I'm intrigued by the similarities between the Pecos River style and the Barrier Canyon style in Utah. One difference is that Barrier Canyon has no fringed figures. What is the current understanding of what the fringe around some of the Pecos River figures represents or means?

The gross similarities between the Barrier Canyon and Pecos River pictographs can be extended to include other defined rock art styles even farther afield, in for example, Baja California and the Coso Range of California. Generically, these are often called "elongated anthropomorphs" or shamans and they share many basic characteristics - posture, ornate headdresses, multi-colored bodies, and geometric substitutions for body parts or features. The consensus among rock art researchers today is that these similarities are attributable to the recurrent theme of shamanic transformation, with animal attributes, geometric substitutions, elongated body parts all symbolizing the ecstatic or trance state of the religious practitioner. In different areas and at different times, the favored manner of depicting these concepts or ideas varied because the artist was illustrating a process, not reproducing material objects. He or she was compelled to find ways of putting forth ideas, not replicating reality. The Pecos River style artists leaned toward more definitive animal characteristics, for example, while the Baja folks favored duality, partitioning their figures into red and black zones, like harlequins, and the Barrier Canyon people leaned toward ghostlike portraiture. These are questions of style more than content. Although no one "knows" what the fringed costumes mean, I would offer a couple of possible explanations. One is that it furthers the intrinsic relationship between animals and humans seen so consistently in Pecos River art if the fringe is intended to represent hair or fur or feathers. It may, like the headdresses, be part of a costume worn by the shaman during his performances but that does not make it any less representative of a concept - that is the concept of animal transformation. Secondly, trance states in general and those induced by some specific hallucinogens in particular produce the feeling of hair standing on end or growing, symptoms that are open to various interpretations - witness the werewolf phenomenon, for example. Lycanthropy, the formal name for the delusion or ability to assume the form of a wolf, has been known to science and pseudo- science for a very long time, millennia before Teenage Werewolves in London began sprouting facial hair. Shakespeare's great pun on turning a man into an ass in Midsummer Night's Dream was foreshadowed by the Greek writer who described an ointment with the same power in 200 A.D. The recurrence of this theme in so many media over time and space suggests that it is firmly entrenched in a belief system and/or represents a biological response to some stimuli. The Pecos River artists were very adept at developing shorthand symbols that encompassed more than one meaning, visually enforcing and reinforcing the power of the trance state, however it was induced. To me, the fringe is one of those devices by which they encapsulated both the idea of animal transformation and the physical sensation from which it springs (or vice versa). For more details and a broader discussion of similar phenomena, see the RAF's special publication Shamanism and Rock Art in North America.