POWERFUL TEXT FOR THESE TIMES: The Broken Spears (La Visión de lo Vencidos) by Miguel Leon Portilla

Friends,

I encourage everyone to read the truly magisterial text published in 1959 by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico by Dr. Miguel León-Portilla. Originally compiled from texts written in Nahuatl and translated into Spanish before being rendered into English by Lysander Kemp, this work provides invaluable insight into the Indigenous perspective on the Spanish conquest. The illustrations in the text, adapted from original paintings found in authentic codices, were created by Alberto Beltrán.

A crucial clarification: Dr. Miguel León-Portilla (February 22, 1926 – October 1, 2019) did not write The Broken Spears himself, aside from his introduction. Instead, this text is a meticulously compiled historical record that preserves firsthand Indigenous accounts written in the aftermath of the Spanish invasion of Tenochtitlán, now Mexico City. It's chock full of lessons for today—like right now with the dismantling of our own government institutions and processes.

The Broken Spears draws on evidence from codices and other writings, including formal pleas to King Philip of Spain, imploring his mercy in light of the devastation and trauma suffered by the Aztecs, or Mexica [pronounced me-chí-ca], following the Spanish-led invasion and the ultimate fall of Tenochtitlán in 1521. These accounts acknowledge the complexity of Indigenous responses to the Spanish presence—some groups aligned with Hernán Cortés, believing they were securing their own futures, only to have their trust cruelly betrayed by the invaders.

I sympathize with those who sought peace, for among the Mexica were true peacemakers who hoped for a harmonious coexistence. Yet their choices had lasting, unintended consequences, as is evident from the sorrowful and tragic letters to King Philip. The Indigenous peoples were divided, and some found elements of Christian teachings resonant with their own worship of the Sun God, making conversion to Christianity less alien than commonly assumed.

This text offers an unflinching and vivid portrayal of the fall of Tenochtitlán, immersing readers in the catastrophe as if it had happened yesterday. The narrative is gripping, haunting, and profoundly moving. Even after reading Dr. León-Portilla’s introduction—which is fascinating in its own right—one cannot help but be drawn deeply into the Indigenous testimonies. I highly recommend the audiobook version, which powerfully conveys the intensity of the events described.

Without a doubt, despite his extensive scholarship, The Broken Spears stands as Dr. León-Portilla’s most significant and enduring contribution. He was one of Mexico’s greatest anthropological minds, and La Visión de los Vencidos (the Spanish title of The Broken Spears) remains a groundbreaking work in the study of Indigenous perspectives on the conquest. It gives voice to the Nahuatl people, who perhaps foresaw that future generations would read their words and bear witness to their suffering and resilience. How prescient and thoughtful our ancestors were.

What I additionally find fascinating is it captures a moment in world history before the concept of race or racism existed, but rather ethnicity, including among the "Tenoch" peoples themselves and beyond. 

I look forward to a reading group we have formed that is dedicated to discussing this essential text, and I encourage all of you to read it as well. For ease of reference, I have included a video of Dr. León-Portilla speaking about The Broken Spears, as well as a Wikipedia entry on Miguel León-Portilla. 

Angela Valenzuela

Wikipedia, Miguel León-Portilla 

Miguel León-Portilla (22 February 1926 – 1 October 2019)[1] was a Mexican anthropologist and historian, specializing in Aztec culture and literature of the pre-Columbian and colonial eras. Many of his works were translated to English and he was a well-recognized scholar internationally. In 2013, the Library of Congress of the United States bestowed on him the Living Legend Award.[2]

Early life and education[edit]

