Cabeza de Vaca as Interpreter of Lower Pecos Rock Art

A New History of Old Texas

Brandon Seale

Arts, Cabeza De Vaca, The Alamo, Battle Of Medina, San Antonio Missions, Texas, Mexico, Gutierrez-magee, Education, Comanches, Apaches, Society & Culture, San Antonio, Courses, Philosophy, History

2.4 • 686 Ratings

🗓️ 1 January 2023

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Post-Script to Brandon Seale's podcast on Cabeza de Vaca. From a speech I gave at the Witte Museum in San Antonio, this is my attempt to argue that we can actually hear the themes of the famed Lower Pecos Rock Art expressed by Cabeza de Vaca in his attempt to take on the role of a "spirit guide" for the native Americans who joined him on his journey. If true, this would be compelling confirmation of the most recent scholarly interpretations of that Lower Pecos Rock Art and the worldviews of ...

Transcript

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0:00.0	Happy New Year from a new history of old Texas.
0:03.0	I've been slow getting out the next season of this podcast,
0:05.9	partly because I'm going to be trying something a little bit new in the new season
0:08.9	and it's taking longer to pull together.
0:11.2	More to come there.
0:12.5	We've also been busy continuing our field work on the search for the battlefield in Medina,
0:16.1	and it made some really, really encouraging progress,
0:18.5	which I hope to be able to report back on later in the new year as well. But in the meantime, I thought I'd take us back to Cabezza de Vaca for a minute,
0:25.4	because it's a story that I feel like I'm always carrying with me. Just this last weekend,
0:29.4	out at my wife's ranch in Kuala, we stumbled upon an old burned midden, which is basically
0:34.4	a prehistoric Native American cooking site. As I researched it more, I found that the ways that Indians were using these earthen ovens,
0:41.7	back in the days of Cabeza de Vaca, and for thousands of years prior to that,
0:45.3	were frankly just like how I've had barbacoa de pozzo prepared for me at ranches in other parts of Mexico.
0:51.1	Today, it's the kind of throughline in a mundane everyday practice that just
0:56.8	makes me feel good about life and that can take us back even further than our written records could.
1:02.4	And that's basically what I'm arguing in the speech that I gave at the Witty Museum a few years back
1:06.4	and that I'm going to share with you here, that we can actually see impressed upon Cabes de Vaca's account
1:11.7	direct evidence of Native Texans' worldviews, worldviews that are written out in the first
1:16.5	person in the rock art that is everywhere in the Lower Pacas region of Texas. Enjoy. Well, good morning, and thank you again for having me here.
1:30.3	And I'm going to assume if you're here at a Texas history conference that you have some passing familiarity with Kabeza de Vaca in his journey.
1:36.3	So I'm going to be able to just hit the highlights because I really want to get to a moment about six or seven years into his journey that I think is a unique moment, a unique insight into the worldview of the Native Americans that he's living amongst.
1:48.0	Because his account still is an account from a Europeans' perspective.
	...

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