A Rock Art Discovery in Cumayasa

Before meeting Rafael in La Piedra, Alain and I searched caves for several years in Cumayasa with Chichi. Chichi’s knowledge of local caves came, not from hiding illegal pesticides in them, but from looking for lost livestock; goats in particular have a penchant for wandering into cave complexes, not being able to find their way out and dying. We turn off the main highway, between San Pedro de Macoris and La Romana, after the

The guaguita can just be seen parked to far left

monumental Presidente beer billboard and more or less follow the high tension electric towers past several dumps and charcoal making piles and we turn after the shack where the Haitianos live and bounce down the brutally rutted dirt road through several barways until we get to Chichi’s mother-in-law, Isabel’s house.

Pile of branches ready to be burned for charcoal.

Isabel raises mules and donkeys and has taken in several wan, thin orphans over the years and feeds them partially with bread made from the rhizomes of guáyiga (Zamia debilis), a wild fern-like cycad that grows in abundance here. If the sap is not properly purged from the mashed rhizomes the bread can be

Plantains and papaya planted on limestone

deadly poisonous but Isabel’s, while very dry, is filling and sticks with you. She claims her recipe hasn't killed anyone yet. They also grow yucca (manihot), guandules (pigeon peas), habichuelas (kidney beans) and lechosa (papaya), although I don't know how since the ground appears to be about as fertile as the Moon. They have to find or smash and chisel holes in the jagged limestone crust and fill them with dirt and manure in order to plant anything. Walking through a planted area is an ankle turning, shoe-ripping ordeal.

Chichi is married to Isabel's deaf mute daughter, who I am not sure has a name, and they have one child together.

Chichi with wife and child in their back yard

Unlike Rafael, who took a shine to looking for petroglyphs with us and who explores the caves with us when he does not have somewhere else he needs to be, Chichi leads us to a cave entrance, follows us in to the edge of the dark zone, shudders, leaves, and comes back for us in the afternoon. If we need to rappel into the cave we ask him to wait for us above ever since the morning some itinerant, machete-wielding tigueres shouted down to us, at the bottom of a 30 foot deep drop with sheer walls and no other way out that we knew of than up by the same 9mm rope that we had descended with, that they were going to cut and steal the rope. Luckily we were able to name-drop several local landowners and managed to talk the thugs out of it. They would have probably cut the rope into short lengths to make halters and hobbles for stolen mules or to make towropes for broken down vehicles.

This area of Cumayasa is rich in caves but was not known to be so rich

Petroglyph from Cumayasa.

Unusual with two connected heads,

perhaps suggesting Siamese twins.

in rock art. As in almost all regions of the Dominican Republic, close to half of the caves will have at least one or two, often badly eroded, petroglyphs carved into calcite formations near the entrance, in partial light. These petroglyphs are nearly always faces comprising a circle, two eyes and a nose or mouth and are thought to be guardians of the deeper regions. We don't know why the Taíno (or their predecessors) decorated their caves but they did believe that they were special places; the sun and moon emerged from caves in their creation and the souls of the dead were thought to be tied to the comings and goings of bats in the caves.

During a previous year Alain and Eric LaBarre, another French caver, along with Chichi, had discovered both a painted mural and a finger-fluted boulder in a previously unreported cave that they named Cueva del Peñón. Chichi kept coming across unknown entrances and Alain and I kept exploring, measuring and mapping them and it turned out that many of the entrances were interconnected and that it was not an area of many small caves but of a few large, almost maze-like cave systems.

One drizzly morning Chichi led us to the back of a small property owned by Vidal and that had a small shack on it and eventually we spotted the entrance at the bottom of an overgrown gravelly slope. After being assured that we would not need to rappel Chichi promptly left to go chop firewood with his colleen*.

