Painters in Prehistory Archaeology and Art of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands

Painters in Prehistory is a revised update of the book Ancient Texans: Rock Art and Lifeways along the Lower Pecos, edited by Harry Shafer with photographs by Jim Zintgraff, and published by the Witte Museum, in conjunction with a permanent exhibition in 1986. The Witte Museum is known for its focus on natural history, science, and the history and culture of South Texas, and the scholarly and artistic pieces collected in the book are the result of years of research and dedication to the story of the ancient canyon dwellers along the Rio Grande.

The remnants of prehistoric Lower Pecos people reveal lifeways unlike those anywhere else in the world. The people who inhabited the land in what is now Texas left a unique series of narratives in their shelters, including art on rock walls, pictographs, and organic residue and trash. These narratives are tantalizing in their novelty—they provide information about almost 12,000 years of existence, the last 7,000 of which are still astoundingly evident.

This updated edition features significant research by new scholars who have deepened the understanding of rock art interpretation, scientific analysis of artifacts and coprolites, and the lifeways of prehistoric Lower Pecos people.

Harry Shafer is professor emeritus at Texas A&M University. He joined the faculty as the anthropology department’s first archaeologist in 1972. He has forty years of research expertise in Texas prehistory, North American archaeology, Southwestern archaeology, Maya archaeology, and prehistoric stone technology. He is the editor of Ancient Texans: Rock Art and Lifeways along the Lower Pecos (Witte Museum, 1986), the coeditor of Field Methods of Archaeology (Left Coast Press, seventh edition, 2008), and the author of Mimbres Archaeology at the Nan Ranch (University of New Mexico Press, 2009).