Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

Rock Art Research in Cuba / 93
dom), advanced in the 1960s by French archaeologist André Leroi-Gourhan,
director of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, has been somewhat more in®uential
in interpretations advanced in Cuba (Nuñez Jiménez 1975; Guarch Delmonte
1978). However, this apparent in®uence may also be understood as
coincidental, since the interpretations of Harrington (1921), Herrera Fritot
(1939), Ortiz (1922b, 1935, 1943), and Rouse (1942), advanced decades earlier,
are consistent with a symbolic reading of cave art. For these early researchers,
the symbolic meaning was religious in nature, related either to petroglyphic
“Zemis” (Guarch Delmonte 1973, 1978; Harrington 1921; Rouse 1942) or, in
the case of the Cueva No. 1, Punta del Este site, to an “astrological religion”
(Ortiz 1922b), the computation of a lunar month by prehistoric artists-priests
(Ortiz 1943), or a “solar cult” (Herrera Fritot 1939).
The 1987 study by Guarch Delmonte identi¤ed another potential meaning
for Cuban pictographs. He found that while three pictographic zones contained
motifs unique to the respective region, most motifs were not con¤ned
to a single area. This ¤nding led to the conclusion that motifs are generally
distributed across the archipelago. From this distribution and correlation of
pictographic motifs and designs, Guarch Delmonte (1987:88) inferred that the
images could be understood as part of an incipient ideography, one which had
not attained suf¤cient regularity or structure to be considered an ideographic
text. Yet he also suggested that both preagricultural and agricultural peoples
may have made use of this kind of rock art expression (1987:89). He also
acknowledged (1987) that his analysis did not consider a historical origin for
some of the pictographic images (La Rosa Corzo 1994). Both of these factors
complicate the ¤ndings of his study.
While a cave context for most rock art sites in Cuba may provide some
support for efforts to advance interpretations to an indexical level (Deacon
1997), higher levels of interpretation are currently more scienti¤cally palatable
in Cuba (as elsewhere) when they rest on ethnohistoric evidence. For example,
interpretations advanced for a number of rock art images (Fernández Ortega
and González Tendero 2000, 2001a; Harrington 1921; Núñez Jiménez 1975)
have been supported by the ethnohistorically documented importance of
caves in Taíno cosmology. Pané’s study (1984) of mythology among the contact
peoples of Hispaniola has been particularly in®uential in these interpretations
(Dacal Moure and Rivero de la Calle 1996; Nuñez Jiménez 1975, 1985;
Rivero de la Calle 1966). 18 More recent works that incorporate Pané’s ¤ndings
(Arrom 1975) and those of other early chroniclers (e.g., Las Casas 1951, Martyr
1944 [1530]) have also contributed to the analyses of many rock art images and