The Edwards Plateau is not just a landscape of sinkholes and archaeological sites.

It is a landscape of memory — a place where the human past is written into the rock in ways that sometimes surprise and always illuminate.

Across the plateau, in the limestone shelters that dot the canyon walls and cliff faces, the rock art traditions of Archaic and later populations have left painted figures in red, black, and occasionally other colors: geometric designs, human and animal figures, shamanic images, pictographs that have resisted full interpretation for generations.

The most elaborate rock art in the Texas region appears in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands — the canyon system of the Pecos River and the Devils River where they join the Rio Grande at the Texas-Mexico border, roughly a hundred miles southwest of the Edwards Plateau proper.