Stylistic and Compositional Analysis of the Red Beene Shelter (41VV0951) Pecos River Style Rock Art

Abstract

While Pecos River style (PRS) rock art remains one of the most-studied rock art styles of the Lower Pecos, extant scholarship seldom considers the insights granted from an analytical art history perspective. With radiocarbon data suggesting a genesis of production in the Middle-to-Late Archaic, PRS spans an immense temporal range of three millennia with marked stylistic coherence. A stylistic analysis of the PRS pictographs of the Red Beene Shelter (41VV0951) reveals the morphology of formal artistic elements and the compositional complexity of the site’s panel. The study of line, color, location, spacing, depth, rhythm, and incorporation suggests the aesthetic and functional usage of artistic elements to both depict and animate complex cosmological narratives via intricate stylistic schemas that codify iconographic motifs of supramundane figures.