Born in Mexico City, Miguel León-Portilla had an interest in indigenous Mexico from an early age, fostered by his uncle Manuel Gamio, a distinguished archeologist. Gamio had a lasting influence on his life and career, initially taking him as a boy on trips to important archeological sites in Mexico and later as well.[3] León-Portilla attended the Instituto de Ciencias in Guadalajara and then earned a B.A. (1948) and M.A. summa cum laude (1951) at the Jesuit Loyola University in Los Angeles. Returning to Mexico in 1952, he showed Gamio a play he had written on Quetzalcoatl, which resulted in Gamio introducing his nephew to Ángel Garibay K., whose publications in the 1930s and 1940s first brought Nahuatl literature to widespread public attention in Mexico. Needing to make a living, León-Portilla began attending law school and worked at a financial firm. At the same time he taught at Mexico City College, an English-language school in the Condesa neighborhood. Other instructors included important scholars of Mexican indigenous history and culture, Wigberto Jiménez Moreno, Fernando Horcasitas, and Eduardo Noguera. Gamio persuaded León-Portilla to drop his law studies and job in business to work at the Inter-American Indian Institute [es; pt], a specialized organization of the Organization of American States,[4] which Gamio directed.[5] León-Portilla began graduate studies at the UNAM, completing his doctoral dissertation, La Filosofía Náhuatl estudiada en sus fuentes, in 1956, which launched his scholarly career.[6]

Career[edit]

His dissertation on Nahua philosophy was published in Mexico, and then translated to English as Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind (1967) and then many other languages.[7] It was the first of his many works to be translated to English. His translations of Nahuatl and Spanish texts on the conquest of Mexico, first published in Mexico as Visión de los vencidos, translated to English as The Broken Spears, is the way many undergraduate students in the United States are introduced to accounts from indigenous participants and not Spanish conquistadors.[8]

León-Portilla spearheaded a movement to understand and re-evaluate Nahuatl literature and religion, not only from the pre-Columbian era, but also that of the present day, especially since Nahuatl is still spoken by 1.5 million people.[2] His works in English on literature included Pre-Columbian Literatures of Mexico (1986),[9] Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World (2000),[10] and with Earl Shorris, In the Language of Kings: An Anthology of Mesoamerican Literature, Pre-Columbian to the Present (2002).[11] He also compared the literature of the Nahuas with that of the Inca.[12] Another area of research was on indigenous religion and spirituality, with works including Native Meso-American Spirituality (1980),[13] and South and Meso-American Native Spirituality: From the Cult of the Feathered Serpent to the Theology of Liberation (1997).[14] He also published a work on the Maya, Time and Reality in the Thought of the Maya (1990).[15]

León-Portilla was instrumental in bringing to light the works of Franciscan Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, a 16th-century primary source on the Aztec civilization, whose twelve-volume General History of the Things of New Spain, often referred to as the Florentine Codex, are crucial for understanding Nahua religion, society, and culture, as well as for providing an account of the conquest of Mexico from the Mexica viewpoint. León-Portilla was the first to denote Sahagún as the "Father of Anthropology in the New World".[16]

He contributed to the understanding of the development of the field of Mesoamerican history in Mexico. With Garibay, León-Portilla made contributions to the study of nineteenth-century Mesoamerican historian Manuel Orozco y Berra.[17][18] León-Portilla also published two volumes on the work of Mesoamerican humanists, including his mentor Garibay.[19]

In the field of colonial Nahuatl studies, particularly the New Philology, León-Portilla's work on a collection of late sixteenth-century wills in Nahuatl, The Testaments of Culhuacan, contributed to the understanding of local-level interactions within a Nahua town.[20][21]

A subordinate but important interest of León-Portilla was the early history and ethnography of the Baja California Peninsula. He addressed this region in more than 30 books and articles, including a 1995 volume collecting several of his earlier publications.[22]

Early in his academic career in 1969, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.[23] That was the first of many academic awards and recognitions, including the Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor, the highest award bestowed by the Mexican Senate. In 1970, he was elected to membership of Mexico's National College[24] and, in 1995, to membership of the United States National Academy of Sciences.[25] From 1987 to 1992, he served as his country's permanent delegate to UNESCO, during which time he successfully nominated five pre-Columbian sites in Mexico for inclusion on the World Heritage List.[26] On 12 December 2013, León-Portilla received the Living Legend Award from the U.S. Library of Congress.[2] He was also a member of the Mexican Academy of Language and the Mexican Academy of History.[27]

Personal life[edit]

León-Portilla married Ascensión Hernández Triviño, a Spanish linguist and academic, in 1965. Their daughter, Marisa León-Portilla, is also a historian.[28]

León-Portilla died in Mexico City on 1 October 2019 after having been hospitalized for much of the year.[29] The federal Secretariat of Culture announced that his body would lie in state on 3 October 2019 at the Palacio de Bellas Artes.[29]

Notable works[edit]

UT’s Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory must return ancestral remains

A hallmark of settler colonialism is its objectifying ways of knowing, meaning treating "the other" like objects—like a grade, a number, a test score—or as covered in this poignant story below, like an artifact.  How disgraceful to learn about the over 2,000 ancestral remains housed at UT's Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory (TARL).  

