On an Uninhabited Caribbean Island, a Trove of Pre-Columbian Cave Art

By Dan Robitzski, Staff Writer | November 6, 2017 10:00am ET


Imagine a social-networking site that predates not only the internet but even a European presence in the Americas. That's how researchers from the University of Leicester are describing the discoveries they've made after three years of excursions deep into the narrow caves of an abandoned Caribbean island.

The caves, which were on the island of Mona between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, contained thousands of never-before-seen wall posts, the researchers said. And this indigenous spiritual artwork gave the scientists a new glimpse into pre-Columbian life on Mona Island.

"For the millions of indigenous peoples living in the Caribbean before European arrival, caves represented portals into a spiritual realm," Jago Cooper, an archaeologist from the British Museum who worked on the research, said in a news release. "Therefore, these new discoveries … [capture] the essence of [the artists'] belief systems and the building blocks of their cultural identity." [See Images of Mona Island's Cave Art]

To analyze the cave drawings, thee archaeologists took X-rays and used carbon dating. They were surprised to find that all of the artwork discovered in about 70 winding caves predated Christopher Columbus arriving in the Americas. Indeed, some of the artwork that had already been discovered was assumed to be much more recent, as cave art from pre-Columbian times would have been expected to be decayed or faded more than it had, according to the new findings, published online Oct. 27 in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

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