Cave Art Illumines Story of Long-Lost World : Archeology: Drawings in Texas and northern Mexico were created 3,000 to 4,000 years ago, scholars say. Rock Art Foundation is working to find and preserve them.

Shallow caves in the river canyons of southwest Texas and northern Mexico harbor ancient paintings that tell the spiritual story of a long-lost world.

Indigenous people, not known by any formal name, created the animal and human figures 3,000 to 4,000 years ago.

Archeologists aren’t sure what happened to the artists, but their pictographs have endured.

Now the cave paintings are gaining wider appreciation as the public discovers them and the Rock Art Foundation works to identify and preserve them while exploring the world of the ancient artists.

“The paintings are the one real key to their existence,” said Jim Zintgraff, a professional photographer who became captivated by the cave art in the 1950s and has been documenting it ever since.

The art can be found on private ranches in Val Verde County. It is most accessible to the public at Seminole Canyon State Historical Park off U.S. Highway 90, about 40 miles west of Del Rio.

“The thoughts behind these paintings died with the people,” park guide John Freeman told a mesmerized group of visitors who hiked into the depths of Seminole Canyon one hot summer morning to view the art.

Archeologist Solveig Turpin of the University of Texas at Austin has spent much of her career searching out and studying the rock art.

“After a while it gets you and it just starts telling you what it is,” Turpin said. “I think it is probably one of the most exciting things for an archeologist--to be able to look at the workings of people’s minds.”

The illustrations are of animals and humans with animal features, representing the perilous out-of-body voyages of a shaman, or spiritual leader, Turpin said.

The art indicates the painters had a unified “belief system” long before the days of Christ, she said.

“To me, it ranks as one of the oldest religious systems in the New World,” she said.

The art itself may have been part of a communal religious ceremony, Turpin said, noting the height of some of the cave pictographs, which may have required assistance for the artist.

The pictures are done in black, white, red and orange paint created from minerals that are believed to have been heated and ground, then mixed with some type of binder, possibly animal fat.

The sites are located primarily in the part of Val Verde County where the Pecos River meets the Rio Grande. There are approximately 250 known sites, many of which contain three, four or five works of art. A number of rock art sites were covered by water when nearby Lake Amistad was created.

Now Turpin is expanding her work into Mexico, where far fewer sites have been discovered but where many are suspected to exist.

Later art works by native people also have been found in the river region, but the rock drawings of shamanistic rituals have become known to researchers as the “Pecos” style.

Ancestors of the rock artists are believed to have lived in the area as long as 12,000 years ago after migrating to the continent across the Bering land bridge in Alaska. Those early inhabitants lived at a time when mammoth and bison roamed the region.

A climatic change around 7,000 or 8,000 years ago turned the area into a more arid land--much like it is today--more suited for a hunting and gathering lifestyle.

Researchers have dated the rock art at 3,000 to 4,000 years old. Turpin believes the painting lasted less than a thousand years.

Exactly what became of the artists isn’t known. Some speculate that they simply vanished, dying from disease or other natural causes.

Though that makes for a more mysterious story, Turpin theorizes the rock artists intermingled with other people who moved in from the north or that they migrated elsewhere.

“Native people rarely disappear,” she said.

These days, Turpin, Zintgraff and other primitive art enthusiasts are pushing to educate others.

In 1992, they formed the San Antonio-based Rock Art Foundation, which has about 300 members.

Property donated to the foundation in 1993 contains a well-preserved pictograph of a white shaman, accessible to public visitors who are escorted onto the property by foundation members.

The group recently commissioned and unveiled a 16-foot-tall sculpture at Seminole Canyon State Historical Park by artist Bill Worrell to honor the area rock art.

A big concern of the foundation is vandalism, a decades-old problem that has damaged rock art across the Southwest. The International Rock Art Congress, at its recent annual meeting in Arizona, spent half a day discussing vandalism.

Zintgraff and Turpin say education is one of the best ways to combat it.

“If they understand this isn’t graffiti . . . but is as much a work of art as a church altar or the Sistine Chapel in its own sort of way, then people aren’t as likely to deface it if they know what it is,” Turpin said.

Zintgraff also advocates safeguarding the art with tougher anti-vandalism laws.

“It is a treasure,” he said, “and it should be protected.”