Pomier paintings

Why this is extraordinary

In the hills of San Cristóbal, a protected reserve of limestone caves holds the largest body of pre-Hispanic paintings and engravings in the Caribbean, or one of the counts says so. The protected-area text describes 55 cavities and more than 6,000 paintings and engravings, assigned to two cultures, Igneri and Taíno. A 2001 magazine count is close to that: 54 caves, some 6,000 images of birds, fish, reptiles, and humans, the largest cave with about 590 drawings, reported in 1851. The Academy of Sciences of the Dominican Republic later published a different inventory. Art had been counted in 17 cavities: 1,033 paintings and 103 petroglyphs. Allowing for caves not yet tallied, the academy thought about 1,700 known images was a fair total, and said that was not a reckless guess. Six thousand and seventeen hundred cannot both be a head count of the same walls. One of them is an estimate that ran ahead of the tally. The other may have missed caves. The pictures are real either way.

One panel now has a laboratory age, and it does not date the reserve. A charcoal bird, possibly a heron, is 890 ± 30 radiocarbon years. The abstract prints 1045 to 1225 calibrated years AD. The calibration paragraph prints 1045 to 1223. Both are printed here, and they were not smoothed. The authors warn that the plant was not identified, so old wood can make the figure look older than the day the bird was drawn. The same paper says the sun and the moon appear as subjects. That is iconography, pictures of the lights, not an azimuth of a cave mouth. You would need a measured bearing, and a horizon height, before a painting of the sun became a sightline. One bird does not refile every geometric meander.

Some groups of paintings have been read against the early Spanish accounts, especially the short report a friar wrote in the 1490s on Hispaniola. The protected-area text names that friar, Las Casas, and Peter Martyr as the writers people use. A seated figure in cave 2 is published as a behique, a specialist, at the cohoba rite, inhaling a powder through a tube. The photograph shows a seated body and a long form at the face. The powder is not in the paint. A column in the Bridge Cave carries a black meander, filed as an Igneri design, with a small human figure on the wall beside it. Igneri, in that filing, is the earlier people, and Taíno the later. The walls do not come with captions.

The cosmology that gets attached to Caribbean caves is a three-level world in later scholarship, sky, lived earth, and a world below, with caves as the passages. The friar’s text gives the dead a country called Coaybay. It does not say, in the sentences used here, that this meander is a map of that country. Scholars have made the link. A panel can be a rite, a ancestor, a maze, or a mark whose meaning was never written down. Quarry blasts in the limestone around the reserve have been reported as a threat to the paint. That is a conservation fact. It is not a reading of the figures.