Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

74 / Linville
est of Indocuban pictographs” (Núñez Jiménez 1990:128). While this suggests
that other examples were known, record(s) of these have not survived. More
than a century later, researchers rediscovered the cave, which contains an
extraordinary petroglyphic mural measuring 10 m long (along with both
prehistoric and colonial ceramic remains) at the base of Cerro de Limones
(Núñez Jiménez 1990).
Two other pictograph cave sites discovered in the mid-nineteenth century
have not since been relocated by modern investigators. One is in the hills of
Tapaste. The other, in Banes, was ¤rst discovered during population census
activities of 1846. These two pictograph sites were reported by Colonel
Fernando García y Grave de Peralta and by Don José María De La Torre,
respectively, and were documented in the Faro Industrial de La Habana of
April 16, 1847 (Núñez Jiménez 1975:507).
More than 40 years later, in 1889, a priest named Antonio Perpiñá published
a reference to aboriginal drawings in the hills of Cubitas, Cerro de
Tuabaquey, in the province of Camagüey, in the cave now known as the
Cueva de Pichardo (Núñez Jiménez 1967; Perpiñá 1889; Rivero de la Calle
1960). Unlike previous discoveries, this one emerged in the midst of the scienti¤c
debate surrounding Upper Paleolithic cave paintings in Europe. Sanz de
Sautuola had by then achieved the conceptual leap that led archaeologists to
question the relationship between Upper Paleolithic deposits in caves and the
art found on their walls. However, his ideas would not gain widespread acceptance
until they were sanctioned (in 1902) by the archaeological establishment
(Bahn and Vertut 1997:22). Thus, as in other parts of the world,
scienti¤c studies of cave art and the body of useful theory that they would
engender did not yet exist in Cuba in the nineteenth century. Indeed, more
than six decades would pass before archaeologists would begin to investigate
Perpiñá’s discovery (Rivero de la Calle and Núñez Jiménez 1958).
In his 1910 publication, A través de Cuba, the French writer Charles Berchon
described the chance discovery by a North American doctor, Freeman P.
Lane, of a cave with pictographs at Punta del Este, Isla de Pinos (Isla de la
Juventud) (Núñez Jiménez 1967:x). This discovery, too, went largely unrecognized
in Cuba until 1922, when the noted Cuban ethnohistorian Fernando
Ortiz reported the site to the president of the Academia de la Historia de
Cuba (Herrera Fritot 1939:10). Ortiz also published a reference to the cave,
announcing at that time his intention to produce a detailed report of the site
(Ortiz 1922b:37). Although this report “never materialized” (Alonso Lorea
2001:45), Cuban researchers have recently located the unpublished notes of