OUTSIDE COMSTOCK, Texas — On an overcast summer morning, Carolyn Boyd, an archeologist at Texas State University, stood at the foot of a cave in west Texas, looking up toward a series of towering murals painted on a rock wall. Three massive human-like figures soared toward an overhang that had sheltered the painting from the elements since they were drawn here perhaps 4,000 years ago.
An artist herself, Boyd knows how hard it would have been to paint these long, crisp lines. Before starting, the bands of Indigenous hunter-gatherers who lived in this west Texas valley, where the Pecos River empties into the Rio Grande, would have spent weeks pulverizing gypsum, hematite, limonite and manganese to make paint. They would have gathered massive quantities of sotol stalks to fold its fibers into scaffolding. The painting itself would have required teamwork and precision, with people at the bottom guiding artists on the wall as they painted figures stretching up to 30ft tall.
“As a muralist, I can tell you that just maintaining a straight line on an even surface is a challenge,” said Boyd. She’s spent 35 years analyzing these sites, some of which are older than the pyramids, and she describes them as a sprawling and still largely unreadable library storing some of humanity’s earliest stories.
“Look how perfect this line goes down and tapers,” she said, dragging a green laser pointer along its length. “It’s just stunning. I’ve brought fine artists, painters out here and they scratch their heads.”
The Trump administration is now dealing these rare treasures a potentially fatal blow. Last year, Republicans in Congress heaped a whopping $46.5bn for border wall expansion into Trump’s “big, beautiful” spending bill. The longest remaining unwalled stretch of the US-Mexico border lies in west Texas, a remote region that includes some of the state’s most-visited public lands, including the Big Bend national park.
Since February, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has indicated it will use that massive war chest here to expand what it calls its “smart wall” – a mix of steel bollard fencing, vehicle barriers and hi-tech surveillance.
The area has remained unwalled until now, partly because geography already impedes most illegal crossings. Large ranches dominate the Mexican side, which contains no major cities and only few large towns to attract would-be migrants. Steep cliffs abound.
But with such vast sums on the table, CBP is pushing forward at breakneck pace with its plans – riding roughshod over virtually universal opposition from locals, business leaders and a growing number of political leaders from both parties. Most of that tension has focused on the controversy over CBP’s plans to mar the wilderness of the Big Bend national park, which the agency halted last week after activists publicized videos of bulldozers plowing up ground at the park’s famed Santa Elena Canyon.
The impending construction also threatens to mar or destroy an untold number of these millennia-old rock art murals that stand in the coming wall’s path. The slated construction includes 165 miles (266km) of four-to-six-foot-tall vehicle barriers and patrol roads starting a few miles outside the Big Bend national park and ending at Lake Amistad. It runs straight through the Seminole Canyon state park, which is home to 27 murals, including the Fate Bell Shelter where Boyd stood.
Boyd has emerged as perhaps the most prominent voice defending the region’s ancient heritage. One day, she hopes, archeologists teaming up with Indigenous communities who have preserved stories by word of mouth through the millennia will learn to decipher the murals the way we can now read the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt or Mayan pictographs.
“These are world-class masterworks,” Boyd said. “These are sacred sites. They’re the oldest-known books in North America. We need to protect them.”
Heritage threatened by border wall expansion
Boyd, 68, wore tiger-print framed glasses and a red bandana around her neck, and her tightly braided silver hair was covered with a green felt hat to shield her fair skin from the desert sun. She fell fast in love with rock art murals after first encountering them on a trip to the Lower Pecos region in 1989. Back then, she says, most scholars viewed the murals as little more than ancient graffiti – images that early humans haphazardly scrawled on the wall.
That seemed implausible to Boyd. Not only did the murals require great skill and teamwork to paint, they also demanded precious materials. Muralists used marrow from deer bones to make what amounted to an ancient variety of oil paint. In a region with few reliable sources of fat, hunter-gatherers depended heavily on marrow for calories.
