4,000 Years of Shared Cosmology: Pecos River Murals Reveal an Enduring Visual Language

Archaeologists working in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands — a cross-border region of southwestern Texas and northern Mexico — report that painted rock art at 12 sites preserves a remarkably consistent pictorial language spanning roughly 4,000 years. By combining two independent dating techniques, the team reconstructed a chronology that suggests the same artistic rules and symbols were transmitted across an estimated 175 generations of hunter-gatherer communities.

Dating the paintings

The researchers used 57 direct radiocarbon measurements of organic carbon in paint binders together with 25 oxalate dates from mineral crusts above and below paint layers to build a chronological model. Radiocarbon dating targeted organic binders commonly used by Indigenous painters — for example, fats from deer bone marrow — while oxalate dating provided independent constraints by dating mineral accretions that formed before or after painting events. The two methods reinforced one another and indicate that stylistic continuity persisted for millennia.

The Pecos River style and its implications

Many of the murals fall under a distinctive grouping known as the Pecos River style (PRS). The authors report that eight of the 12 murals, created at different times, follow the same compositional guidelines — including a characteristic sequence in color application — and share a stable iconographic vocabulary. The team argues these patterns point to a coherent cosmovision (a cultural conception of the universe) that was preserved and transmitted through visual conventions.

"We propose that Pecos River style paintings faithfully transmitted a sophisticated metaphysics that later informed the beliefs and symbolic expression of Mesoamerican agriculturalists," the authors write.

Interpreting ancient imagery

Rock art — both painted pictographs and pecked petroglyphs — is found on every continent except Antarctica and has long been used to study past belief systems. Scholars have suggested that certain motifs encode cosmological ideas or events, such as eclipses or supernovae, but decoding prehistoric symbolism is inherently interpretive and rarely yields a single definitive meaning.

Nonetheless, the chronological evidence presented in this study strengthens the case that the PRS murals functioned as a long-lived visual language, carrying important metaphysical ideas and cultural knowledge across communities and centuries. The findings illustrate how modern dating methods can reveal the persistence of symbolic systems in prehistoric North America and fuel broader discussions about cultural continuities across the Americas.

Publication note: The study was published in the journal Science on Nov. 26.