Having received a number of questions on diverse topics, I want to assure the contributors that I will be attempting to answer them over the next few newsletters. This issue, the question comes from outside the RAF but it is of central concern in the study of rock art, especially now that a backlash is developing against the shamanistic interpretation of much of the imagery. This is a natural pendulum swing, especially espoused by the younger members of the rock art community, who do not remember when it was anathema to even mention rock art and shamanism in the same breath. All that changed about 1989 - for us, in Texas, with the symposium on Shamanism and Rock Art held at the Witte Museum in San Antonio - for the rest of the world with the growing awareness of the significance of David Lewis-Williams' work in South Africa. This subject will be addressed in greater detail in the RAF's forthcoming volume on Rock Art and Cultural Processes (working title) which is currently in the editing stage. Now - on to the question. Starting at the beginnings of human illustration, I am particularly interested in the X-ray style of cave paintings/ancient illustration which reveal the internal structures of both man and animal and are found in 'primitive' cultures globally. Having stumbled across your fascinating site, I wondered if your organisation would be able to help me find out more about the significance/meaning of this type of art and/or any information which may help me.

One of the incongruities in the iconographic evidence for a strong connection between shamanism and the Pecos River style pictographs is the virtual absence of the X-ray style. Only a few examples of skeletonized figures are seen and those are so stylized as to be ambiguous. For example, one figure appears to center on its spinal column with a series of hourglass lines that look like vertebrae. Zintgraff sees the radiant heart of the corporeal white shaman as all of you who have taken the site tour may recall. The Red Monochrome style can claim but one incontrovertible example of the X-ray style - a deer in the panel at Painted or Flooded Shelter has long been recognized as such and thought to be the result of Athapaskan influence emanating from the Plains. But the clear depiction of internal organs and/or the bones within seen in Huichol string paintings, Northwest Coast carvings, Paracas textiles, and many other art forms of the Americas is notable for its rarity in the Lower Pecos and northern Coahuila. In all of those diverse locations with their widely different media, despite thousands of years of temporal as well as spatial distance, skeletonized humans and animals dominate the art. A most insightful analysis by Peter Furst, published in a rare ArtsCanada book "Stones, Bones and Skin" points out that one of the most enduring elements in shamanism is the idea that life is resident in the bones, the most durable part of the body, and that resurrection from the bones is a common theme in myth and legend. Mircea Eliade "(1974:63) is, as usual, the source for much of the shamanistic lore: "To reduce oneself to the skeletal condition is equivalent to entering the womb of this primordial life, that is to a complete renewal a mystical rebirth." Many years ago, when I was still a humble graduate student, a colleague of mine, Anne Paul, asked me to help her do a statistical analysis of motifs from the elaborate textiles found in the mummy bundles of the Peruvian coastal desert, specifically the Paracas funerary wrappings that she had documented in museums around the world. We embarked upon this adventure (remember what computers were like in 1976?) and learned a great deal about art, attributes, elements, themes, and statistics. One of the most serendipitous outcomes was the definition of the major themes perpetuated in the iconography - one of those came from the computer grouping of what appeared to be dancing figures with long hair, pectorals, kilts, and strange scoring on their ribcages. By laying these figures out in a line according to degrees of similarity, we found a progression from clearly skeletonized rib cages to abstracted representations reduced to a few parallel lines. To make a long story short, we were unable to publish our findings at that time, being but green graduate students we obviously didn't understand our subject matter. Later, however, by dropping all references to how we got there (the statistical method) we published an article in Archaeology magazine (by then Anne was a recognized expert on textile art and I had published extensively on rock art so we had gained credibility - you have to understand academia to understand that). Our conclusion was that this dancing-falling-flying figure represented the shamanic trance and was an emblem of the social position of the mummy during life. The point is of course that it is the shamanistic principle that provides the unity of thought that explains the consistency of this theme in such diverse cultures. It also illustrates the selectivity that operates to emphasize some concepts and relegate others to obscurity. The Pecos River people focused on magical flight, out-of-body experiences, animal transformation, and the tripartite landscape of the shamanic universe. They apparently placed much less emphasis on other elements such as the X-ray or skeletonized view of the body, the drum as a vehicle to the otherworlds, and the central pole or tree at the center of the world. On the other hand, the seemingly pragmatic Red Monochrome artists dropped this tantalizing hint that perhaps their portraiture-like art may have had deeper concerns that are obscured by our opinion of them as realists.