Canyons of Memory: How a Four-Millennia Painting Tradition Rewrote the Deep History of North American Thought

The Long View from a Limestone Wall

In the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and northern Mexico, the desert wind works slowly. It lifts dust across Cretaceous limestone, rifles through sotol thickets, and curls along the canyon walls where generations of hunter-gatherers once left astonishing murals. These Pecos River style paintings tower several meters high, packed with human-like figures, serpents, deer, and symbols so dense they seem to flicker between worlds.

Direct pictograph dates and modeled age estimates. (C) PRS pictographs from 41VV 1230. Credit: Steelman et al., Sci. Adv. 11, eadx7205

For decades, archaeologists struggled to anchor these murals in time. Their pigments were mineral, not organic; their creators left no inscriptions; their chronology was guesswork, stitched from stylistic comparisons and the rare datable artifact buried nearby.

The new study¹ by Karen Steelman, Carolyn Boyd, and Phil Dering has changed that. Their team coaxed carbon from paint layers so thin they resemble dust motes. Then, with plasma oxidation and Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, they built the most robust timeline yet for any rock art province in the Americas. The dates they recovered stretch back nearly six thousand years and run forward for four millennia.

Elaborate red and black painting of a human-like figure holding a black spear thrower with dart in one hand and red darts and staff in the other hand. For scale, the human-like figure is 73 cm tall. Credit: Courtesy of Shumla Archaeological Research & Education Center.

This is not simply a revision of age. It is a revision of intellectual history.

“The murals form a throughline across time, linking dozens of generations who treated this landscape as a constant teacher,” says Dr. Elena Rossi, a paleoanthropologist at Cambridge University. “It signals a form of cultural endurance that is exceptionally rare among foraging societies.”