Pictographs, Fate Bell Shelter, Val Verde
County, Texas. Photograph: Peter Faris, 2004.
In 2004, we had the privilege to tour rock art of Val Verde
County, Texas, with Teresa Weedin and a group from the Colorado Archaeological
Society, guided by James Zintgraff, who had done so much to protect and study
it.
Pictographs, Fate Bell Shelter, Val Verde
County, Texas. Photograph: Peter Faris, 2004.
A large proportion of the rock art in this area is found in
large rock shelters in the limestone bedrock, like Fate Bell Shelter seen here.
This limestone is quite fossiliferous, begging the question, is the rock art
linked to the fossils in any way? Do fossils interest you? They have always fascinated me, and I think that is the normal reaction of most people to the idea of a shell or other part of a formerly living thing now in solid stone. I would bet that the early native American inhabitants of this area felt the same way.
Ammonite fossil, Fate Bell Shelter, Val Verde
County, Texas. Photograph: Peter Faris, 2004.
John Felix has suggested that the shapes in the earliest
rock art were copied from fossils found in nature (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~feliks/impact-of-fossils/index.html).
It is not difficult to imagine a coiled ammonite fossil inspiring the first
spiral petroglyph. This is certainly a possibility, although I cannot imagine
how we can prove it. We do, however, know of instances where fossils are
accompanied by rock art which certainly suggests some link (although the link could just be the rock, but I believe it is more - people are fascinated by fossils). In this part of Texas it does seem to at
least the casual observer that locales with prominent fossils also tend to have
rock art. That is certainly the case with some of the major sites displaying
Pecos River Style rock art. Some of these sites are Fate Bell Shelter, Halo
Shelter, Painted Canyon, and White Shaman.
Watercolor paintings of the pictographs in Fate Bell Shelter.
From W. W. Newcomb, The Rock Art of Texas Indians,
Paintings by Forrest Kirkland, 1967.
In this posting I am going to present Fate Bell Shelter in
Seminole Canyon State Historic Park, Val Verde County, Texas. “The site was first excavated by the
University of Texas between October 20 and November 18, 1932, by a crew of five
men led by James E. Pearce and A. T. Jackson. The 1932 expedition was the only
major excavation of the shelter. A smaller excavation was carried out by Mark
Parsons in 1963 as part of the salvage operations prior to the construction of
Amistad Dam. Various projects since then have documented the Indian rock art
extant in Fate Bell Shelter and in the surrounding area.” (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/bbf01)
“Fate Bell Shelter is
best known for its pictographs, which are among the best documented and best
preserved of the Pecos River Style. This Style, which may date between three
and four thousand years before the present, is generally considered the oldest
of the types found in the Lower Pecos area. This would place the art in the
middle Archaic period. The Pecos River style is a polychrome style that is
considered a manifestation of the shaman cult. The central characters of the
pictographs are faceless anthropomorphic figures, elaborately dressed and often
holding a variety of accessories such as atlatls, darts, and fending sticks.
The figures are often depicted with their arms outstretched, and in later
pictographs the shamans’ arms are increasingly stylized and seem to be more
akin to wings than arms. At one end of the shelter there are also examples of
Red Linear figures – a Late Archaic Period style characterized by very small
stick figures engaged in various activities.” (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/bbf01)
County, Texas. Photograph: Peter Faris, 2004.
The remarkable thing about the fossils in Fate Bell Shelter
is that some of them are displayed prominently in a large, roughly cubical,
block of limestone. This limestone block was placed in the shelter in a
location that suggested it had been moved there from elsewhere (there was no
corresponding void in the ceiling above suggesting to me that it had fallen).
It had many fossils that I believe to be Elimia tenera (in the family
Pleuroceridae) shells showing on its surface, and the upper surface was quite
polished. It looked like it had been oiled and burnished, perhaps by butt
polish or intentional preparation. In his 1933 report on his studies at Fate
Bell, Pearce stated: “On the surface, at
the outer edge of the shelter, is a boulder of limestone that evidently was
used in working down and polishing bone and wood implements. The upper surface
of the stone is 60 by 37 inches. The entire surface is worn exceedingly smooth
and some portions, around the rims of old eroded depressions, are as slick and
shiny as glass. In addition, there are several hundred grooves with sharp,
well-defined edges. The depths of the grooves vary from 1/16 to ½ inch and the
lengths range from ½ to 10 inches. The presence of numerous bone implements in
the midden deposit explains the use of this stone.” (Pearce 1933:37-38) You
can see by this that Pearce believed that the polish was caused by abrasion
from sharpening awls and other artifacts. This struck me as unlikely because
the smoother the boulder became the less effective as a sharpening stone it
would become. I think that the job would have been abandoned long before it
achieved its present state of polish. Remember too that it has sat there for
many centuries, it must have been even more polished originally. More interestingly,
Pearce did not mention the fossils showing on this block. Either he considered
them unimportant, or perhaps he was discussing a different block of stone, but
then why did he not discuss the one we saw? I can only assume that Pearce, as a
traditional archaeologist, had no interest in fossils and did not bother to
mention them in depth. A final point is that limestone is a soft rock and would not have been very effective as a sharpening stone.
To me, it was hard to escape the conclusion that there was
some sort of correspondence or connection between the pictographs and the
fossils at Fate Bell Shelter. Both were prominently placed, both took a lot of
work to put in place and prepare, and both are examples of things that the
people would have found special and meaningful. Also seen at Fate Bell Shelter
was a fossil ammonite in the bedrock. I am certain that a detailed search would
have turned up many more fossils.
In his 1933 report of the excavations of Fate Bell Shelter
Pearce listed two fossils found in burial contexts. However, he did not
identify the type of fossils they were, and careful reading of the inventories
in his burial descriptions only yielded mention of one fossil found. This example
of one (or two) fossils included in grave goods seems to me to reinforce the
significance of fossils and thus, the relationship of those fossils to the rock
art of Fate Bell Shelter.
The 1930s excavation of Fate Bell Shelter also produced
samples of the paint that were used to create the pictographs. I will take this
up in a separate posting at a future date. Additionally, material items found
in the rock shelters in this region often include painted pebbles, and this was
certainly the case at Fate Bell Shelter. I will focus on the painted pebbles in
a future posting as well.
REFERENCE:
Newcomb, W. W., Jr.
1967 The
Rock Art of Texas Indians, Paintings by Forrest Kirkland, University of
Texas Press, Austin and London.
Pearce, J. E.,
and A. T. Jackson,
1933 A Prehistoric Rock Shelter In Val Verde
County, Texas, Anthropological Papers of
the University of Texas, Vol. 1, No. 3, Bureau of Research in the Social
Sciences, Study No. 6, University of Texas, Austin.
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