I hope that the TARL stops their foot dragging and honor the request by Dr. Mario Garza, Maria Rocha, and other Indigenous groups and return the ancestral remains to the communities and places to whom and where they belong.  

I would also hope that this become a teaching moment for an entire field with a sordid history of dehumanizing and objectifying native peoples under the guise of "science."  Indeed, this very 'ask' unmasks the field as not at all objective, but as ideologically caught up with the horrors of settler colonialism that continues forcefully into the present.

As the great American novelist, William Faulkner once said,

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

-Angela Valenzuela

Photo Credit: Helen Brown | Daily Texan Staff

UT’s Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory must return ancestral remains

Published on October 22, 2019 at 9:18 pm

BY KAITLIN BURNS PASSAFIUME

Imagine your great-grandparents’ graves are upturned, and their remains are unearthed to build a fence or maybe a ticket booth. Official law has validated requests for their reburial, but these requests are denied. Their bodies are collections in a museum. Their bones are artifacts of archaeological research.

It’s a horrific thought, which is why the Texas Penal Code prevents just this sort of an act.

However, consistent with Texas’ history of treating its indigenous groups as less than human, over 3,400 ancestors of original groups have been disturbed from what should have been their final resting place. Before, they lay carefully buried in customary tradition. Now, they sit in the aseptic cabinets of archaeological research labs.

Over 2,000 ancestral remains can be found at UT’s Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory (TARL), on the J.J. Pickle Research Campus. 

The lab should repatriate ancestral remains to their original groups so that they may receive the proper burial required by their sets of beliefs and traditions. This act could both contest the unequal treatment of indigenous groups and serve as a step in repairing a history of mistreatment, removal and extermination.

According to the TARL’s website, “The disposition of human remains and associated objects affiliated with particular Native American Tribes will be determined by each tribe.” 

This vague language seems to suggest that each original group determines the fate of their ancestors. While this should be the case according to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990, Mario Garza of the Miakan-Garza band of the Coahuiltecan people said that TARL has refused to return remains due to his group’s lack of federal recognition. 

This is despite NAGPRA’s statement on their website that “there are some cases in which nonfederally recognized tribes may be appropriate claimants for cultural items,” which includes human remains or artifacts. According to Garza, 11 nonfederally recognized tribes like his own have gotten remains through NAGPRA.

NAGPRA has placed responsibility on museums and federal institutions in returning cultural items of the original groups of the U.S. So why then does UT’s TARL continue to refuse the requests of Garza and other indigenous groups?

According to TARL, the institution has received conflicting claims for the same remains, and these disputes should be resolved between such groups. Garza responded that this policy has never been communicated to him or his organization and that he was unaware of any conflicting claims. TARL additionally did not offer details about the identity of the conflicting group.

Garza and his people, originally from the San Marcos area, know all too well how difficult this bureaucratic struggle can be. Along with his wife María Rocha, he founded the Indigenous Cultures Institute in 2006, an organization dedicated to preserving the culture of Texas’ original peoples while maintaining their covenant to sacred sites.

“We generally believe that when a person dies, only the physical body dies, but the spirit does not die. It continues on a spiritual journey,” Garza said. “When the remains are removed, it interrupts that spiritual journey of the individual, and the spirit is out there in some type of limbo. We believe the remains should not be bothered at all to start with. If it is removed, the remains need to be repatriated and hopefully as close as possible to the original site.”

TARL claims that they applaud and support efforts to resolve claim disputes between Texas’ originary groups. However, Garza said that talks have stopped.

Students and UT affiliates who want to stand in solidarity with the fight for the return of ancestral remains to original groups should contact TARL with their requests. 

