Welcome to Cabeza de Baca.

Episode 20, All Things to All People.

I'm Brandon Seal.

At several points in this series, I've lamented the fact that we don't really have any primary accounts about Native American life prior to the arrival of Europeans.

But that's not quite true.

Scattered across northern Kualaweila and southwest Texas are hundreds of caves and rock shelters containing some of the oldest artwork in the

Americas, some dating back more than 4,000 years.

Many of these murals are located near the Old Valverte County community of Schumla, outside of

modern-day Del Rio.

In 1998, Carolyn Boyd founded the Schumla Archaeological and Research Center to preserve and study this rock art.

She began her study of these works as an artist, in fact, not as an archaeologist.

She painstakingly redrew each of the panels that she studied, reliving the artistic act of creation with each one.

Later, she supplemented her hand drawings with 3D laser mapping, drone mapping, portable

x-ray fluorescence, handheld digital microscopes, and more.

Over the course of years of study, what she and her team discovered was that the colorful pictographs were more than just the primitive taggings of Stone Age graffiti artists.

For one, there were compositions of impressive scale that, quote, span as much as 150 meters long, 15 meters tall, and contain hundreds of figures.

Of the 76 murals documented by Schumla Archaeological Research and Education Center, 34 extend greater than three meters from the

shelter floor and required a ladder or scaffolding to produce, end quote. And by the way,

I'm quoting extensively in this episode from Carolyn Boyd's work, the most

recent of which is the 2016 book called White Shaman, published by UT Press.

Another clue to the panel's significance was in the pigments with which they were painted.

To outline their compositions, the artists often used precious red ochre, for example,

...