The history of the discovery of America is accompanied by the oppression and domination of the indigenous population by the Europeans. New research reveals a different side of early 16th-century encounters. In the caves on the Puerto Rican island of Mona, archaeologists found Spanish religious inscriptions accompanying the indigenous cave drawings.
Archaeologists Jago Cooper (British Museum) and Alice Samson (University of Leicester) recently completed fieldwork on Mona. This month they published an article about their research in the archaeological journal Antiquity. They describe how special the cave drawings in the caves of Mona are, not only in size but also because of the religious interaction between the drawings. The archaeologists see this as evidence for the formation of a new identity of newcomers and South Americans who saw the world change within one generation.
Water and bread
Christopher Columbus was commissioned by the Spanish royal family to search for a sea route to the Eastern Spice Islands. In 1492 he unexpectedly discovered the still unknown continent of America. On his second voyage in 1494, Columbus makes a note of the island of Mona, near Puerto Rico. The approximately fifty square kilometer small island was located at a crucial spot on the route between Europe and South America. The island consists largely of chalk cliffs with underground tunnel systems. These rocks contain fresh water, which suited the ships passing by. Drinking water was indispensable during a sea voyage and this island soon became an important stopping point for the Spaniards.
At the same time – in 1494 – one or more indigenous tribes lived on the coast of Mona. The islet was a day's canoe ride from the islands of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and Puerto Rico, and its population was part of a large tribal network of hundreds of thousands of people, from the Bahamas to the Lesser Antilles. They farmed small tracts of land, especially cassava roots, kept livestock, and hunted game and fish. They made bread from the cassava and the inhabitants immediately responded to the need for fresh water and food of the European travelers. With the arrival of the Spanish settlements, the indigenous tribes expanded their exports and supplied finished goods such as cotton garments and hammocks.
The oldest Spanish written sources emphasize their dependence on Mona. Recent fieldwork confirms this dependence:the Spaniards did not roughly take what they needed, but paid for it. In the previously inhabited areas (the now uninhabited island is a nature reserve) European objects have been found, such as glass beads, pottery and coins from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
These new items changed the material culture on the island. Not only that, the Spaniards also brought the Catholic faith with them. In other rocky sites in South America, native cave paintings have been censored by Christians or native depictions of fearsome cross-carrying Spanish horsemen. If not on the island of Mona, this research shows.
Long corridors
The island of Mona is one of the rockiest areas in the world. There are two hundred caves on the small island, seventy of which have been explored since 2013. Thousands of indigenous cave paintings have been found in thirty caves, giving Mona the greatest variety of indigenous cave art in the entire Caribbean. Illuminated by torches, the indigenous inhabitants carved the images into the soft limestone walls with their fingernails, it turns out. Hundreds of meters underground, they depict ancestor figures, meandering wave movements and other geometric patterns.
The archaeologists also found a clear association between the cave art and the freshwater. Not only because of the locations of the images near the water, but also because of the iconographic significance of fresh water as a source of life. The peak of indigenous cave art is dated between 1300 and 1500.
In addition to native images, the archaeologists found over thirty inscriptions of Christian symbols in a specific cave, renamed Cave 18. Crosses, Latin Proverbs and the Name Jesus are scratched into the caves using tools, as well as the Spanish names of some visitors and the year of their presence.
Forgiveness
The images in cave 18 differ in height. The native patterns are made at a height of about one and a half meters and the Christian inscriptions at about 1.80 meters high. With this, unlike the native images, they are visible when you walk upright through the caves.
The inscriptions are from 1500 but mainly in the 1550s. The native images are thus older and remarkably enough left intact. The Christian visitors, both Spaniards and converted islanders, have placed their crosses and texts above the native art. However, they did not write over it or destroy anything. According to the researchers, this indicated that Christianity was hierarchically above the native religion.
An example of a Latin text found is Plura fecit deus or "God has made much." According to the authors, this comment appears to be a spontaneous reaction to what the cave visitor saw around him at the time. In a Spanish inscription Dios te perdone, scratched on the ceiling above native drawings, the visitor asks for God's forgiveness.
Dialogue in stone
Soon after the arrival of the Spaniards, islanders began to convert:the oldest church on the island, according to sources, dates from 1548 and was run by early converted islanders. Whether the natives converted under duress, economic gain or divine inspiration, the sources do not say. But these new Christians, too, carved Christian figures and names into the cave walls. The dialogue carved in stone between colonial individuals of diverse origins is one of the most important discoveries of this research, according to the archaeologists.
Previously looking only at the extinction of the local population after the arrival of the Spaniards, this research sheds new light on the early transformation of indigenous cultures in the Caribbean and the identity formation of a new generation in the early 16th century. . It consisted of local indio, Spaniards, enslaved Africans and a combination of the two, the creole. This term appears in written sources as early as 1514, making it one of the first manifestations of a Creole Christian identity in the new world. The interaction between different cultures and religions come together in the rock art on the island of Mona that provide a rare insight into this early dynamic.
Conceived in Leiden
There is also a link with the Netherlands in this study. Professor Corinne Hofman (archaeology, Leiden University) and project leader of the Caribbean research project NEXUS1492:“An interesting study. The caves on Mona Island have been known for a long time and have been previously explored by Puerto Ricans. Samson and Cooper's research contributes to this and goes much further. The Native American drawings and Spanish annotations show a special form of interaction between the indigenous population and the Spaniards during the early years of colonization, especially in the field of religion and the transformation of cultural identities. This has not been documented in this way before.”
“The nice thing is that Alice Samson obtained her PhD with us in 2010. After being a teacher here, she was awarded a grant from the British Academy to do a postdoc in Cambridge. So I know the researchers and the research very well. The research at Mona was conceived in Leiden and the results therefore fit in well with our NEXUS1492 project.”