Texas researchers have now definitively dated a distinctive rock art tradition, a profound discovery shared across multiple ancient Mesoamerican cultures.<\/p>\n
For thousands of years, ancient forager societies across southwest Texas and northern Mexico painted these stunning murals, known as the \u201cPecos River Style,\u201d inside remote limestone rock shelters.<\/p>\n
These colossal murals stretch up to 100 feet long and soar 20 feet tall. In a dramatic announcement by Texas State University, researchers revealed that \u201cthe canyons of Southwest Texas house a vast and ancient library of painted texts documenting 175 generations of sacred stories and indigenous knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n
This monumental tradition is thus deeply embedded in the history and landscape of this US region. Though the desert climate perfectly preserved these significant American works, researchers only recently attempted to date the tradition, leading to a shocking contradiction of long-held archaeological beliefs.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs an artist and archaeologist, I can tell you that this is a breathtaking discovery,\u201d Carolyn Boyd told Texas State.<\/p>\n
A seriously important rock art tradition in the US<\/p>\n
To pinpoint the art\u2019s origin, researchers employed 57 radiocarbon dating analyses across 12 sites, utilizing plasma oxidation and accelerator mass spectrometry, which firmly placed the tradition\u2019s start at an astonishing 6,000 years ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut it didn\u2019t stop there,\u201d Boyd explained to Texas State. \u201cUsing the same graphic style, symbol system, and rules of paint application, they continued to create these visual manuscripts for more than 4,000 years.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n
These paintings\u2014featuring humanlike, animal-like, and geometric figures\u2014were previously assumed to be random additions, slowly expanded by different groups over time.<\/p>\n
The bombshell research, just published in Science Advances, dismantled that theory.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnother huge shocker is that the dates within many of the murals clustered so closely as to be statistically indistinguishable, suggesting that they were produced during a single painting event as a visual narrative,\u201d Boyd said. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis contradicts the commonly held belief that the murals<\/a> were a random collection of images that accumulated over hundreds or thousands of years.\u201d<\/p>\n A visual landscape that transmitted beliefs throughout the centuries<\/p>\n Texas State reported that stratigraphic and iconographic analyses proved that eight murals were created as unified compositions, strictly adhering to specific rules and an established iconographic vocabulary.<\/p>\n This composition structure proved to researchers that the art \u201cfaithfully transmitted sophisticated metaphysical concepts that later informed the beliefs and symbolic expression<\/a> of Mesoamerican agricultural societies,\u201d according to the news release.<\/p>\n \u201cThe compositional nature of the murals<\/a> was further supported by our analysis of the painting sequence. Using a digital microscope to retrace the steps followed by the original artists, we discovered that the painters adhered to a rule-bound color application order,\u201d Boyd explained. <\/p>\n \u201cAs a result, paint layers of multiple figures are intertwined, forming well-planned, highly sophisticated compositions \u2013 some spanning more than 100 feet long and 20 feet tall. They are visual manuscripts created according to a set of rules passed down from one generation to the next for more than 4,000 years.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut perhaps the most exciting thing of all is that today Indigenous communities in the U.S. and Mexico can relate the stories communicated through the imagery to their own cosmologies, demonstrating the antiquity and persistence of a pan-New World belief system that is at least 6,000 years old,\u201d she concluded in a news release by Texas State<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Texas researchers have now definitively dated a distinctive rock art tradition, a profound discovery shared across multiple ancient…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":160521,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[2520,787,437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46,96634],"class_list":{"0":"post-160520","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-archaeology","9":"tag-art","10":"tag-arts","11":"tag-arts-and-design","12":"tag-artsanddesign","13":"tag-artsdesign","14":"tag-design","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-il","17":"tag-israel","18":"tag-mesoamerican"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/160521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}