The House of Dawn: Visualizing Sacralized Spaces of Ritual & Emergence Through Rock Art from Paint Rock, Texas

Abstract

This thesis presents an investigation of the art style techniques used in four Red Monochrome Style rock art panels found at Paint Rock, Texas. The aim is to further understand how design concepts in rock art show art intentionality to transmute ancient messages of myths and orations that invoke ritual practices into iconography. This research builds on the innovative methods developed by Boyd and Busby (2021), Boyd and Cox (2016) and Boyd et al. (2023) for examining design concepts and art techniques used during the creation of ancient rock art panels. Using the same method, I examine the panels for Blood Moon, the Ball Player and Emergence and Corn panels to identify symbols that stand as direct embodiments of visual culture through paint application techniques that contain function and meaning. Then, through reviews of ethnographic records, I connect the meaning of symbols and motifs to records of Pueblo stories and orations, and Mesoamerican myths. The findings suggest that Blood Moon and the Ball Player highlighted particular attention to characters of a story, adopting art concepts and storylines from Mesoamerican deities that were transformed into Pueblo art. In contrast, the Emergence and Corn panels emphasize importance to the actions being performed to establish a new “Flower Mountain” through the invocation of Puebloan rituals and orations. The recurring solar alignments and themes of emergence and transcendence that appear throughout the panels consecrate Paint Rock as a “House of Dawn” where Pueblo and Mesoamerican cultures of the Southwest coalesced.