“I think that if they would receive 1,000 letters from students, they would realize there are more than two people fighting for this,” Garza said. Additionally, students can become involved with the Indigenous Cultures Institute.

The individuals that first inhabited Texas deserve equal legal protection, and UT should do its part to ensure this. 

“I don’t see it as a Native American issue, I see it as a human issue — a human rights issue,” Garza said. “We need support from everybody.”

Burns Passafiume is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

Ancient N. America connected to Mexico

Our ancestors were amazing people who navigated the entire continent through great river waterways like the Mississippi. When we say things like "We as Mexican/Mexican American people didn't cross the border, but rather it crossed us," the archaeological evidence suggests as much.  

Even if we're not always taught this, know, or embrace it, today's United States is inescapably our ancestral homeland.  There's ultimately nowhere "to go back to"—as we are often callously told by those that construct us as "foreigners," at best, and "invaders," at worst.

To be sure, the presence of a militarized border that is itself an artifact of a modern construction called the "nation state" belies this fact of our prior occupancy of these ancestral homelands.  From this view, the truth is that as long as we emanate from this continent, we are always in our home—our ancestral homelands.  Our ancestors never left the continent.

Palabra!

Angela Valenzuela

c/s

Ancient N. America connected to Mexico

Chaco, Cahokia were outliers of great empire, archaeologist says

By Jim Mimiaga Journal staff writer

Article Last Updated: Monday, October 12, 2015 3:41pm

Enlargephoto

The Associated Press

The ancient Mesoamerican city Cahokia, near St. Louis, was larger than most cities in Europe 1,000 years ago. Archaeologist Steve Leckson gave a presentation in Cortez last week that focused on Cahokia and Chaco’s connections to the ancient cities of Mexico and South America.

Modern borders have skewed how ancient civilizations are interpreted, says Steve Leckson, a University of Colorado archaeologist.

Enlargephoto

File photo

The people of ancient Chaco, in New Mexico, traded for chocolate and macaws from southern Mexico and Central America. Archaeologists are discovering more evidence that Chaco was linked to civilizations far to the south.

Related stories:

• Study: Drought cracked Pueblos’ social fabric

Great North American civilizations from 1,000 years ago, including Chaco and Cahokia near St. Louis, were outliers of a vast Mesoamerican empire in southern Mexico.

“Forget the international border, it was all one world,” he said during a presentation at the Sunflower Theatre in Cortez. “After the U.S.-Mexican war in 1848, the attitude here was that these were our ruins with no connection to the south. That is absurd.”

North American and Mesoamericans shared culture and goods in the postclassical era, which began about 570 AD. The period had explosive population growth and is known for exploration and long-distance trade between city-states.

Cahokia is often overlooked.

Thriving about the same time as Chaco, in 1,000 A.D., Cahokia was the largest North American city, with 30,000 residents. All that’s left are giant mounds that were once temples and pyramids.

“Cahokia was larger than most cities of Europe; it was bigger than London,” Leckson said. “It had the biggest pyramid north of Teotihuacan,” the Aztec ruins north of Mexico City.

Chaco and Cahokia were on the edge of a larger civilization, and leaders traveled and brought back high-end goods to impress commoners, he said.

Chaco nobles wore blankets of macaw feathers and “knocked back chocolate” products originating 1,500 miles away.

“High-end goods like cotton and perishables is what we should be looking for,” he said. “It tells the tale more than things like pottery that archaeologists are more comfortable with.”

Chemical evidence in vessels of Chaco have revealed cocoa residue. It is also likely Chaco traded in the Mississippi Valley for Black Drink, a highly caffeinated energy drink made from holly.

“Everyone in this room who took Archaeology 101 was taught there were no city-states north of Mexico, and that is not true.”

When exploring Chaco or Cahokia, Bandelier or Mesa Verde, think about Mesoamerica, said Leckson. Forget the border with Mexico.

“I would say the way to know about Chaco is to know about postclassic Mesoamerica, because that is what it is, plus a lot of other things,” he said. “The people of Chaco were trying to live like Mesoamerican lords.”

