Faculty Profile for Dr. Carolyn Elizabeth Boyd

Biography Section

Biography and Education

Carolyn Boyd is the Shumla Endowed Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Texas State University. She is the founder of a nonprofit organization, Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center (www.shumla.org), which was established in 1998 to preserve the oldest known “books” in North America – the rock art of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands in southwest Texas and Coahuila, Mexico. Boyd is the ex officio head of research for Shumla and serves on the organization’s board of directors. She also is an active member of the Rock Art Network (http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/rockartnetwork/), a working group established by the Getty Conservation Institute and the Bradshaw Foundation to promote, protect, and preserve rock art globally.

Boyd received her doctorate in archaeology from Texas A&M University based on her analysis of the 4,000-year-old rock art of the Lower Pecos. She is author of Rock Art of the Lower Pecos, published in 2003 by Texas A&M University Press and The White Shaman Mural: An Enduring Creation Narrative, published in 2016 by the University of Texas Press, which received the 2017 Scholarly Book Award from the Society for American Archaeology. Boyd teaches Field Methods in Rock Art, a four-week field school offered through Texas State University and gives numerous lectures around the country and abroad.

Currently, Boyd serves as the Principal Investigator for two projects: Origins and Tenacity of Myth, Ritual, and Cosmology in Archaic Period Rock Art of Southwest Texas and Northern Mexico (funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities) and Layers of Meaning - Pictograph Stratigraphy and Chronological Modeling (funded by the National Science Foundation). The two projects are a collaboration between Texas State University and Shumla Archaeological Research & Education Center. They are anchored in both science and the humanities, combining two research and preservation efforts as part of a comprehensive study of prehistoric art in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas and adjacent Mexico. The information encoded in the images is sufficiently rich to inform archaeological research into forager territoriality, information exchange, labor organization, and the origins and tenacity of myth.