direction to show inhalation vs exhalation or using different paint application techniques to reflect forceful speech. The choices made by artists in the production of imagery reflect their cosmology and the framework of ideas and beliefs through which they interpreted and interacted with the world. Bridging iconographic data with ethnohistory and ethnographic texts from Mesoamerica, our speaker suggests that speech-breath express in the rock art of the Lower Pecos was intimately tied to concepts of the soul, creation, and human origins.

Dr. Carolyn Boyd is the Shumla Endowed Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Texas State University, San Marcos. She is the founder of a non-profit organization, Shumla Archaeological Research and Educational Center, which was established in 1998 to preserve the ancient rock art murals of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands in southwest Texas and Coahuila, Mexico. Boyd is the author of Rock Art of the Lower Pecos (2003, Texas A&M University Press) and The White Shaman Mural: An Enduring Creation Narrative (2016, the University of Texas Press), which received the 2017 Scholarly Book Award from the Society for American Archaeology. Her current projects include Origins and Tenacity of Myth in Archaic Period Rock Art in Southwest Texas and Northern Mexico, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Layers of Meaning: Chronological Modeling and Pictograph Stratigraphy, funded by the National Science Foundation.

This meeting is free and open to the public but you must pre-register. Click HERE to register.