Leckson’s talk was part of the Four Corners Lecture Series. On Oct. 13 at 7 p.m. at the Anasazi Heritage Center in Dolores, Dan Simplicio will give a Zuni tribe perspective on the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act.

jmimiaga@the-journal.com

This is a story about the the White Shaman mural, a pre-historic wall painting, that was discovered by Carolyn Boyd in Comstock, Texas, awhile back in 1992.  

But more than 4,000 years ago, these barrens were home to a flourishing culture of hunter-gatherers, creators of some of the world’s most complex and beautiful prehistoric rock art. The literal meaning of those paintings had been dismissed as an unsolvable mystery—until recently

 

Today, Dr. Mario Garza and Gary Perez of the Indigenous Cultures Institute in San Marcos, Texas, continue forward with this work, conducting research and delivering lectures on our ancient ancestors.  All so fascinating.

 

Read on.

 

Angela

 

 

FROM THE MAY 2012 ISSUE

Decoding the Ancient Secrets of White Shaman

Rock paintings near the Rio Grande contain hidden 
messages about a mysterious 4,000-year-old religion. Now one archaeologist has learned to read them.

By Will Hunt|Tuesday, July 24, 2012

 

RELATED TAGS: ARCHAEOLOGY

 

The figures at the White Shaman rock shelter seem to depict a journey through the spirit world.

SHUMLA School INC 2012

 

 

Carolyn Boyd guides her pickup down a cliffside trail overlooking Dead Mans Pass, a limestone canyon cut deep into the back country of southwest Texas. A ring of black vultures circles overhead. Boyd slows the truck and scans the canyon for what has drawn their interest. On top of a boulder, splayed out like a ritual sacrifice, is a half-eaten goat carcass. “Mountain lion,” she says.
The region known as the Lower Pecos is an arid 21,000-square-mile expanse of southwest Texas and northern Mexico surrounding the confluence of the Pecos River and the Rio Grande. The land is barbed with cacti, teeming with rattlesnakes, and riven with impassable canyons. But more than 4,000 years ago, these barrens were home to a flourishing culture of hunter-gatherers, creators of some of the world’s most complex and beautiful prehistoric rock art. The literal meaning of those paintings had been dismissed as an unsolvable mystery—until recently.
Boyd parks at the bottom of the canyon. In her early fifties, with high cheekbones and dark hair pulled back under a hat, she is both elegant and hardy, like a pioneer woman from a classic Western. She sets a brisk pace up the side of the canyon. Her destination is Delicado Shelter, one of some 300 shallow caves in the region known for paintings of human figures, deer, canines, felines, birds, rabbits, snakes, and other desert animals. Boyd, an archaeologist and director of SHUMLA (Studying Human Use of Materials, Land, and Art), an education and research center in Comstock, Texas, will spend the afternoon scouring the shelter for insight into the ancient residents and their spiritual world.
Through decades of dogged work, Boyd has also developed a system to understand this enigmatic art. Working like a detective, she discovered a symbolic code that reveals narratives in the paintings, which she believes can be read, almost like an ancient language. Just as finding the Rosetta stone in Egypt enabled linguists to decipher ancient hieroglyphs, these paintings help unlock the secrets of a majestic religious system that blanketed Mesoamerica nearly four millennia before the arrival of Columbus. Boyd has discovered that myths and rituals similar to those written in the rocks have survived in the Huichol, a modern tribe now living in the mountains of western Mexico, and in other cultures throughout Mexico and the American Southwest.

