Shumla Blog

Welcome to the Shumla Blog Page! Here we will share our ongoing research and other Shumla happenings with you, our friends, colleagues, and collaborators around the world. This blog will not only feature our ongoing work as part of the Alexandria Project, but also give insights into some of the broader research questions Shumla is exploring – and much more. Happy reading!

Processing and Organizing the Data

Processing and Organizing the Data

The contrast between field work and lab work is often striking, and our experience in Mexico is no exception. We left the spontaneous and unpredictable fieldwork conducted in the wide-open spaces of the sierras to begin our deliberate and meticulous lab work, stuck in front of a computer for hours on end.

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The Hearthstone/National Endowment for the Humanities Interviews

The Hearthstone/National Endowment for the Humanities Interviews

In 2016, Carolyn Boyd and Kim Cox suggested that Pecos River style (PRS) murals are visual narratives containing evidence of el nucleo duro (the hard nucleus), a widespread Archaic core of beliefs persisting across time and across cultural, linguistic, and geographic boundaries. If this is true, then Indigenous people living today should be able to relate PRS imagery to their cosmology. In 2021, Carolyn was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant through her position at Texas State University to test this hypothesis and Shumla received a subaward as part of this collaborative grant.

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Fate Bell

Fate Bell

Fate Bell is a massive rockshelter in Seminole Canyon State Park and Historical Site. Our field work focused on a famous set of well-preserved images at the southern end of the shelter, commonly called “The Triad”.

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Painted Canyon

Painted Canyon

Painted Canyon houses two spectacular rock art sites, Jackrabbit and Jaguar shelters. The mural in Jaguar shelter is the oldest we have yet radiocarbon dated in the region. It may contain the oldest securely dated pictographs in North America. We are conducting additional research as part of the field work described in this blog to confirm our findings.  

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Our Research Plans

Our Research Plans

Is Pecos River Style mural art a surviving manifestation of core beliefs that formed the basis for later Aztec, Toltec, and Olmec religions? If this is true, then regardless of group affiliation, any person with a working knowledge of the transcendent myths informing the art could read the murals.

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10 Days in Fate Bell Shelter

10 Days in Fate Bell Shelter

By Jerod Roberts and Vicky Roberts
We knew from the beginning of The Alexandria Project that documenting Fate Bell Shelter was going to be a monumental task. A typical rock art site may take us only a few hours to complete our baseline level of documentation, …

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To Iconography… And Beyond!

To Iconography… And Beyond!

By Amanda Castañeda and Charles Koenig
This blog post focuses on a key aspect of Shumla’s documentation methods and the Alexandria Project: iconography. Iconography includes the documentation, study, and interpretation of images and symbols. Archaeologists working …

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High-Resolution Rock Art Documentation and Digital Preservation

High-Resolution Rock Art Documentation and Digital Preservation

As detailed in the last blog post, during the Alexandria Project we are collecting quite a bit of different data, and these data are helping us address our project goals and research questions. One of the primary goals of the Alexandria Project is to preserve the Lower Pecos rock art sites for future generations because many of the pictographs are deteriorating due to age (up to 4,000 years old) and natural weathering.

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Welcome to the Shumla Blog!

Welcome to the Shumla Blog!

Welcome to the first post of the new Shumla Blog! We started this blog to be able to share our ongoing research with our friends, colleagues, and collaborators around the world. All of us at Shumla are very excited for the ability to share our progress from our newest research program, the Alexandria Project.

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