IF WALLS COULD TALK

Do West Texas Cave Paintings Portray Ancient Drug Rituals?

By Allan Turner
Copyright 1997 Houston Chronicle

College Station The White Shaman, one of the oldest rock paintings in
the New World, keeps its secrets well.

For generations, artists and scholars have traveled to Southwest Texas'
Pecos River country to view the fabled painting one of hundreds that dot
the limestone walls of the region's serpentine valleys. They have come to
paint and photograph, puzzle out meanings or simply stand in awe.

But for all their efforts at deciphering the 4,000yearold artwork, likely
created by holy men of a longvanished hunting and gathering society,
visitors rarely came away with more than speculation and untested theory.

Now, though, through the efforts of Texas A&M University archaeologist
Carolyn Boyd, the ancient painting may be about to reveal its mysteries. In
so doing, it may shed light on the meaning of countless other paintings
that once thought random, prehistoric graffiti may be related "like
pages in a book."

Key to the discovery is Boyd's controversial belief that the 12by24foot
White Shaman is filled, not with battle imagery as previously thought, but
with references to Lophophora williamsii, the hallucinogenic peyote cactus.

The scene, she believes, depicts five people engaged in the ritual
harvesting of the drug, which some contemporary Native American groups
believe can open the way to the spirit world.

The painting features five humanlike figures linked by a cord, along with
animals, arrows, squiggly lines and dots. She believes that, in essence, it
was an instructional billboard intent on unifying the group and preserving
its traditions.

"This was not art for art's sake," she said. "This was art for life's sake."

Boyd's innovative multipronged attack on the enigmatic painting
especially her comparison of the mural's motifs to current ritual peyote
use among the Huichol Indians in Mexico has brought her kudos and
condemnation from her peers.

"She came up here and lectured and knocked everybody's socks off," said Tom
Hester, director of the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at the
University of Texas. "Gee! We never had thought about it that way before.
Rather than right or wrong, the importance is the new perspective she has
brought to it."

"She's a bright, criticalthinking young woman, and there's no substitute
for that," added Dee Ann Story, a leading expert on East Texas' Caddo
Indians and the socalled dean of Texas archaeology.

But James Zintgraff, a San Antonio photographer and executive director of
The Rock Art Foundation, which owns the White Shaman site, dismissed Boyd's
conclusions as "sensationalism."

"I don't believe and never will believe that peyote was the basis for that
culture," he said. Just because the Huichols engage in ritual peyote use,
he said, doesn't mean it was relevant to the creators of the painting.

"Everybody likes to hear about drugs," said Solveig Turpin, director of
UT's Borderlands Archaeological Research Unit. "They love to think these
people took drugs. ... It's obvious that (the painting) is shamanistic
religious art possibly the oldest in the New World. It reflects a trance
state and the notion that the spirit leaves the body and travels to the
other world. But I don't think it's a convincing argument to say it
reflects druginduced trance.

"To call it a peyote religion is to call Catholicism a wine and wafer
religion."

David Whitley, director of the Californiabased International Council on
Monuments and Sites, suggested some resistance to Boyd's work grows out of
archaeology's dismissal of religion, art and anything that could be
considered touchyfeely.

"Fundamentally, archaeology is a science of the concrete," he said. "The
idea that we can get at the conceptual side of prehistory is something
quite foreign to most archaeologists. Literally, they are taught it's an
impossibility. But that's wrong.

"Personally, I think it's a heck of a lot more important to understand
prehistoric cultural beliefs than what they ate. Eating was important. They
did it every day. But after you know what they ate, so what?"

BRISTLING AT THE THOUGHT

Boyd, 39, a college dropout who returned later to obtain bachelor's,
master's and soon doctorate degrees, bristled at the thought that the
nature of her studies somehow meant she was sympathetic to drug use.

"I am by no means the drug lady," she said. "Using these powerful plants in
prehistory was not recreational. It was a sacrament. These were important
medicinal plants used in childbirth or as an antibiotic. It would be
ethnocentric to think these people wouldn't use any plants available to
them for survival."

A Galvestonborn artist turned archaeologist, Boyd has spent hundreds of
hours in the desolate Pecos River region searching for clues to the meaning
of the White Shaman and other rock art. All told, she has visited between
75 and 100 of the sites.

"There are three rivers in this area the Rio Grande, the Pecos and the
Devil's," she said. "They are absolutely the most beautiful rivers; this is
an absolute paradise. Unlike some other rivers, they flow yearround. That
is why they were attractive to ancient peoples."

The paintings, sometimes 100by200feet in size, are protected in
limestone shelters that pock the rattlesnake infested cliffs along the
water courses. "They are permanently dry," Boyd said. "That's why they are
so well preserved. They've never gotten wet."

Just getting to the sites can be an ordeal.

