Production of spirits of the Canyon has been made possible in part by the Joy Tache Gallery of Scottsdale, Arizona.

The joy Tache Gallery is a source of international, national and southwestern art and sculpture, and by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Southern Education, Communications Association.

10,000 years ago, in the lower Pecos region of Texas and Coahuila, Mexico.

A prehistoric people left their mark on this land.

Hello, I'm Amado Pena.

For most of my life, I painted pictures derived from historic southwestern cultures.

In this country.

In the process, I've drawn on images and motifs used by painters who painted before me.

Some hundreds, even thousands of years earlier in shelter overhangs like this.

They continue that history by painting on walls with charcoal, ocher and manganese oxide.

They molded crayons from dried pigment.

They applied colors with brushes made from shredded soto leaves.

They used binders of animal fat, blood and urine.

This fading images are often powerful, sometimes humorous.

A blend of history and ritual of the events in a lifetime.

They are a window through which we now reach to touch the past.

It is a harsh landscape that lines the banks of the Rio Grande, where the US and Mexico brush went against the other.

A desolate land broken by coursing rivers and slashes of deep canyon.

A mysterious land where ancient people left their signatures on limestone walls.

Archeologists call them the old people.

These people who claim the lower canyons on the banks of the Rio Grande, the Pecos and the Devil's Rivers, the that is.

That is nice.

When preservation is excellent, isn't it?

Oh.

The paintings are left behind.

Offer a tenuous bridge between the past and present.

It is one of the most extensive rock art galleries on the North American continent.

And affords us a glimpse into a world of both beauty and simplicity.

Well, you wake up to a very familiar world.

It's a world that you've seen all your life, and you've never seen beyond it.

Like everybody else, your basic needs of food, clothing and shelter need to be met.

And they were met with the very resources right here.

There was no trade.

There was no border for any of that.

Those needs, there were taken care of off the landscape.

And I think the one thing that the people had was a, an incredible familiarity with the land that was their comfort.

That was their security.

Archeology cannot give you a day.

It can give you 100 years.

Maybe, or a thousand years.

The specificities of their everyday life is something we can only borrow from the ethnographic studies of other hunters and gatherers, and on this earth today, there are no hunters and gatherers that were as well off as those people are.

The people that, you know, we always use the Bushmen and we always use the Australian Aborigines as examples.

But those are people that are in impoverished environments who are socially decimated.

Their refugees and displaced persons.

And we try and use those to recreate lower life.

I think it's we're probably putting them on the short side that their life was much better or more elaborate or more cohesive.

I think socially than these disrupted, disruptive people that we see today.

They were hunter gatherers whose ancestors followed the mammoth and bison across the Bering land bridge from Asia to the New World.

They entered the lower Pecos Canyonlands around 9000 BC.

The glacial ice masses were melting and the climate in the Northern hemisphere was undergoing dramatic change, bringing with it a new landscape and fauna that would replace the native camels, horses, giant beavers and mastodons.

What was happening in the deserts of northern Mexico in southwest Texas was that there was a desiccation that country was drying up desert vegetation began to spread and these early people began to settle into those deserts and learn to use the desert resources they lived in a land of relative abundance.

They had desert succulents and fish and deer and game and all the chert they needed for their stone tool manufacture.

And they had houses provided to them by rock shelters.

So it was really more of a lush environment for them.

They are are your life 50 years of archeological research tells of a people who lived in bands of 8 or 10, traveling seasonally within a 300 mile radius.

By.

They may have come together from time to time in larger social groups, either to wage war or to celebrate a events rites of passage, puberty ceremonies.

Much as the Australian Aborigines did, or much as the hunters and gatherers in Africa did.

South America do they are they are.

This hunter gatherers lived within an area located today near the Southwest Texas town of Del Rio, on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert.

They cultivated no crops, but used every natural resource available to them.

They knew the movement of game and the fruit cycles of plants, archeological work out here has uncovered remains of the diet in terms of preserved fecal material.

An analysis of this fecal material has given us an incredibly accurate, detailed profile of the diet.

To begin with.

There basic plant foods that we find over and over again include prickly pear, the so tall and the lechuguilla, which is a diminutive form of agave that grows in this area.

These were staple foods.

This is a lechuguilla bulb.

This is really interesting in that it shows you what you see in archeological sites that you forms a large bulb and it grows in the ground and all the leaves pull off like artichokes, and that the Indians used to cook these bulbs.

They take a sharp flake.

They'd cut them off like so.

And then they'd eat these, much like you would in artichoke.

They also use these things to make the frames for their sandals that they would bend.

These off and, and make frames like so out of them.

There'd be a whole layer of just fiber in that layer of fiber.

You'd find these things that we kept many of the artifacts, the old people left behind were collected by San Antonio's witty Museum.

Amazingly, how they twisted that twine out of that fiber is not exactly an easy fiber to handle.

Each.

They chewed it the early expeditions into the dry rock shelters of the Trans-Pecos yielded a treasure of over 15,000 pieces, and burn corner.