“It’s not just a bunch of painted figures on the wall,” Boyd said. “They sacrificed food off their plates.”
Her husband, a 74-year-old archeobotanist named Phil Dering, shares her enthusiasm. They went on their first date at the Seminole Canyon state park back in 1992. They married a few months later.
After completing her dissertation, the couple settled in the town of Comstock in 2003, so Boyd could study the murals full-time. They founded a non-profit, the Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center, that has since educated about 13,000 students on the region’s rock art heritage and documented more than 250 rock art sites. Boyd has befriended local landowners, who have facilitated access to researchers, students and pilgrims to murals found on their properties. She has forged relationships with Indigenous communities on both sides of the border to share knowledge about the images and their meanings.
Boyd’s perpetual state of curiosity has collided head-on with the Trump administration’s single-minded fixation on wall-building.
The smart wall’s proposed path runs dangerously close to known murals and may cut through yet-to-be-discovered ones. Surveying for rock art is an arduous task, often requiring the skills of a rock climber and the knowledge of a graduate-level anthropologist. Covering a few miles in rough country takes weeks.
The expanded wall doesn’t have to touch the murals to damage them. A close look at Fate Bell Shelter reveals a string of superficial pockmarks ranging in size from that of a golf ball to a pancake. Limestone, which served as the early muralists’ canvas, is a porous rock that allows water to seep in. Daily and seasonal temperature swings cause changes in limestone’s internal pressure, leading bits and pieces of the rock face to flake off over time – a natural process called “spalling”.
But the vibrations from construction, which will probably include dynamite blasting and excavation with heavy machinery, threaten to supercharge this spalling, chipping away chunks of painted limestone up to several hundred yards away.
In Boyd’s nightmare scenario, entire panels could come crashing down – including from previously undocumented murals. Even if the rock art makes it through the process relatively unscathed, the new border barrier would leave at least 80 known murals on the southern side of the new fence, raising questions about access for the researchers who study them and Indigenous people who visit them as sacred ancestral sites.
“Many of those messages will be destroyed or damaged to the point where we cannot decipher them, work with them, or go to them for help or inspiration,” said Maria Rocha, 78, who identifies as Indigenous and has visited Lower Pecos rock art sites for spiritual reasons. “But deeper than that, we have a connection to those paintings for our creation stories.”
Attempts to buy out landowners
One of the murals that Boyd worries about the most is called Painted Shelter, which lies on a private sheep ranch owned for more than a century by the Zuberbueler family.
Painted in a series of installments by different peoples over a period spanning about five millennia, it contains several different styles that flourished in this area over the years. It’s also something of a historical record, containing images of people wielding the atlatl spear-hurling device, a traditionally shaped bow and a more modern, recurve-style bow.
The current smart wall map shows the vehicle barrier running very close to Painted Shelter, despite the fact that it is a Texas-designated historic landmark.
Fisher Sand and Gravel Co received a $2.7bn contract to build the barrier – a cost of about $16.5m a mile. To expedite construction, the Department of Homeland Security has waived dozens of federal laws that would normally require surveys, environmental reviews and damage mitigation plans to protect historical treasures.
Like other local landowners, Patrick Zuberbueler began receiving letters in February offering $5,000 to cede portions of the family’s ranch land for construction, without going through the eminent domain process. So far, the family has refused.
Still, Fisher Sand and Gravel Co has pushed forward with its construction plans, asking the family for access to millions of gallons of water for its proposed operations. With the ranch’s undulating terrain and rocky ground, Zuberbueler expects the company to blast extensively.
“It’s almost like [they’re saying,] ‘We don’t even really care what you think,’” Zuberbueler said.
Painted Shelter already suffers from significant spalling, with fallen shards as large as basketballs marring what is otherwise a remarkably well-preserved painting, naturally shielded by the overhanging cliff.
“Vibrations from blasting and heavy equipment will be devastating to the site,” Boyd said. “There’s no question.”
