How much hard evidence is there for the deterioration of the Lower Pecos paintings in historic times? (Part I)

Part I The answer to this question will appear in the next two newsletters. The first response will address the evidence for catastrophic events; the second will discuss the human effect. It may even take a third installment to sum up the process of natural decay and its acceleration. Long time residents of the Lower Pecos will be the first to tell how the paintings have faded and spalled in their lifetimes, and thanks to those early recorders, A.T. Jackson and Forrest Kirkland, some drastic losses can be documented pictorially. Natural disasters have no respect for age - two of the most dramatic examples of total loss were painted at opposite ends of the time span of Lower Pecos pictographs. Both Jackson and Kirkland published accounts of Rattlesnake Canyon's historic painting of an anthropomorphized church or an architecturalized priest - in this composite figure, a solid red rectangle sits atop a nested pair of squares, forming the building. Atop the rectangle is a round head, with ears and nose, and crowned by a tall cross. Both "arms" are raised and each ends in a cross where hands would normally be. More crosses float freely above and beside the arm-towers. The solid rectangle is pierced by a long lance or arrow. To one side are two handprints, to the other a horse and geometric designs. If only Kirkland's drawing was available, the clarity of the figures in the 1930s could be questioned because he often reconstructed or filled in faded or spalled figures. However, A.T. Jackson's photograph is certain proof that this pictograph was intact and in good condition in 1936. We spent a day searching the canyon walls above the more famous Pecos River style paintings before we finally saw the faded red stain of a handprint and a cross, all that remained of the site Newcomb thought exemplified what the native artist would like to do or see done to the missionaries. The local consensus is that the painting was lost to the great flood of 1954. Kirkland called the other victim of the flood of 1954 Lookout Shelter. Standing in front of Panther Cave, looking directly across Seminole Canyon, you can see the overhang and the ledge that Kirkland described as worn smooth by the feet of many Indians. When the water is low, huge boulders covered with cut marks emerge from Amistad Reservoir but not a trace of the paintings remain. Yet Kirkland copied - among others - a tall horned shaman figure, a small shaman with radiant hair, a half- shaman or torso, and what appears to be a variation on the hole- in-the-universe design. When the archeologists appeared in 1958 in advance of impoundment of the reservoir, they made no note of paintings in Lookout Shelter and, when a concerted search for all of Kirkland's sites was made in 1967, Lookout Shelter was among the missing. A less dramatic but equally devastating climatic event took its silent toll at the Red Linear site in Presa Canyon one winter day. An unusually dense fog was followed immediately by a hard freeze that night. By circumstance, we were leading a tour of visitors up the canyon and found a spall the size of a silver dollar lying at the base of the shallow overhang that protects the paintings. Cause and effect were fairly obvious - the freeze had expanded the water trapped behind the indurated skin of the limestone, detaching this spall and taking with it one of the small figures in the group scene, forever altering its composition. This same process has worked upon the pictographs for centuries, but a large Pecos River shaman or solid bodied Red Monochrome anthropomorph can afford to lose a spall here and there without total devastation. Such is not the case in the miniature Red Linear style, so what was a clear example of slow, natural rock decay became a catastrophic event, just on a different scale. Other catastrophic events can be seen in paintings that are now on or behind collapsed blocks of roof fall. This is the case in a couple of sites on Amistad Reservoir so it is difficult to determine if human intervention precipitated the collapses or if it was just nature's way of making rocks out of bedrock. I know of other shelters far from the reservoir where the entire roof collapsed, sealing the deposits, but there is no way to know if paintings are or were in these sites. The flood of 1954 was a 10,000-year event - never before in the span of human occupation of the Lower Pecos had the river reached the heights it did in 1954 - all as a result of a stalled hurricane. We literally do not know how many other sites were lost to rushing waters. Upstream of Lookout Shelter and Panther Cave, in Seminole Canyon, a rock shelter of enormous natural beauty has literally been flushed of deposits, leaving a travertined column 3 meters high where a spring once flowed through ashy fill that accumulated over millennia. On the upstream end of this site, protected by a huge block of roof fall, is a scattering of Pecos River style pictographs - a black shaman figure, a dashed line panther - not seen by Kirkland or Jackson. Presumably, other paintings once ringed the site and only these remain, proof that natural catastrophes have taken a toll higher than we know.