This is a complete mat, practically matting and bone sandals chewed lechuguilla and painted pebbles.

The remains of a culture, the earliest explorers sent out by the Wheaty were young adventurers.

The time was a middle of the 1930s.

Well, it's depression year.

There was no jobs, no work.

You know, you needed something to do.

Neither one of us was an archeologist, but we never got faulted for our work.

The basic thing we saved that stuff from the vandals that were beginning to scoop it all up scientifically.

We were vandals scientifically.

When I think now what you save, you know, every leaf your concretions, your seeds, you saved everything.

All we were looking for baskets painted stones and burials.

You know.

But but as I say, at least we saved it.

And we have it.

Most of the artifacts hardened black and Jack Davenport uncovered, were an eagle nest cave near Judge Roy Bean's town of Langtry.

Work in the trenches.

Started a daybreak.

We'd start right in the middle from the front and go to the back.

We had a trench.

I was about six feet.

Eight feet wide and trying to keep some idea of where the material was coming from.

We went back in layers.

We'd go back and dig down until we could see a change in the strata.

About four feet, and we'd carefully take everything out of that.

And catalog it.

Then we'd take the next layer, black and Davenport explored the cave vertically.

Later, during the 80s, archeologists would work caves like eagle nests horizontally to learn how the space was used by the people who lived there.

We have found through our excavations that they did divide the space up within the cave.

We found a bedding area literally, literally human nests, where a big basin was scooped out in the earth.

Then it was carefully lined with sticks, and then the sticks were carefully covered over with twisted bundles of grass to make a nice bed.

We found tucked under the edge of the bed, a little fish skeleton, you know, like it was somebody a bedtime snack or something of that sort.

And we found other parts of the cave that were used as latrines.

This area of the cave used as a cooking area.

And we found areas of the cave that were work areas.

This is prehistoric workbench.

You can see the shine that's built up here on the rocks.

And this is from when the Indians would have processed either hides or some sort of plants to make clothing or some sort of thing, like that.

The prehistoric cultures used to take advantage of these natural areas, and we find them throughout the lower Pecos.

Something like this is where perhaps the women would have ground different types of seed.

Certainly it wouldn't have been corn, but it would have been some type of seed.

Much of the work in the lower Pecos has focused on implements and tools on the layered debris left by thousands of years of living, yet the treasures of this prehistoric Indian culture extend beyond the fine ash that swirls above the trenches to include the haunting narratives and faded images that lined the canyon walls.

I think you're looking at the pantheon of their religion.

You know, most Native American Indians, they their religion was what's known as animism.

They believed that the world was animated with spirits that every species of tree, every species of plant and animal had a helper, a supernatural being that was in charge of its continued existence.

But I think what you're looking at are different.

Spirit helpers on the wall.

We do not Locke in the meaning of these symbols.

The symbol world, the spirit world of these people are extinct as they are, and there's no way of ever recouping that.

The one mistake that we often make, and we all make it, is to try to interpret this art from our own world.

And we can't do it.

We don't have the Rosetta Stone that tells us what these symbols stand for.

I think they reflect what the people of that era in that date thought who they were, what they did, how they handled their their everyday life.

That's what's on the wall, their day to day life, their religion, their their hopes, their dreams, their what they expected generations to come or what they expected the next day.

Although the caves were occupied, over 9000 years, the earliest remaining pictographs date back to just under 5000 years.

They are the distinctive Pecos River style.

Painted on these walls, a millennium before the Great Pyramids of Egypt were built.

Oh!

They are.

It is impossible to know what these paintings meant to the people who painted them.

Yet scholars suggest they commemorate some basic values and rituals that helped to codify the society, perhaps to ensure the success of the hunt or the continuation of the community.

Let's say, for example, that this art or some of this art was produced during the course of a male initiation ceremony.

Let's say a circumcision ceremony where the young initiates were undergoing a great deal of anxiety, fear in context with those particular ritual.

And this art was painted during the course of that instruction.

There instruction are, let's say, to conclude the ceremony, I can guarantee you in the minds of those initiates, they would never, ever forget this site.

The art are the stories that were told in conjunction with it.

Are.

As an artist, I see an incredible amount of skill, an incredible amount of skill from the standpoint of their choices to use the color in the right place, their choices to overlap figures, their ability to do work with line and space.

So I have a feeling that they did have some sort of understanding.

It's just a very powerful place to be from.

From the standpoint of I've had the opportunity to be in other very sort of special sacred places.

And I think this is a little bit overwhelming.

I have no doubt in my mind that the Pecos River style is one of the great religious art styles of the world, and that isn't giving them credit for any kind of organized religion at all.

But all the people that came into North America, presumably from Siberia or from the Old World, carried with them a religion that we call shamanism or you can call it magic.

And the practitioner is the shaman or the medicine man.

He is the one that is depicted in the Pecos River style.

The most.

The central figure to us in this particular panel is the white anthropomorph, which some people refer to as the white shaman.

