Speech-Breath: Mapping the Multisensory Experience in Pecos River Style Pictography

Abstract

Archaic period hunter-gatherers of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and Coahuila, Mexico, created complex rock art murals containing elaborately painted anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures. These figures are frequently portrayed with dots or lines emanating out of or into their open mouths. In this article, we discuss patterns in shape, color, and arrangement of this pictographic element and propose that artists used this graphic device to denote speech, breath, and the soul. They communicated meaning through the image-making process, alternating brushstroke direction to indicate inhalation versus exhalation or using different paint application techniques to reflect measured versus forceful speech. The choices made by artists in the production of the imagery reflect their cosmology and the framework of ideas and beliefs through which they interpreted and interacted with the world. Bridging the iconographic data with ethnohistoric and ethnographic texts from Mesoamerica, we suggest that speech and breath expressed in the rock art of the Lower Pecos was tied to concepts of the soul, creation, and human origins.

Dances with Zigzags in Toro Muerto, Peru: Geometric Petroglyphs as (Possible) Embodiments of Songs

“…An exception to this is the study of San rock paintings in the Western Cape in South Africa, in which Parkington and Paterson (2017) argue that undulations and zigzags associated with elephants may depict sounds produced by these animals. Interesting conclusions have also recently been reached by Boyd and Busby (2022), according to whom dots or lines emerging from or entering into the open mouths of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures in Lower Pecos River rock paintings denote speech and breath. Significantly, Boyd and Busby (2022, 29-30) make references to different examples of Mesoamerican iconography (Maya, Mixtec and Nahua codices) where such dots or lines (also spiral-shaped) possibly depict songs in visual form.…”