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Hueco Tanks Carbon Dates
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February 25, 1997
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by Spencer P.M. Harrington
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Carbon dates as early as A.D. 620 have been obtained from six pictographs at Hueco Tanks State Historical Park in West Texas, upsetting the belief that agricultural societies of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had created them. St. Edward's University anthropologist Kay Sutherland says the dates obtained by Texas A&M University chemists Marvin Rowe and Marian Hyman suggest that the rock art was instead the work of hunters and foragers of the Pithouse period (ca. A.D. 1-1100). The pictographs, which include representations of masks, dancers, and a figure resembling the Mesoamerican rain god Tlaloc, also indicate a far earlier diffusion of Mesoamerican religious influence in the region than previously thought. According to Sutherland, the worship of Tlaloc was carried to North America by trader-priests searching for highly prized turquoise. She adds that the early dates also resolve a controversy about the origin of the Pueblo kachina cult, a form of ancestor worship meant to induce rainfall. Archaeologists had believed that the kachina cult developed in Arizona in the thirteenth century. The early dates for the mask pictographs at Hueco Tanks, which are stylistically similar to kachina masks, suggest an early origin among the Mogollon peoples of West Texas and southern New Mexico.
© 1997 by the Archaeological Institute of America
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