Pecos River Style Rock Art: A Prehistoric Iconography by James Burr Harrison Macrae (review)

James Burr Harrison Macrae’s Pecos River Style Rock Art primarily concerns the structure and character of Pecos River Style painted rock art, which dates from ca. 4,000–1,500 years ago and is found in rock shelters in the lower Pecos River area in the West Texas and Mexican Chihuahuan Desert. This rock art was produced by painters in Middle and Late Archaic-period-hunter-fisher-gatherer societies who seasonally ranged across the land. The book also represents the author’s efforts to explain and understand both the rock art and the aboriginal peoples who created it.

The polychrome painted rock art, in red, black, yellow, and white pigment-based paint, features elongated linear and abstract anthromorphs as well as a wide variety of other core and non-core motifs. Macrae makes a strong case that the rock art has both “metaphorical and spiritual connection to the landscape” (73), and was meant to convey ritual and supernatural events, religious precepts as well as cosmology, and depict the hierarchy of important men and leaders in their society.

Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the Lower Pecos region, its geology (especially its limestone overhangs, which were used as rock art panels) and climate, and the archaeological context of the rock art. Most interestingly, it also includes autobiographical information about the author and his decision to focus academically on the Pecos River Style art. In chapter 2, Macrae provides the methods and theoretical approach he employs in the study of the rock art. Here, Macrae characterizes the approach as structural-iconographic analysis. This analysis relies on the identification of repetitive patterns and symbols in the art, along with determining the contextual relationships between the symbols and patterns in each rock art panel at rock shelter sites. Macrae follows this by defining nineteen core motifs in the rock art imagery in chapter 3. The imagery is divided into anthropomorphs, material culture, and zoomorphs (mainly mountain lions, deer, and birds, as well as centipedes), enigmatic characters, and geometric symbols combined into an abstract and symbolic narrative on “paintings layered one on top of another” (30).

The heart of the book arrives in chapter 4 with the presentation of Macrae’s well-illustrated typology of those nineteen core motifs along with fifty-five non-core motifs and symbols identified in the Pecos River Style rock art. This typology includes a description of the unique character of these motifs as well as interpretations of their symbolic meaning offered by Macrae and a variety of rock art researchers. These interpretations represent the best current view of their meaning, “subject to the best available evidence and theory” (36).

Macrae ties together these disparate pieces of information and symbolic content on Pecos River style rock art in Chapter 5. He argues that this rock art was created by hunter-fisher-gatherer groups as part of a long-term ritual cycle tied to periods of social pressure and stress among Lower Pecos bands. During periods of increasing populations or aridity, the rock art functioned “as a stabilizing and unifying cultural process” that was manifest as cyclical nucleation of bands and the creation of sacred space “at natural shrines on the landscape” (77).

I highly recommend Macrae’s book to readers interested in the aboriginal rock art of the Lower Pecos region, as well as in the author’s research approach. I hope Macrae will continue his studies of Pecos River Style rock art and delve further into the complex rock art created by Lower Pecos peoples.