Join Renew Donate
ARARA presents...
Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center works to preserve and study rock art in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands. Shumla uses technological advances to document each painted narrative as a whole and each figure and line within it individually, creating an exhaustive searchable database that can be used by researchers. In this presentation, I will share the results of the Hearthstone Project, a collaboration between Texas State University and Shumla, which was partially funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Shumla used data previously collected and conducted a new comprehensive study of Pecos River style (PRS) pictographs using high-resolution photography, digital microscopy, stratigraphic analysis, stratigraphic diagrams, and digital renderings. We have analyzed more than 850 locations of intersecting paint across 10 PRS murals. Results show that murals are narratives created by ancient groups of hunter-gatherers to illustrate their cosmology. Paintings in the murals contain interwoven figures and follow an order in the application of the colors that we can diagram with the Harris Matrix to understand the original sequence used by the ancient artists. There is a strict method to apply the paint which was in production for at least 3,500 years between 5500 and 2000 cal B.P.
Dr. Diana Radillo Rolón is the Senior Preservation Archaeologist at Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center. As a researcher and logistics manager, Diana is responsible for the archaeology research team and leads fieldwork to document rock art in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands. Before joining the staff at Shumla, Dr. Rolón was Professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and at the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH). She has over 15 years of experience as an archaeologist specializing in ancient Mesoamerica and rock art research in northern Mexico.
Diana received her Ph.D. in Archaeology from the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH) in Mexico City. Under the mentorship of Dr. Stanislaw Iwaniszewski, Diana learned about interpretative theories to study symbolic systems, myths, and religion. She also finished her Postdoctoral research in the Anthropology Department at Texas State University, in San Marcos, Texas. Under the mentorship of Carolyn Boyd, Diana made a comparative analysis between Pecos River style rock art and Mesoamerican iconography, particularly felines, their attributes, and symbolisms.
ARARA is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Top
