The search for the sacred is often imaged as an ascent, a journey up and out — whether that’s in Biblical invocations of “the Most High,” the vaulted spaces of medieval cathedrals, or the widespread reverence for mountains. Yet that search has just as often been seen as a journey down and in, to the roots, the hidden sources, into what one contemporary Buddhist teacher calls the “fruitful darkness.” And across cultures and ages, caves have been emblems of that “fruitful darkness,” portals to sacred worlds.
It was true for our region’s prehistoric peoples. Archeologists here have identified numerous “shrine caves,” ancient pilgrimage places, where ceremonies were conducted, offerings made. New research on these caves reveals the depths of religious life in prehistoric West Texas.
Myles Miller is a veteran Chihuahuan Desert archeologist.
“Probably once or twice during the calendar round, they made a pilgrimage for rain or for honoring ancestors,” Miller said. “It's better to conceive of the shrine caves and the pilgrimages not as journeys to, but as returns to places of ancestral origin.”
With two colleagues, Miller recently dated 30 artifacts from the region’s shrine caves for insight into their history and meaning.
Two-thirds of the artifacts came from Ceremonial Cave, in the Hueco Mountains near El Paso. In 1926, two hunters sought shelter here from a rainstorm, and found an immense artifact cache. Looting followed. But El Pasoans rallied to protect the site, and Harvard archeologists soon arrived to excavate the important find.
Caves were certainly habitation sites in prehistory. But the items found here, and their abundance, tell a different story.
“There were thousands of items,” Miller said, “over a thousand sandals — just sandals. Projectile points. There were dozens of ‘pajos’ or prayer sticks, hundreds of tablita fragments, hundreds and hundreds of perishable fragments of basketry and cordage.”
There were beautiful objects — including a finely crafted turquoise bracelet. The pajos, or prayer sticks, were yucca, agave or sotol stalks, wrapped in fiber, and topped with bundles containing tobacco or feathers. Such items continue to be used in Indigenous traditions, as do “tablitas” — ritual headdresses or masks. One of Ceremonial Cave’s tablitas was encrusted with mother-of-pearl, from the Pacific Ocean.
The artifacts themselves are revelatory. But dating them opened up new vistas.
One object dated was a “flat curved stick” — a tool for hunting and warfare — painted with wavy lines. Similar designs are found in the region’s most ancient rock art. And this object, too, was ancient — some 4,000 years old. Desert people, it seems, made offerings at Ceremonial Cave for millennia, across more than a hundred generations.
It’s a stunning continuity. But there was also change. After 600 C.E., offerings began to feature striking new iconography. That iconography also appears in the rock art at Hueco Tanks, and other local sites. The shift corresponded with a surge in population, Miller said, and the advent of farming and village life. As society changed, it seems, so did religious practice at Ceremonial Cave.
What precisely Ceremonial Cave meant to the earliest West Texans is, of course, elusive. But Miller said that across the prehistoric Americas, caves were seen as places of origin – of a people, of life itself. Pilgrims may have honored their ancestors here, and prayed for that most vital source of desert life: rain.
“The fundamental core,” Miller said, “is that this is probably part of these foundational beliefs in ancestral and tribal origins associated with underworlds and ancestors in mountain caves and rain originating in either in mountains or in underworld.”
At shrine caves, we glimpse our region’s true old-time religion.
