Secrets Of Mona’s Caves: Rock Art Reveals Ancient People Were Ahead Of Their Time Long Before The Arrival Of Columbus

AncientPages.com - There is no doubt any more that ancient people were much ahead of their time, long before the arrival of Columbus.

Mona’s caves, located on the Puerto Rico’s Mona Island reveal our ancestors were true ancient artists and their work often served as a portal to a spiritual realm.

Researchers have examined around 70 cave systems and discovered thousands of motifs recorded in dark zone chambers far from cave entrances. Mona’s caves include the greatest diversity of preserved indigenous iconography in the Caribbean.

Image credit: University of Leicester

The team uncovered multiple rock art sites inside the caves with iconography consisting of human, animal, and meandering designs. Some are painted or drawn, and others, drawn with the fingers in the soft walls, are more elaborate and akin to a technique called finger-fluting familiar from Palaeolithic rock art in southern Europe.

Portals Into A Spiritual Realm

Scientists from the University of Leicester and the British Museum working with colleagues from the British Geological Survey and Cambridge University outlined the science behind the largest concentration of indigenous pre-Columbian rock art in the Caribbean.

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“Scientific analyses from the team have provided the first dates for rock art in the Caribbean - illustrating that these images are pre-Columbian made by artists exploring and experimenting deep underground.

“The conservation-minded approach we used squeezed every bit of information we could out of the discovery using multiple methods that are relevant to the studies of vulnerable rock art worldwide,” Dr Alice Samson, co-author of the paper from the University of Leicester School of Archaeology and Ancient History said.

Image credit: University of Leicester

“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,” Dr Jago Cooper from the British Museum said.

“As a Puerto Rican these groups of people that visited and lived in Mona Island are my ancestors, and their story is of utmost importance. Working in those caves, as part of the Corazon del Caribe archaeological project, is hard but fun work.

Image credit: 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. 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,” Victor Serrano, member of the student team and PhD distance learning student in the University of Leicester’s School of Archaeology and Ancient History, said.

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