Greetings Readers !
I took this photo in November 2022 in south Texas. They are thousands of years old. It really amazes me that they are in such great condition. The pigment is from the rocks, iron oxide and the artist used animal fat and yucca root to make the paint. I think it is important to note that animal fat was important for their survival but was used in many sacred pictographs. It tells me how significant their sacred art was and how important it was for them to record it. In this photo the artist painted the lines on their hand and then pressed the hand onto the rock wall. I have other photos of hands from other sites of the hand being put on the wall and the artist using a hollow reed of some kind to blow paint around the hand to create a negative image of the hand. Some sites have dozens of hands on the walls. The question has been asked if these are recordings of clans on the wall or do they represent something else? Maybe a ritual of some kind? Maybe the wall was being used as a portal and these prints were believed to be coming through from inside the wall itself. We really don't know. Our own cultural and world views get in the way of interpretation.