ABSTRACT
This chapter employees the general Trans-Pecos culture-history framework in order to ask and answer questions about the significance of the region's rock art. It describes other aspects of the Trans-Pecos region. Through ethnography and the resulting anthropological, ritualistic, and embodied frameworks, researchers are now armed with powerful analytical tools. Geologically, the Trans-Pecos is complex, with strata ranging from the Precambrian to the Cenozoic; there are igneous and limestone plateaus and outliers, and elevations ranging from broad desert basins. Important for concepts of archaeological regionalism in the Greater Southwest, both the eastern and western boundaries of the eastern Trans-Pecos have been defined in part according to the presence or absence of certain rock art motifs. The chapter employees the regional framework developed in Mpumalanga to augment what we have just learned about the diverse rock art of the Trans-Pecos. Unfortunately, cognitive archaeological approaches to the cultural material of the Trans-Pecos are also scarce, or marginalized.
