Awards
- Winner of San Antonio Conservation Society Publication Award 2019 (United States)
- Winner of Society for American Archaeology Book Award 2017 (United States)
- Winner of Society for American Archarology Book Award 2017 (United States)
Overview
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.
Full Product Details
Author: Carolyn E. Boyd ,
Kim Cox
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Imprint: University of Texas Press
Dimensions:
Width: 21.60cm
, Height: 2.30cm
, Length: 27.90cm
Weight: 1.306kg
ISBN: 9781477310304
ISBN 10: 1477310304
Pages: 219
Publication Date: 29 November 2016
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.
Reviews
The depth and detail of [Boyd's] analysis is extraordinary and adds a much-needed level of twenty-first-century methodology to rock art studies of this region. Boyd employs a relaxed, familiar tone in her writing style, making extremely analytical details easily accessible for readers at most levels. * CAA Reviews *
Author Information
Artist turned archaeologist, Carolyn E. Boyd is the author of Rock Art of the Lower Pecos. Dr. Boyd founded the Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center, where she spearheads efforts to document some of the oldest pictographic texts in North America.
