"The president’s border wall plan could damage or destroy ‘the oldest-known books in North America’"
"OUTSIDE COMSTOCK, Texas — On an overcast summer morning, Carolyn Boyd, an archeologist at Texas State University, stood at the foot of a cave in west Texas, looking up toward a series of towering murals painted on a rock wall. Three massive human-like figures soared toward an overhang that had sheltered the painting from the elements since they were drawn here perhaps 4,000 years ago.
An artist herself, Boyd knows how hard it would have been to paint these long, crisp lines. Before starting, the bands of Indigenous hunter-gatherers who lived in this west Texas valley, where the Pecos River empties into the Rio Grande, would have spent weeks pulverizing gypsum, hematite, limonite and manganese to make paint. They would have gathered massive quantities of sotol stalks to fold its fibers into scaffolding. The painting itself would have required teamwork and precision, with people at the bottom guiding artists on the wall as they painted figures stretching up to 30ft tall.
“As a muralist, I can tell you that just maintaining a straight line on an even surface is a challenge,” said Boyd. She’s spent 35 years analyzing these sites, some of which are older than the pyramids, and she describes them as a sprawling and still largely unreadable library storing some of humanity’s earliest stories."
Roque Planas reports for Public Domain August 24, 2026.
SEE ALSO:
"In Building His Border Wall, Trump May Bring Down a 110-Year-Old Church" (New York Times)
