Pictured above is another example of the simple rock art in the Indian Head area on the northwest side of Big Bend National Park.
The chances are good that rock art of this nature may have been produced by the Jumano Indians (pronounced, zhümuh'no)—perhaps from sometime around 1000 A.D. (I’m sticking with “A.D.” because “BCE,” and “CE,” each a variant on the “common era,” is claptrap that doesn’t offer further clarity in historical dating.)
As for the Jumanos… According to W. W. Newcomb, Jr.’s The Indians of Texas, Jumano culture disintegrated during the eighteenth century and our knowledge of them is mostly through archology and inference. Newcomb’s book (originally published in 1961 by the University of Texas Press) was considered comprehensive and authoritative at least through the 1990s tenth reprinting that I own. However, the 55-plus years since the book was first published has seen further archaeological studies and linguistic analysis to the tune of “new information.” Further insight on both Jumano culture and the rock art of Big Bend are, no doubt, at your fingertips.
The original image is a Tagged Image Format File (TIFF) with a file data size of 35.1 megabytes (MB).
For display on this web site the TIFF was duplicated and the duplicate re-formatted as a Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPG/JPEG) image with a file data size of 2.32 MB. To approximate detail visible at the time of capture the image was sharpened as necessary and resampled via the Photoshop Bicubic Sharpen algorithm. The re-sampling increases the image resolution from 300 Dots Per Square Inch (DPI) to 360 DPI.
Unless otherwise noted the image was corrected to offset color shift and balance. This restores black (shadows), white (highlights) and neutral gray (neutral mid-tones).
• An unnumbered image is the only one of the subject matter.
• A number corresponds to the sequential order in a subject-matter-related sequence.
• The letter “B” indicates color correction to approximate what was visible when the image was captured.
• The letter “C” indicates enhancement beyond an approximation of what was visible at the time of capture.