Why white.

White is unusual.

Granted, but again, we don't know what the color symbolize in primitive worldviews.

And primitive art colors are very, very important.

And colors stand sometimes for different directions.

East, north, south, west.

They may mean something else, and it may just be that white stands out.

There explanatory science was probably myth and legend and story.

How did the world begin and where did we come from?

As people?

And what's our place in the great scheme of things?

And, and I think that's a lot what the Pecos River style was.

Myth and legend did explain much of their world.

Yet surely there were natural phenomena.

The old people could not explain the weather.

Comets in the sky, events that must have frightened them.

There was also incredible beauty.

The splash of a bullfrog sending waves of light dancing across the limestone walls, the magic of illusion again and again.

The illusion, the magic and the reality would be translated into painted images, ones that are slightly faded but still rather prominent.

Here, these red ones.

These are the what are known as red monochrome.

They date to sometime after about 500 A.D. One of the things that's unique about the red monochrome is they're much more realistic.

A key element to dating these is this motif here that has a depiction of a bow and arrow.

Bow or arrowheads in the lower Pecos date to sometime after about 8500.

So we know that this had to have happened sometime after that.

The need to communicate with the supernatural or the other through pictographs was something that lasted for a long time.

We know that there's very difficult, very different styles that occurred.

There's you can see how much different this is.

The red monochrome versus the lower Pecos.

So this gives you more of a time depth.

This is much more recent.

This is within the last thousand years.

There is clearly a chronicle painted in these shelters a record spanning thousands of years in the lives of these ancient peoples, from the majestic paintings of the Pecos River style to the less prevalent tiny red linear motifs that depict stories of armed conflict and communal hunting to the late prehistoric red monochrome art.

Finally, to historic art like this in the Arroyo de Los Indios and in vaquero shelter.

Here, pictographs seemed to tell stories of real events, as Spanish explorers moved across the continent.

I always see Vaquero as the Indian from the south, the Indian coming from somewhere in Mexico, Monterrey, Monclova, and coming north and saying, you won't believe what I saw down there in Mexico.

And he and he draws this picture for his friends or colleagues or people that he's met.

And he signs it with his handprint, which is his signature.

And they probably stood around and went, no way.

It is possible in time, archeologists will detect a pattern that will help unravel the meaning of the lower Pecos art.

But time may not be on their side.

The raging rivers have been dammed and harnessed and archeological sites flooded.

The landscape has continued to change.

The waist height grasses of the 1800s have been grazed away and tourists have discovered the lower Pecos.

The rock art, as we see so vividly displayed in some of the cave walls, is being affected by the way we use the land.

It's affected by the, I'm sure, by the rise in moisture from the lake.

It's certainly affected by a visitation.

It's affected by people who vandalize it, and it's affected by just the natural processes themselves, which have been going on for thousands of years.

The elements do play a key factor in it, of course.

Now the human element is the most unpredictable one.

We can pretty well predict what the effects of nature will have, but man is a whole different beast.

He he does things for no apparent reason.

Round holes like this quite often are the product of vandalism, and people digging for arrowheads.

The archeological sites in this area are beautifully preserved.

Records really archival records back in the last 9000 years have just been ravaged by collectors.

To the extent that they're virtually none left intact today.

This is a, you know, a pretty scientific pre-literate sort of society.

And they did what they felt was the way the universe worked.

Obviously, they were successful.

Did it very well.

They lived here for 7000 years without changing, hardly at all.

So it worked.

We've only been here 150 years, and we've almost managed to destroy it all.

So because it certainly didn't look like this 150 years ago, you look at the figure just to the left of the light gray area here, probably a man like figure or a shaman figure.

Tourists continue to flock to the Pecos.

Photographers and painters and scholars in search of a photograph of the album.

A piece of history, an explanation, the secrets of the old people.

Long idled in the dust.

I'm in the pursuit of an explanation.

My goal is to try to understand the function, the cultural milieu that produced the art.

And I'm getting closer and closer to doing that.

But it's also the thrill of discovery.

There's no feeling quite like coming around the corner in the bottom of a canyon.

There.

You've been crawling over boulders and through thorns and thickets, and you come around the corner and you see it.

It is in these canyon bottoms and these rivers.

One begins to experience the magic of the lower Pecos.

Be out there on the river someday when you have a huge thunderstorm.

Be out there when it's 32 degrees.

Be out there when it's 110 degrees.

Be out there when the sky is clear and blue.

Be out there when the sun sets and the sky turns.

Every color of the rainbow.

And what ordinarily looks to be a very ugly, very vicious or very tough part of the world becomes very beautiful and very exciting and very challenging.

It is a legacy of art, a legacy of the land, a legacy from a people who flourished for 10,000 years.

And then they were gone.

Production of spirits of the Canyon has been made possible in part by the Joy Tache Gallery of Scottsdale, Arizona.

The Joy Tache Gallery is a source of international, national and southwestern art and sculpture, and by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Southern Education, Communications Association.

This is PBS.