Carolyn Boyd, an artist who became an archaeologist, founded Shumla in 1998 to record and study the painted murals of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas and Coahuila. The organization calls them the oldest books in North America. By its count people have lived in and traveled these canyons, where the Pecos meets the Rio Grande, for more than 12,000 years, and the surviving murals date from about 6,000 years ago into historic times. Boyd's own work reads the White Shaman mural, some 26 feet long above the Pecos, as a creation narrative.
Many of the murals are on private land, and Shumla works with the landowners to document them without disturbing them. It documents each panel as a whole and each figure and line within it, building a searchable record meant to outlast the paint, and its newest office, on the Texas State University campus in San Marcos, houses a ten-chamber plasma oxidation laboratory. Its board has adopted a resolution opposing the Big Bend Project 5 border barrier as planned through the canyonlands, asking for an approach that meets security goals while sparing the sites, with consultation of Tribal communities and landowners.
The Comstock headquarters is a working office and lab, and visitors are welcome Monday to Thursday if they call ahead. Shumla also leads occasional guided treks. For the murals themselves, it points visitors to the ranger tours of Fate Bell Shelter at Seminole Canyon and to the Witte Museum's Saturday tours of the White Shaman mural, September through May.
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