Genies on the Wall

When Boyd first visited the Lower Pecos more than 20 years ago, she had no intention of becoming an archaeologist. At the time, she was an artist living in Old Town Spring, Texas, with her four-year-old son, Jeff, making a small living selling watercolors out of a local gallery. But when she gazed up at the paintings on the shelter walls, she was stunned. The largest of the 4,000-year-old murals stretched over 200 feet, containing hundreds of red, yellow, black, and white images. Gigantic human figures swooped on the walls overhead like genies escaping from magic lamps. Some wore fabulous headdresses or gripped scepterlike objects; others appeared to be half animal, with wings or antlers. There were felines with bristling fur, deer with delicate antlers, canines with tiny teeth. The largest figures reached up 30 feet; creating them would have required enormous scaffoldings and incalculable hours with crude brushes and mineral paints. The paint had faded, but Boyd could imagine walking through the canyons when the walls had been ablaze with color.
She scoured libraries for books on the rock art. Archaeologists, she read, believed the paintings were related to shamanism, the common religious practice among tribes in the region. The shaman was a tribe’s liaison with the spirit world. During rituals, he would fast, dance, or eat hallucinogenic plants to induce an out-of-body trance in which he would travel into the otherworld. There, he fought off demons or consulted the spirits of the ancestors before regaining consciousness and relating his experiences to the rest of the tribe.
Researchers suspected that the paintings conveyed some aspect of the shamanic ritual, but most thought the rock art would never be truly understood. Archaeologists usually learn about prehistoric art from the ancient artists’ descendants, who continue the traditions of their ancestors. But in the Lower Pecos, those who created the paintings had vanished. No one knew why they left or where they went, making it impossible to identify their descendants. “Any attempt at interpretation can only be speculative,” Boyd read in Texas A&M archaeologist Harry Shafer’s book Ancient Texans. “The meanings are lost when a culture comes to an end.”


Order Out of Chaos

For Boyd, the prospect of an unsolvable mystery made the paintings only more compelling. A few months later, she returned to a rock shelter called White Shaman (shown in the photos on page 1 and page 4). Carved into a limestone bluff near the confluence of the Pecos River and the Rio Grande, the shelter marked the geographic center of the region. Boyd was deeply impressed by the frieze of crimson, black, and yellow human figures covering the back wall, especially the shimmering white figure that gave the shelter its name.
Boyd began sketching the paintings, studying them carefully. Archaeologists believed that the images at White Shaman were essentially unrelated, each depicting an individual ritual, and at first glance, the mural did seem chaotic: Swarms of indecipherable markings surrounded figures painted one on top of the other.
But looking at the mural with an artist’s eye, Boyd saw something different. She noticed a row of five identical human figures spaced evenly across the length of the mural. The design had to be deliberate. “I saw a carefully planned composition, governed by patterns,” she says. If these patterns could be broken down and identified, she thought, perhaps the ancient artists’ lost messages could be retrieved.
Boyd knew she would need more than a few sketches to do that. She had to rely not on the instinct of the artist but the hard science of the archaeologist. So in 1991, at the age of 33, Boyd enrolled as an anthropology major at Texas A&M and told Harry Shafer, founder of the department’s archaeology program, that she wanted to do an interpretive study on Lower Pecos rock art. Although Shafer had dismissed the possibility of interpreting the paintings in his book, he signed off on her proposal.
Boyd began with a comparative study of two painted rock shelters called Rattlesnake Canyon and Panther Cave. During long weekends, she would drop Jeff off at his dad’s, load her camping gear into her Toyota, and make the seven-hour drive to the Lower Pecos.
One afternoon that fall, Boyd stood beneath the tawny overhang of Panther Cave, where ancient artists had painted 
hundreds of black-, red-, and saffron-colored human and animal figures in what looked like a jumbled fray. Sketch pad in hand, she studied a human figure about two feet tall on the panel’s right side. The figure (see next page) had wings coming down from its arms; it hovered above a circle with a long, wavy line emanating out.
Boyd froze. She had seen these images before. Back at College Station, she tracked down a 1930s book of rock art drawings and turned to a rendering of Rattlesnake Canyon. Near the center of the panel was a winged human figure beneath a circle with a long, wavy line attached to it, nearly identical to what she had seen at Panther Cave. A survey of drawings from other shelters revealed dozens more of this pattern. Like the figure at Panther Cave, the human figures all displayed animal attributes, such as wings, deer antlers, rabbit ears, or fur. “If they were painting these images over and over, they had to have been significant,” she thought. But what did they mean?
Boyd found answers in studies of tribes throughout Mexico and the American Southwest, where shamans consistently described their cosmos as vertically tiered: Spirits were said to live in heaven, on Earth, or in the underworld. She then reexamined the humans in the paintings. They were placed above, below, and on top of the wavy lines. Could she be looking at 4,000-year-old depictions of shamans journeying into the underworld?
Boyd hunted for clues. One came from Ralph Beals, a UCLA anthropologist who studied the Yaqui, a tribe in northwestern Mexico and southern Arizona. In Beals’s work, a Yaqui shaman said that when he journeyed to the underworld, he “passed through the body of a snake.” This was a pattern: Nearly every tribe in the region envisioned a serpent as the divider between the earthly and the spiritual realms, explaining the wavy lines on the Lower Pecos rocks. The same kinds of stories explained the animal adornments; when shamans traveled to the underworld, each had a “spirit animal” for protector and guide.