SOME DIFFICULT TO FIND

"Some of them are in really remote areas. You drive an hour down a dirt
road, then hike in a few miles over rugged terrain. They are in some cases
up on canyon walls and you have to rappel down to them. It's anything but
comforting. There's real danger in accessing some of the sites."

Boyd believes some paintings deliberately were placed in hardtoreach
locations. "Some of them were for everybody, others were for select
groups," she said. "Some of them may have been for men only or for women
only."

Spanish explorers were the first Europeans to see the paintings. But they
weren't truly documented until a little more than a century ago, when
railroads pushed through the region. The first serious study of the
paintings came in the 1930s from draftsman Forrest Kirkland and his wife,
Lula, who made watercolor renderings of the works.

The paintings were a natural lure to Boyd, a successful artist and gallery
owner who had an abiding interest in other cultures.

"It goes back to my grandparents my grandfather was dean of the
University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston," Boyd said. "They were
extensive travelers around the world. They always had such interesting
things in their house that they had brought back from their travels.

"When I was very young, we lived a year in Europe. I was fascinated with
people living in different places as well as in the past."

Boyd found that, although the Pecos rock art sites repeatedly have been
visited by scholars and laymen in the last half century, understanding of
them has come slowly. Generally, it was thought the paintings works of
four distinct periods and types are found in the Pecos region were
random artistic expressions with little connection to one another.

Boyd used a number of disciplines in trying to crack her rock art mystery.
She made watercolor copies of the paintings, scrutinized studies of art and
of Native American beliefs and even experimented with recreating the paint
used by ancient artists. (The paint, she concluded, was a mixture of iron
oxides, deer bone marrow and detergents derived from yucca plants.)

SPECULATION ABOUT CONTENT

In choosing the White Shaman as the focus of her research, Boyd picked a
wellknown painting whose content has been the subject of wide speculation.

"There's been a belief that that one person's thought was as good as
another's," observed Story, a former UT archaeologist. "Carolyn has proved
this is not necessarily the case."

"Some people believed that this was a battle scene because there were all
of these objects shot through with arrows and everything looked dead," Boyd
said. The Rock Art Foundation's Zintgraff insisted that the painting is a
commentary on "resurrection."

Boyd's investigation took her to the Huichol tribe in North Central Mexico,
a group of about 25,000 whose religion includes the ritual ingestion of
peyote in a rain ceremony.

For the Huichol, deer, maize, peyote and rain are inseparably linked.

Kauyumair, the sacred deer person, brought peyote to Earth on the prongs of
his antlers, they believe. Now, the cactus sprouts in his footsteps.

Annually, after undergoing a purification rite that employs a white cord,
members of the tribe harvest peyote in the TexasMexico borderlands. They
carry with them deer antlers and candles, which are presented to the rising
sun as periodic offerings to peyote. Upon finding the cactus, they shoot it
with arrows, an act they claim releases a shower of colored sparks as the
plant's soul flees.

DEPICTION OF ELEMENTS

Boyd believes many of these elements are depicted in the White Shaman.

Humanlike figures, shadowed by their disembodied souls, hold torches
roughly analogous to the candles used today. The figures are linked by a
cord. The antlers of a small deer figure are adorned with dots; larger dots
found in the painting are impaled on arrows.

One figure prominently displays a bristly object some believe is a gourd
rattle. Boyd believes it is the spiky seed pod of the hallucinogenic datura
plant.

"It is given too much emphasis just to be a rattle," she theorized. "And
peyote and datura were the power plants."

"The similarities are striking," she said, "but this is still what we'd
call a `thin thread' argument. It's better than what we had before, but
it's not enough.

"Why in the world would deer and peyote be the same thing? Living in the
Pecos, why would they need a rain ceremony when they didn't have crops?
These are the questions you come up with."

Turning to ecology, Boyd discovered that rain often torrential in the
arid Pecos country results in sudden bursts of vegetation. Not only do
the wild plants and fruits provide food for humans, but they attract deer
from long distances. The rain also signals the sprouting of peyote.

WHY ARE THEY THE SAME?

"But why are deer and peyote the same thing?" Boyd said. "The Huichol
string peyote on cords just as they do deer meat."

The answer, she concluded, lies in the drug's ability to suppress appetite.

"It allays thirst," she said. "It's rain. It's water. It causes you to feel
as though you can run and jump like a deer. It's used by longdistance
runners to increase their stamina. It's nutrients, it causes you to feel
like a deer rain, deer, peyote. All that started to make the argument
look more solid."

All that remained, she said, was proof that peyote had been available to
the ancient residents of the Pecos region.

"Peyote has been found in the sediments at some of the cave sites," said
Boyd. "It was dated to 5000 B.C. That makes it older even than the rock art.

"Now, with all of those elements, we're no longer dealing with a thin
thread. We have, I think, a cablelike argument one that's extremely
strong."