Is there any significance to the colors used in the paintings?

The dominant color used in the paintings, no matter their age or subject material, is red. This is true in all the styles, from the earliest Pecos River shamans to the latest Historic autobiography. The names given to two of the styles - Red Linear and Red Monochrome - attest to this overwhelming popularity. Some of the selectivity can be attributed to obvious factors - such as availability and durability; other factors are more esoteric and aesthetic. Ocher, or hematite, the most common source of pigments in the Lower Pecos, is easily available in the form of pebbles in the gravel-beds of the many canyons, as is limonite, the yellow variant. In other parts of Texas, ocher is exposed in veins at or near the surface where it can be collected or pried from the earth with little effort. Recently, one of our projects has been tracking down "paint mines" as they were called by early archeologists. We have identified four sites where some prehistoric exploitation of ocher can be presumed. In one of these, red, yellow, and grey- white colorants could be collected from the surface within a few feet of each other. Heat readily turns yellow ochers red, thus increasing the supply. Mineral pigments are more portable and last longer than vegetable paints (except on soft items where saturation fixes the color). Therefore, based on functional criteria, red is a convenient and accessible colorant. Functional criteria aside, the first response that leaps to mind when asked about the color red is blood, the essential fluid that courses through the veins of all humans and animals. Of course, early people were aware that loss of blood meant loss of life, but they also knew that new life arrives in blood as well. I would be willing to bet if we took a poll of readers, their immediate response to this question would be red is the color of blood. However, there appears to be more to red than even this powerful association with the life force (as well as anger, danger, and communism). Psychologists and linguists studying people who still live at a very elemental technological and social level have found that the first colors to be distinguished (i.e., named) are black, white, and red. These we could call "all color", "no color", and red. The strongest impulse on the chromatic wavelength is red so we are in a sense hard-wired to react to red before any other color. One wonders if our blood was green if the human brain would still react most strongly to red. Why then the polychromes? To me, it is not merely a coincidence that the most sophisticated art - and that most clearly rooted in a ritual context -uses more than one color. If we accept the premise that the Red Linear, Red Monochrome, and Historic art have a stronger narrative component as well as probably being intrusive, we can envision the Pecos River and Bold Line Geometric styles as developing within a trance-oriented religion, where multi-colored visions are expectable. Newcomb detected an evolution in the shaman figures that he thought progressed from simple to complex. In the earlier stages, the paintings were monochromatically red, becoming more elaborate and stylized over time. The use of black, yellow, orange and white added complexity and aesthetic interest to the paintings. These colors and their various combinations may well have had deeper meanings that we have not yet recognized but it is clear that artistic development was accelerated. I see this as perfectly consistent with a circumscribed group of people who were intensifying their economic strategies, their social organization, and their rituals in response to the stimulus of population density. Rooted to one place, the artists could both compete and learn from each other, culminating in the highly skilled paintings that we today recognize as truly the work of old masters.