Portal to the Underworld
On Easter weekend in 1992, Boyd visited Mystic Shelter, about 30 miles east of White Shaman. At the foot of the shelter, her eyes opened wide. Two horizontal stone ledges, one above the other, divided the shallow cave into upper, middle, and lower sections, like a diorama of the shamanic cosmos. About halfway up the rock face, she saw a single red-colored human figure. It bristled with animal fur right above an undulating black line with a gap in the middle. In an outlined space beneath the line was a row of human figures in black.
Here was the whole pattern—the human figure covered in fur, probably the shaman; the arched, wavy line, the serpent dividing earthly and spirit realms; and, at the line’s center, the portal through which the shaman could descend. As for the black human figures beneath the wavy line, they were ancestral spirits in the underworld, Boyd was convinced.
“It’s like a puzzle,” Boyd explains. “You find one piece, then another, and pretty soon all these pieces that didn’t make any sense are falling into place.”
One morning later that spring, Boyd rolled up her pants and waded across the Devils River to Cedar Springs, a horseshoe-shaped site a few miles north of Mystic Shelter (see photo above). Cedar Springs had a cascade of human figures holding spear-throwers and long staffs adorned with feathers. As Boyd scrutinized the paintings, three images, one beside the other, caught her eye. First was a human figure with antlers tipped with peculiar black dots. Nearby was a cluster of fringed black dots with spears sticking out of them. Alongside those were tiny deer figures, also impaled with spears. Her mind raced—she had seen the same group of images at White Shaman.
Again Boyd dove into the ethnographic texts. This time her first clue came from a photograph of a yarn painting by a modern Huichol artist. It depicted a deer with dots on its body and attached to its antlers, just like the curious black-tipped antlers she had seen in the rock art.
The Huichol people are almost unique in the Americas. Protected by the fortresslike Sierra Madre mountains, the group had escaped notice by Europeans when they arrived in the 16th century. Huichol culture remained virtually unchanged, providing a rare 21st-century window into pre-Columbian times.
In the literature, Boyd read of a peculiar Huichol pilgrimage during the rainy season to Wirikuta, a desert plateau they considered their sacred homeland in the northeast. There they collected peyote, a hallucinogenic cactus that helps them contact ancestral spirits in the otherworld.
Boyd was intrigued by the way the Huichol gathered peyote. They stayed low and moved across the plateau holding bows and arrows. It was the same way they hunted deer. To the Huichol, deer and peyote were a single sacred symbol. When one of the pilgrims found a peyote cactus peeking above­ground in the desert, he pulled his bowstring taut and shot an arrow through its center. He was “slaying” the peyote, but he was also slaying a deer. Boyd recalled the speared dots and deer in the ancient paintings. She wondered: Could she find a connection to peyote there as well?
For most of the year, peyote stays hidden below ground; only when it rains does it become visible on the surface. Deer follow the same pattern. During drought in arid environments, deer are absent, but as soon as it rains, they travel great distances to eat sprouting vegetation. Deer, peyote, and rain: The three are all linked.
In an old excavation report Boyd read that archaeologists had discovered remnants of peyote cacti from a site near White Shaman. The peyote, which had been flattened into button shapes and mixed with other plant materials, dated to about a thousand years before the paintings. The molded buttons were proof that the ancient inhabitants of the Lower Pecos had used peyote in rituals.
When Boyd returned to White Shaman, she studied a human figure with deer antlers tipped with black dots. Surrounding him were fringed dots and deer, both with spears sticking out of them.
What had once seemed like an incoherent scramble now appeared obvious. The fringed dots on the wall were buttons of peyote stuck with spears, much like the Huichol peyote hunt in Wirikuta. The deer figure with dotted antlers corresponded to the deer with peyote on his antlers in the modern Huichol yarn paintings. The deeper Boyd delved, the more the mural seemed like a kind of handbook, “a 4,000-year-old instruction 
manual for how to properly conduct a religious ritual.”

