The White Shaman Mural

The painters were foragers. The Lower Pecos Canyonlands, about 8,000 square kilometres of limestone cut by the Pecos, the Devils River and the Rio Grande, hold more than 12,500 years of hunter-gatherer occupation, with diets of baked agave and sotol, prickly pear, small game and fish, and a large industry in plant fibre⁠[4]. Pecos River murals cover the walls of at least 150 shelters north of the Rio Grande; the largest run to 150 m long and 15 m high and needed ladders or scaffolding⁠[4].

The paints are mineral. Studies of Pecos River paint have identified iron minerals (hematite, goethite and others) in the reds, oranges and yellows and manganese minerals in the blacks, with limonite siltstones from canyon floors the likely source; the white has not been characterised⁠[4]. The binder is less certain. An early DNA result pointing to deer or bison could not be repeated, a search for fatty acids found none unique to the paint, and carbon isotope values fit a mix of bone marrow and yucca without proving it⁠[4]⁠[15]. Organic carbon is present in the paint and absent from the unpainted rock, which is what makes the paint datable⁠[4].

The mural was painted as one design. Under the microscope black was laid down first, then red, yellow and white, with figures interwoven so that one lies both over and under another⁠[5]⁠[1]. The 2025 study found the same order at 525 of 535 points in eight other murals, says its results agree with Boyd and Cox's analysis of this one, and found the dates within each mural statistically indistinguishable, which points to single painting events⁠[4]. The same study models the start of Pecos River painting at 5760 to 5385 cal BP and its probable end at 1370 to 1035 cal BP, about 175 generations of painters⁠[4]⁠[16].

The paint sequence is the best-tested claim. It rests on microscope images of the points where figures overlap, and the same rule has since been found across eight other murals⁠[5]⁠[4].

The date has been tested and has not held. Marvin Rowe's laboratory at Texas A&M developed a way to burn off only the organic carbon in rock paint with an oxygen plasma, dating a Pecos River painting for the first time in 1990⁠[17]. Rowe published four dates for the White Shaman mural in 2004, from four upside-down figures: 1970, 1460, 1960 and 2420 radiocarbon years BP. He treated them as provisional, and the 2021 Landmark nomination accepted them as Late Archaic⁠[11]⁠[8]. The same year Steelman, Boyd and Bates reviewed all 32 of the laboratory's Lower Pecos dates and found every one problematic, for want of documented sampling points, base pretreatment or controls on unpainted rock; they did not calibrate them and advised against drawing conclusions from them⁠[11]. The four White Shaman results also spread over nearly a thousand radiocarbon years for a painting made at one time.

The 2025 campaign used the improved protocol: documented sampling points, base washes, 52 control samples of bare rock with negligible carbon, and dated oxalate crusts above and below the paint that came out in the right order⁠[4]. It dated twelve murals. White Shaman was not among them, so no reliable date for this mural has been published.

Boyd's reading has not been tested in the same way. Its support comes from the fit of figure and myth, and from Huichol religious specialists: a mara'akame who visited in 2010 read the red and black crenellated band as the ocean, which Boyd connects with the Huichol serpent that circles the world and the entrance to the underworld, and shamans later shown printouts named the central figure Kauyumari⁠[8]⁠[10]. Those consultations were arranged by the researchers whose reading they support and were not blind.

The shamanic reading came first. Newcomb sorted the Lower Pecos paintings into four styles, of which the Pecos River style is the oldest and most complex, and many Pecos River paintings came to be seen as expressions of shamanistic ritual⁠[18]⁠[3]. Turpin attributed the large figures to shamans and linked the murals to trance with hallucinogens such as peyote; Boyd's early papers read a recurring motif of figures passing through a serpent arch as the shaman's journey to the spirit world and set the art beside hallucinogenic plants found in the shelters⁠[7]⁠[19]⁠[20].

Boyd's 2016 reading keeps the ritual but makes the panel a story. Using Huichol accounts of the peyote pilgrimage and Nahua creation myths, she reads the five black figures as primordial ancestors of the five directions, the headless pale figure as a decapitated moon goddess, the serpent-catfish as an earth goddess, the arch as Dawn Mountain where the sun was born and the wavy white line as the sun's path⁠[1]⁠[9]⁠[8]. She argues that the panel was meant, like the later Mexican painted books, to pass knowledge to later generations⁠[8].

The wider claim is continuity. Boyd and Cox, and the 2025 dating study, propose that Pecos River murals are the oldest surviving expression of a core of belief that later shaped Aztec and Huichol religion, the hard core López Austin described for Mesoamerica; Tate has suggested that the Aztec sign for Chicomoztoc, their place of origin, drew on a Pecos River place sign⁠[1]⁠[4]. In 1974 Kelley explained the parallels the other way, as Pecos River painters copying art from the south, but he thought the style far younger than the dates now show⁠[4].

The doubts are about method rather than detail. Carolyn Tate called the links provocative but not conclusive, and others question reading myths separated from the painting by thousands of years⁠[9]. Farmer finds the reading compelling but notes that the mural looks like no known Mesoamerican style, that virtually no hard evidence of a Mesoamerican presence in the Pecos area has surfaced, and that northern Uto-Aztecan sources such as Hopi ethnography are left aside⁠[12]. The Huichol and Nahua traditions drawn on are living religion as well as evidence; the analogy is the scholars' argument, not something the Huichol consultants were asked to prove.

The date needs new samples. Paint taken from several White Shaman figures under the 2025 protocol, with controls on bare rock and oxalate layers above and below, would either reproduce the legacy values near 2,000 radiocarbon years or replace them, and would test whether the mural was painted in one event⁠[11]⁠[4].

The reading needs a test it was not built from. A dictionary of motifs and meanings fixed in advance, applied by others to Pecos River murals Boyd did not use, such as the panels of Seminole Canyon two miles away, and compared with what the same method finds in unrelated hunter-gatherer art, would show whether the correspondences are more specific than chance; consultations run without the researchers' framing would add independent readings⁠[1]⁠[12]⁠[2].

The inheritance claim would be helped most by dated art or objects between the Lower Pecos and central Mexico carrying the same particular motifs⁠[12]⁠[4].