Rock Art Foundation Founder Remembered

By Bill Sontag
bill.sontag@delrionewsherald.com
Staff Writer, Del Rio News-Herald

Reprinted with permission of the Del Rio News-Herald
Published March 8, 2006

James W. Zintgraff Jr., co-founder and director emeritus of the San Antonio-based Rock Art Foundation died Sunday afternoon, taking thousands of memories with him. But Zintgraff left behind innumerable lessons and stories in the hearts and minds of friends, colleagues and even those with whom he disagreed.

Though the Rock Art Foundation office is in San Antonio, its corpus is carved and painted into the limestone canyons and cliff overhangs lining the Pecos River, Devils River and Rio Grande.

And the heart of this unique, non-profit organization is the White Shaman Preserve, forty miles northwest of Del Rio and less than a mile east of the U.S. Highway 90 West high bridge, where it soars above the chasm carved by the Pecos River.

There, the Rock Art Foundation mission is a simple triad: public education, research and resource preservation. The membership, now nearly 1,000 strong, is a convivial family reunion each fall to share new information about ancient rock art, archeology of the Lower Pecos region, and ethnographic theories regarding the peoples who occupied the cliff shelters and rude huts more than 4,000 years ago.

The Rock Art Rendezvous also includes travels to several of the thousands of rock art panels in the region, usually hand-picked by Zintgraff for members' exploration or re-acquaintance with ancient, mute "friends." For many, however, the images speak of prehistoric belief systems and inseparable, spiritual connections between humans, shamans and the natural world of which they were a part.

Zintgraff and his longtime friend, Jimmy Smith, 85, co-founded the foundation in 1991, and rekindled their old camaraderie at the 13th Rendezvous, October 2005, sadly their last reunion. Zintgraff's health declined after the Rendezvous, and his passing came quietly last weekend.

He was born into the Great Depression in 1926, and Zintgraff later joined his father's business, Zintgraff Photographers, a profession he pursued for 56 years before he "retired" in 1994. His biography points out that "his commercial photographs include presidents, cowboys, debutantes, the historic Alamo, Fiesta, and Hemisfair."

Much of that early collection is in the archives of the Institute of Texan Cultures at Hemisfair Plaza. Zintgraff is credited with decorating the covers of a decade of San Antonio phonebooks, and starting the first color photography processing laboratory in San Antonio.

When he retired to direct the fledgling Rock Art Foundation, Zintgraff turned his photographic skills toward development of what is now the most extensive photographic documentation of Lower Pecos rock art.

He got his first glimpse of this world-class archeological record more than 50 years ago on a hunting trip to the region. Zintgraff eventually put aside his rifle, and picked up a series of cameras.

The digital age of photography put a powerful tool in Zintgraff's hands, just when he needed it most — the ability to modify images to give current paintings the brilliance he believed they had four millennia ago.

Sometimes accused of "over sweetening" the images, Zintgraff plowed ahead, producing in 2002 the Rock Art Foundation's first CD-ROM program, "Rock Art of the Lower Pecos."

The work introduced thousands of viewers to the range and complexity of Lower Pecos rock art in 250 images laboriously selected and prepared by Zintgraff, introduced and narrated by renowned archeologist Dr. Solveig Turpin.

National Park Service Education Specialist Lisa Evans, Amistad National Recreation Area, said Tuesday, "What I well remember about Jim is that he had a welcoming smile and a big hug, and they were given anywhere — at Seminole Canyon, at the White Shaman, at Rendezvous, everywhere.

"He was always willing to share his knowledge of the prehistory of southwest Texas, very committed to developing appreciation of the rock art. Then, after that, stewardship and protection came into play among those he 'brought along,'" said Evans.

As a pioneer in the public "discovery" of the Lower Pecos region rock art, Zintgraff worked with investigating archeologists, writers, photographers from National Geographic Magazine, and periodicals around the world. But his personal discovery stories fired the imagination of all who heard them.

In 2003, Zintgraff described to this writer his first views of the now-famous Panther Cave, a huge panel under a limestone overhang with ownership shared by Seminole Canyon State Historical Park and Amistad National Recreation Area. The area now is accessed only by a lengthy boat trip on Lake Amistad.

The panel's steel observation catwalk, reached by a steep ladder from a boat dock on the lake, leads to adequate views of the long panel behind an unfortunately necessary wire fence barrier.

But when Zintgraff first saw Panther Cave and its hundreds of colorful drawings and paintings, there was no Lake Amistad, no ladder, no fence, nothing of human manufacture except the rope Zintgraff used to rappel from above through a hole in the limestone "roof," disclosing to his widening, astonished eyes one of the premier rock art sites in the region.

Zintgraff had his detractors among a few archeologists, critical of his folksy, carefully nurtured explanations of the secrets of the paintings on the rocks. Recognizing the enmity that sometimes flourishes among practitioners of this discipline, Zintgraff often chuckled, "The only time two archeologists agree on anything is when they're trashing the reputation of a third."

Dr. Carolyn Boyd, founder and director of the Shumla School and one of the Lower Pecos Region's leading archeologists, holds profound admiration for Zintgraff's accomplishments, chiefly that of bringing world attention to the rich archeological record painted on the walls of caves, overlooks and rock shelters.

"Jim's contributions are going to last another lifetime, because they were the sparks that set interest on fire over rock art in Texas. And it's become a wildfire of enthusiasm that countless people now have for rock art in the Lower Pecos," Boyd said Tuesday.

This writer had the privilege of joining Boyd and Zintgraff on their first shared visit to the White Shaman panel, cherished by both for the stories imbedded in the panel narrative.

But their versions of the stories were quite different. Zintgraff's theology of the site was grounded in his admiration for famed mythologist, Joseph Campbell. Boyd is a scientist who had only recently completed her doctoral dissertation, based, in part, on her discovery of a cultural parallel to the symbolism on White Shaman walls. There, the amicable pair "agreed to disagree."

On a similar excursion at another site, Zintgraff chided his new friend, "Well, Sweetheart, I'm the romantic, and you're the scientist."

"No, I'm a romantic scientist," retorted Boyd, eliciting Zintgraff's familiar, but restrained grin.