"In The Rock Art of Texas Indians, Kirkland's meticulous watercolor copies of this rich and diversified art are reproduced, 32 in full color, the rest in black and white. The informative and engaging text is contributed by W. W. Newcomb, Jr., former director of the Texas Memorial Museum and author of The Indians of Texas." "Those early Indians, at different times and places and in a variety of styles, carved and painted their art from Paint Rock in West Central Texas to the canyons of the Big Bend, from the Canadian River Valley in the Panhandle to the Hueco Tanks near El Paso. As the form for this art was varied, so too were the reasons for its execution. Much rock art was no doubt born of magical and religious beliefs, or served to illustrate myths, but some apparently commemorated actual events and some seems to have been only tallies or messages. Kirkland recorded it all with consummate skill, preserving for other generations, as he said he would, the often remarkable, always fascinating art of vanished people."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The comprehensive book on Indian petroglyphs in the Southwest.

After viewing Indian rock paintings on a bluff above the Concho River near Paint Rock, Texas, in 1934, the late Dallas artist Forrest Kirkland was seized with an idea. He wrote later, "Here was a veritable gallery of primitive art at the mercy of the elements and the hands of a destructive people. In a few more years only the hundreds of deeply carved names and smears of modern paint would remain to mark the site of the paintings left by the Indians. . . . What was at first merely a suggestion in my mind soon became a solemn command. I was a trained artist able to make accurate copies of these Indian paintings. I should save them from total ruin."Kirkland devoted a good part of the rest of his life to copying pictographs and petroglyphs at some eighty far-flung sites in Texas. In The Rock Art of Texas Indians, his meticulous watercolor copies of this rich and diversified art are reproduced, 32 in full color, the rest in black and white. The informative and engaging text is contributed by W. W. Newcomb, Jr., former director of the Texas Memorial Museum and author of The Indians of Texas.The petroglyphs and pictographs reproduced here, states Professor Newcomb, "are relatively rare and absolutely irreplaceable human documents. They can often reveal much about the ways of ancient men, including aspects of life which otherwise would forever go unrecorded, for they may illustrate how a vanished, nameless people perceived themselves and their world, their relation to God and to each other, and their fantasies and fears. They are, then, a treasure to be valued and a heritage to be preserved."