Printable version

Eileen Thompson

How did you get involved in studying rock art?

Listen to this answer with RealAudio

A friend of mine gave me a brochure for the American Rock Art Resource Association. This was back in the early 90s, and the association was having their annual meeting in San Antonio and she wanted me to go. She was my principal, and I said, "Well, I can't go, I've got to give a final exam to my seventh graders." And she said, "Well, I'll give it, you go." So I went to the meeting in San Antonio where I listened to the papers and saw slides of rock art, mostly of Texas, and then the whole group moved to Del Rio where we were able to get on boats and visit sites -- go to Seminole Canyon and Presa Canyon and Preda Cave and the White Shaman cave, and I got the bug. I just fell in love with it.

What is the Cholla Site?

Listen to this answer with RealAudio

We are here at the Cholla site, which is a little bit south of Fort Davis -- a west-facing rock shelter, almost due west. We are here in the month of June, and in the northern hemisphere, the Sun is going to be setting here in a few minutes,on its most northern place of setting. And in just a few minutes the light is going to pass through this boulder, in fact, it's already starting to do that. The sunlight is passing through this split boulder and it is starting to create a dagger on the ground and on the boulder that I call the solstice boulder. That light will continue to shine through the split, and it's going to travel around to the front of that boulder way back there in the back of the shelter. Now in the past, maybe 500, 700 years ago, peoples who came through this area, or maybe stayed in this area, have created some paintings. On the boulder that has split is the largest image, that faces to the front of the shelter. Perhaps it's one anthropomorphic humanlike form or possibly two. It also looks like the cholla plants right there in front of the rock shelter. That's why, not me, but somebody else has given it the name Cholla site.

This boulder right here, if the clouds in the sky will cooperate with us and just go away when the Sun is about 10 minutes before it sets, this boulder is going to create shadows on this anthropomorphic shape, and at intervals of about two or three minutes, the edge of that shadow is going to touch the ends of the lines that you see, and I give some significance to that. My opinion is that the phenomena of the Sun setting at this, the longest day of the year, and the light passing through the earth, through the rocks, and creating these interesting images of light on the rocks -- that phenomena just happened to happen. I noticed it and, I think, hundreds of years ago, people noticed that, too, and decided that this must be a special spot, this must be a sacred spot because the earth and the sky are interacting. The Sun is actually coming into this rock shelter, coming into the earth. And so to give this special meaning, they came here and painted.

How old is the Cholla site artwork?

Listen to this answer with RealAudio

I'm not totally sure, but I think that this was probably prehistoric, which means before the European explores came through this area of what we now call Texas and began to record what they saw - where the rivers were, what kind of vegetation was there, what kind of people were here. That's prehistoric Texas, so that would be before the 1500s, possibly before the 1600s, so this is dated more than 500, 700 years old, possibly older. It's hard to know. With a lot of graphic artifacts we don't have the artist to talk to, so we just do some guesswork.

What's special or important about rock art?

Listen to this answer with RealAudio

One of the things about rock art that I really love is that it's just about the only art you can find these days that's still where it was created. I'm an artist and I create the artwork in my studio, but nobody comes to look at it at the studio - it goes somewhere else for someone to look at it or buy it or whatever. But this is exactly where the person who created the artwork, it's still in that exact place. And that's what makes it magical, that's what makes it spiritual, that's what gives it its full amount of heritage to all of us. This is everybody's art heritage, of the whole world, because it's still in the same place, and that's magnificent.

Eileen Thompson is an art teacher in the public schools in Fort Stockton, Texas. In the mid '90s she began studying a site in the Davis Mountains known as the Cholla Site. Her research into the rock art at the site, and its interplay with sunlight and shadows on the summer solstice and other important dates, demonstrated that the site likely was used as a sunwatching site hundreds of years ago. This interview was recorded at the Cholla Site on the summer solstice in 2004.