At Paint Rock, Centuries of Native American Artistry

Paint Rock, an ancient ceremonial site in Central Texas, is a sort of outdoor gallery of rock art that documents hundreds or even thousands of years of Native American heritage. Spread out over half a mile on a bluff 70 feet above the Concho River, Paint Rock derives its name from the pictographs on the layers of limestone shelves. Using massive flat-faced boulders as canvases, nomadic tribes painted and etched more than 1,500 individual images — tomahawks, winged serpents, a Spanish mission, a turtle drawn so that, on the winter solstice, a dagger of light strikes its back at solar noon, the moment when the sun sits highest in the sky.

In March, scores of people from the region — mostly Coahuiltecan, Comanche and Lipan Apache — joined dozens of researchers for a four-day excavation at Paint Rock. Mary Motah Weahkee, a member of the Comanche Nation and Santa Clara Pueblo tribes and a retired archaeologist for the State of New Mexico, attended the gathering to “inspire Comanche youth and elders to visit our history by praying, singing and sleeping at the site,” she said. She also performed in a rain-dance ritual. “I made it flood in a town 20 minutes away,” she said.

Scholars suggest that Native groups occupied the bluffs in two broad periods, one during the Late Archaic, from roughly 600 B.C. to 200 A.D., and again in the Late Prehistoric, from 800 A.D. to 1700 A.D. As many as 300 different tribes camped at Paint Rock, some as recently as 1865, when advancing settlers drove the last Comanches from the area.

In 1856, Robert E. Lee and his troops bivouacked at Paint Rock’s western springs. “A previous archaeological investigation in the 1990s found fragments of a certain type of dinnerware that Lee was known to bring with him on his travels,” said Eric Schroeder, editor of the Bulletin of the Texas Archeological Society. Although no pictographs relate to Lee’s visit, some well-known cavalry soldiers and land surveyors left their autographs on the cliff face next to and sometimes on top a few of the paintings.

The bluffs were a popular stop for stagecoaches on the Butterfield Overland Mail corridor, which operated in Texas from 1858 to 1861, and later the Goodnight-Loving trail, a route used in cattle drives that played a role in Larry McMurtry’s 1985 novel, “Lonesome Dove.”

The Jumano, a tribe of traders and bison hunters that inhabited the area from about 1300 to 1600, are credited with creating many of the glyphs. The red on their palette was made by mixing fat from bears, bison or beavers with pulverized hematite, an iron ore. Yellow came from geodes or ocher; white was chalk, and black was shale and charcoal. One artist may have brought spatter painting to North America by placing his hands against the porous rock and blowing pigment around the outlines with hollow reeds.

For more than half a century, Kay Campbell, who died in April at age 96, presided over the 2,500-acre sheep ranch on which Paint Rock sits. Her paternal grandfather, D.E. Sims, began acquiring the land in 1877, in part to protect the site from vandals. She said that having pictographs was rather like keeping an elephant in your bathtub: “You feel you just must do something about it,” she told The Abilene Reporter-News in 1962. What she did was open the site to the public and conduct guided tours. Today, her son Bill Campbell keeps the tradition alive.

To bring together richer versions of the frontier tales linked to the pictographs, Jeremy Elliott, an English professor at Abilene Christian University and the organizer of the excavation, encouraged tribal elders to bring their grandchildren. An elder informed the youngsters that a drawing of a grasshopper, a scorching sun and stalks of corn was meant to depict a harvest that had been ruined by insects and a heat wave.

One of the more macabre illustrations depicted a stick man with an arrow through his head, which some tribe members interpreted as a sign of insanity. Equally gruesome was a picture of two scalps, a shield with crossed spears and a hoop-skirted figure lying on the ground. The work is believed to depict the harrowing story of Alice Todd, a teenage schoolgirl who was reportedly abducted in the mid-1860s by a Comanche war party while traveling on horseback in the hills of nearby Mason. According to later accounts, a servant was killed during the raid and Alice’s mortally wounded mother died several days later. The fate of Alice remains a mystery.

Relics recovered during the March dig included pottery and the remnants of household hearths. On the final day of the excavation, one tribe member observed, “We’re taking stuff out of the ground and not giving anything back.” In response, a group of elders held a purification ceremony: Cornmeal and beef jerky were laid at the base of the bluffs, and tobacco was scattered to the four winds. “Basically, we thanked all the ancestors for their patience with us,” Dr. Elliott said.