The Earliest Inhabitants: The Dynamics of the Jamaican Taino
by Lesley-Gail Atkinson
by Lesley-Gail Atkinson
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Section 4<br />
Taíno Art Forms<br />
ART IS A CRITICAL and continual aspect <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> human experience. Art, regardless<br />
<strong>of</strong> chronology and geographic locale, has been used to express thoughts,<br />
emotions, beliefs and events. It can be religious, functional, aes<strong>the</strong>tic or documentary.<br />
Ramón Dacal Moure and Manuel Rivero de la Calle, in Art and<br />
Archaeology <strong>of</strong> Pre-Columbian Cuba (1996), categorize <strong>the</strong> art <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> Taíno into<br />
idolillos, wooden idols, figurines, duhos and cave art. Caves were used by <strong>the</strong><br />
Taínos as shrines, burial sites, temporary shelters, water sources and rock art<br />
sites. Since <strong>the</strong> eighteenth century, caves in Jamaica have provided invaluable<br />
evidence <strong>of</strong> Taíno culture and art forms.<br />
Cave art can be broken down into two main categories: mobiliary art and<br />
cave art proper. In Jamaica, <strong>the</strong>re is evidence <strong>of</strong> both categories. Mobiliary art<br />
consists <strong>of</strong> small objects found inside caves; examples include <strong>the</strong> wooden<br />
zemís found in Carpenter’s Mountain, Manchester (1799), and Aboukir, St<br />
Ann (1992).<br />
Cave art proper consists <strong>of</strong> petroglyphs – carvings – and pictographs –<br />
paintings – found inside caves. Petroglyphs can be located on almost every<br />
Caribbean island, in both <strong>the</strong> Greater and <strong>the</strong> Lesser Antilles (Bullen 1974).<br />
In Jamaica, <strong>the</strong> earliest known petroglyph site was <strong>the</strong> Dryland Cave, St<br />
Mary, from 1820. This site is now known as One Bubby Susan, found in<br />
Woodside, St Mary. <strong>The</strong> Mountain River Cave, St Ca<strong>the</strong>rine, is <strong>the</strong> earliest<br />
known pictograph site, discovered in 1896 (Duerden 1897).<br />
<strong>The</strong> two chapters in this section discuss <strong>the</strong> Taíno art forms found in<br />
Jamaica. James W. Lee’s paper “<strong>The</strong> Petroglyphs <strong>of</strong> Jamaica” was published<br />
in 1990. It highlights <strong>the</strong> discovery <strong>of</strong> cave art sites before 1952 and sites discovered<br />
between 1952 and 1985. Lee discusses <strong>the</strong> motifs <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> petroglyphs<br />
and pictographs, and identifies a spatial relationship between cave art sites and<br />
occupation sites. Lee identified twenty-four cave art sites; since <strong>the</strong>n an addi-<br />
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