The Story of Creation
It wasn’t until 2007, when Boyd was studying the Huichol myth of creation, that it all made total sense. In the beginning, the story goes, the first humans ventured through the watery underworld in the West. Led by a sacred deer, they lit their way with torches, heading east until they emerged at Dawn Mountain. There the deer sacrificed himself, allowing the humans to kill him. After he died, peyote sprouted from his body and the tips of his antlers. When the humans ate the deer they were transformed into deities, and the cosmos began.
The next time Boyd examined the mural at White Shaman (see close-up at right), she took a deep breath. Every detail seemed to match. The five human figures were the original humans, making the journey eastward. Painted above each was a different otherworldly figure, including the White Shaman. These represented the deities into which the 
humans transformed.
Below the human figure farthest right was a large, horizontal band of faded black-and-red lines. Knowing that the Huichol associated black and red with the underworld, Boyd believed this pictograph represented the watery underworld in the West, from which the first humans emerged. Next to the underworld was an isolated red deer; this had to be the sacred deer that led the humans on the journey east. (Note: The red deer on the opposite page may seem to be facing west, but the ancient rock artists always depicted west on the right of a pictogram.)
On the mural’s left-hand side, meanwhile, she found a wavy brown line shaped like an arch. This was Dawn Mountain, the final destination and the place where the sun rose for the first time. Hovering above the mountain were the symbols of peyote-deer: fringed dots and a deer stuck with a spear. Directly on top of the mountain was an antler-headed human. This was the sacred deer ascending from the underworld. The black dots on his antlers represented the just-sprouted peyote.
Boyd was reading a story that hadn’t been read for thousands of years. “I was looking at an account of the formation of the cosmos,” she says, “with multiple levels of meaning. It is a creation story, a prescription for ritual, in a sense, a cosmological map.”
Boyd believes the paintings “can be read like a language, with patterns that can be broken down and understood.” But her interpretation has been controversial. Retired University of Texas archaeologist Solveig Turpin, who began researching in the Lower Pecos in the 1970s, believes connecting 4,000-year-old paintings to a contemporary tribe is unwarranted. “You’re reaching across thousands of years and hundreds of miles,” she says. “It just doesn’t hold up.”
Anthropologist Stacy Schaefer of California State University at Chico thinks Boyd’s links make sense. “On a basic level, hunting and gathering people all had similar relationships to the environment. So there are archetypes that we should expect to see in the paintings,” she says.
Boyd herself takes great care to qualify her theory. She says it wasn’t actually the Huichol who made the 4,000-year-old paintings—it was their distant ancestors or relations. The Huichol rituals appear so prominently only because their culture is the best preserved in the region. But the Huichol are just one tribe among many with mythology linked to the paintings in the canyons of the Lower Pecos. Boyd has found similar connections in the mythology of the Hopi, the Zapotec, and other tribes throughout Mexico and the American Southwest. The rock art, Boyd says, displays an archaic core: an ancient belief system that has been widely shared in Mesoamerican mythological traditions.
In July 2010 Boyd invited a Huichol shaman from the Sierra Madre to White Shaman. In his sixties, bright-eyed with a square jaw, the shaman wore traditional dress: a wide-brimmed hat, a brightly colored woven shoulder bag, flowing white pants, and a shirt embroidered with small deer figures and colorful peyote symbols. For some minutes he studied the mural. He pointed to the watery, black-and-red underworld in the West, to the antler-headed human, to the humans marching across the rock face, then to the deities rising above each of the humans.
Then the shaman started weeping. “These are my grandfathers’ grandfathers’ grandfathers’ grandfathers,” he said through his tears.

Will Hunt is a writer in New York.