ABSTRACT
The Trans-Pecos region of far west Texas has a rich but understudied corpus of Indigenous rock art. In this chapter, I consider the extent to which the paintings and engravings—some of which are several thousand years old—are a manifestation of Indigenous worldviews, and how ontologies and the rock art changed with the arrival of new cultural groups in the sixteenth century and after. Using an anthropological approach, and ethnography from neighbouring regions, I argue that certain classes of repeated and intelligible ‘contact art’ motifs can best be explained within a ritualistic framework that encompasses notions of embodiment and somatic transformations.