Even more frustrating to Boyd is the fact there’s little logical reason to guard this area from vehicle crossings. There are no paved roads along the Zuberbueler ranch, just shrubby landscape strewn with boulders.
Even if the land were easily navigable on four wheels, getting from the Mexican side into the United States requires plunging over oak- and laurel-studded cliffs at least 30ft high, fording the Rio Grande and then climbing back over equally steep precipices on the other side. Anyone who managed to accomplish that feat and make it to a paved road would then have to evade border patrol agents cruising the roads and pass undetected through one of the many checkpoints that dot the highways within 100 miles (160km) of the southern border.
CBP did not answer specific questions about the vehicle barrier’s potential impact on ancient rock art, nor the need for a locally opposed vehicle barrier in an area rarely crossed by car. But the agency said that it would conduct its own reviews.
“Even with the use of a waiver, CBP remains committed to environmental and cultural stewardship,” an agency spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement. “Prior to border barrier construction activities, CBP conducts environmental and cultural reviews, seeks public input, and collaborates with state and federal agencies to minimize impacts and balance operational needs with responsible land stewardship.”
Fisher Sand and Gravel Co did not respond to a request for comment.
Raymond Skiles, a former wildlife biologist for the Big Bend national park, shares Boyd and Zuberbueler’s sense of frustration. He inherited a property that his grandparents bought for the scenic views overlooking the canyons and the Rio Grande.
But Skiles also started getting letters from CBP offering money to avoid an eminent domain fight back in February, followed by inquiries from Fisher Sand and Gravel Co. “My first response was ‘Can’t you find a job doing something that’s not hurting people and wrecking places?’”
The part of Skiles’s property outside the town of Langtry that CBP wants to seal off with a vehicle barrier is even more treacherous than the Zuberbueler ranch. Cliffs soar 130ft over a dry canyon that leads into the Rio Grande. Two separate murals lie about midway up the canyon walls. Skiles expects heavy blasting both to level terrain and break through rock, raising fears of damage to the rock art.
“You can’t do anything without blasting,” Skiles said. “My grandpa put in a little bit of fencing and a jeep road, and it was all dynamite.”
In all the time that Skiles, 71, has spent on the property, he has personally seen a total of eight people crossing illegally, all on foot. Six of them wanted to be found, he said. “It ain’t an issue,” Skiles said.
Imperiled messages from the past
Damage to the murals wouldn’t be the only tragedy, said Boyd. It’s also the loss of a long-term, deeply human goal: to understand the artists’ stories and messages from the past.
Even a very clear mural can keep a scholar occupied for decades. One of the best-preserved examples is White Shaman, a roughly 100ft panel tucked into a cave perched above the Pecos River. The muralists used four colors derived from pulverized rocks – black, red, yellow and white.
One of the mural’s central images is a headless white figure with outstretched arms that Boyd says represents the Moon Goddess, a central deity for the Nahua and Wixárika peoples. The painting faces west. As the sun sets on the lunar solstice, it moves up the wall, illuminating the painting and stops right at the Moon Goddess’s neck, visually “decapitating” her.
“Every time I look at it, I see more,” Boyd said. “This is a panel that just keeps on giving.”
On a recent morning, she hiked with trekking poles up a steep set of stairs toward the panel. At the entrance, which was surrounded by ocotillos flowering from the recent rains, she announced the arrival of our group – herself; her husband, Phil; the site’s director, Aimee Spann; and this reporter. With a broad smile, she waited for a moment before proceeding.
“The ancestors are still here,” Boyd said. “We need to respect them.”
The story is co-published with The Guardian.
Why is it always an insufferable joke that people who have no fucking idea how to build anything assume that once made aware of a need to preserve that builders will destroy it for a project? It’s been acknowledged and whatever engineering needs to happen has the backing of the most powerful treasury in the world. So demand it is preserved and get on with the pearl clutching.