Cave Art From Long-Lost Civilization
Discovered On Uninhabited Caribbean Island (text in english)
Archaeologists have unearthed
long-lost art from a civilization that once inhabited the Caribbean.
Known as the Tainos, these people
once lived on the island of Mona, Puerto Rico – now an uninhabited nature
reserve – in the 14th century, before the arrival of Columbus. Now gone,
thousands of pieces of Taino art have since been found in caves on the island,
offering a fascinating glimpse into their culture.
The research has been led by the
universities of Leicester and Cambridge, the British Museum, and the Centre for
Advanced Studies of Puerto Rico. A paper describing some of the findings is
available in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
The art so far comes from 70 caves
on the island, with dozens left to explore. The images show animal and human
faces, along with a number of abstract patterns.
University
of Leicester
“Most of the precolonial pictographs
are in very narrow spaces deep in the caves, some are very hard to access, you
have to crawl to get to them, they are very extensive and humidity is very high
but it is extremely rewarding,” said Victor Serrano, a member of the student
team at the University of Leicester, in a statement.
“Imagine a social networking site,
where instead of having a page with posts of people here you have an actual
cave wall or roof full of different pictographs.”
This paper details the team’s
findings from 2013 to 2016, undertaking fieldwork that was funded by National
Geographic. Carbon and uranium-thorium dating were used to narrow down the date
of the cave art. The dating methods place the art at up to 800 years old, in
the 14th and 15th centuries.
There were a number of methods used
to paint on the walls. The more primitive, notes The Independent, is that the
Tainos dragged their fingers along the walls, a removing a layer of calcite to
expose lighter rock.
University
of Leicester
Another method involved using bat
excrement, which had turned yellow, brown, and red from minerals absorbed from
the cave floor. Some plant resin is evident in the paint too, helping it stick
to the walls, while others simply used charcoal.
The Tainos were ultimately wiped out
by disease, famine, and war as a result of Spanish colonization. These
paintings, however, give us a fascinating insight into this extinct
civilization.
“For the millions of indigenous
peoples living in the Caribbean before European arrival, caves represented
portals into a spiritual realm, and therefore these new discoveries of the
artists at work within them captures, the essence of their belief systems and
the building blocks of their cultural identity,” said Dr Jago Cooper from the
British Museum in the statement.
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