Big Bend Arts Council

Members Meeting, 2:00 pm, February 17, 2008

Kokernot Lodge

The fact that people began showing up at 1:30 was a good omen! A crowd of around 25 people attended the presentation.

The meeting began with a brief introduction of our speaker by VP Tim Roberts. Reeda Peel did a wonderful job of taking us on a visual tour of local and regional archaeological Rock Art sites. Ms. Peel , who has a background in fine art and commercial art, first became interested in the texas anthropological sites eighteen years ago. She mentioned how the sites out here in West Texas were researched in the 40's and then basically ignored until the late 90's, when the center for  Big Bend Studies got underway. Her lecture was nicely informative and yet very concise. She was easy to understand by the novice and technical enough for those in the group with prior experience. She was very hesitant, as is necessary, to interpret the meaning of the images. She explained to the group the difference between a petroglyph, which is carved into the surface and a pictogragh which is painted on the surface. She opened her lecture with images from the "Graef"  site   on the mesa's outside of Balmorhea.

She talked about the imagery and how to understand and correlate the images to other images as well as how the sites were mapped and recorded. Throughout her presentation she fielded questions from the audience. She also introduce the group to the Bee Canyon and Black Hills sites that are down near Persimmon Gap. 

She ended her lecture with images of her own illustrated paintings of the Caddo Indians from East Texas. She pointed out how the historical writings of the Spaniards, the anthropological studies of the tribes and the archaeological studies of the early settlements helped her to accurately render portraits of the early costumes and features of this tribe.

You can see Reeda Peel's artwork on display at the Alpine Studio Gallery on Murphy Street in Alpine, Feb 29th - March 2.