After taking the GPS coordinates we ducked under a low lentil and crawled into the cool penumbra of the cave. I readied my camera stuff while Alain wandered off to reconnoiter the first rooms and within minutes got lost. When he called out sometimes the echo came from nearby and sometimes from what seemed like from the bowels of an empty, subterranean coliseum. I hammered on the wall near me from time to time and he found his way back

Remains of a lost goat. A strand of

our discarded measuring thread

can be seen to left.

after about 20 minutes. He handed me my end of the string from his Topofil gadget and we began measuring the few nearby dimly lighted rooms and their interconnections before striking off down a slick, smooth, mud glazed decline and into total darkness. At first when I looked back I could see points and dim glows of light from where we had come, but one turn later and all was dark in every direction except where our helmet spotlights shined. While Alain sketched and calculated the rises and runs and azimuths I cast my light around the walls looking for art.

We measured our way off to the right where we soon came to a cliff with a 6-meter drop, too steep for us to descend without rope. As we gazed down into that space Alain thought he recognized one of the boulders on the floor as one he thought of as “camel hump” from Cueva del Peñón. We turned and, punto por punto, worked our way back through a sort of high lobby with a dark triangular opening in the far end. Alain bit off the used measuring thread and sat down to sketch some ceiling details while I wandered off through the lobby. High and to the right of the triangle I saw the first pictograph, “Alain, hay dibujos!” I said.

We left our packs at the base of the triangle and crab-slid our way through the opening into a narrow passageway about 15 meters long and that had a shelf like a stair-tread about 1 meter high extending the length of the left hand wall and above that shelf the wall was covered in rich black pictographs. Some were covered with natural deposits of calcite, which attests to their antiquity. The ceiling was high, evidently nearly reaching ground level since we could see pinpricks of light above.

We did eventually determine that the cave on Vidal's land did connect with Peñón at the intersection by the “camel hump” rock and that the whole system contains almost 3 miles of passageway and 4 important areas of rock art. Alain published his findings in a private publication in French and I published Finger Fluting and Other Cave Art in Cumayasa, Dominican Republic in Rock Art Research, a juried, peer reviewed Australian journal available to download HERE. Rock art image galleries HERE and at www.danielduvall.com

* Colleen is a vernacular term here for machete because many years ago all the machetes were imported from The Collins Iron Works, Collinsville, Ct., USA and they had the word Collins stamped in the steel up near the handle and colleen is the Spanish pronunciation. In those days when you were wading into a machete fight you might threaten to stick it into your foe “up to the colleen”.

Cueva de La Cucaracha and a Robbery (Revised)

Architecture, La Piedra

The town of La Piedra (piedra means stone in English) is a parched campo with little water. Its rough dirt roads are laid out in grids and most of the houses are built using rusty sheets of galvanized, corrugated sheet metal and cut, un-milled poles for framing. Used blue poly-tarps are ubiquitous as building material and glass windows or even screening are non-existent. There are no actual stores and the few colmados are small, with few provisions, and operate out of homes that may only have power for part of the day. At the end of a day of caving it is often impossible to buy a cold beer anywhere.

Lynne Guitar, who is an anthropologist who teaches at a university in Santiago and specializes in studying the Taíno culture, first introduced us to this area. Several years ago Lynne bought a piece of land in La Piedra I that has a large cave on it that contains petroglyphs and she invited us to map it for her. On Alain’s and my first visit we missed the turn where the mule was supposed to have been tied to the tree and wound up all the way over in La Piedra III where we parked in front of a small group of houses. When some people came out to see who we were Alain asked them what he always asks strangers he has never met before, “Hay cuevas por aquí?” which means Are there any caves around here? The answer was yes and someone went to fetch Raphael.

Raphael (foreground) with Alain in a cave entrance.

Raphael Agramonte, 50’s, short, wiry and angular with a few teeth missing would become our cave guide for the next few years. When he was younger he attended an agricultural school in Santo Domingo and specialized in fertilizer. One thing led to another and he would up in La Piedra. Times got tough and he got involved in buying and selling black market fertilizer which comes in 55 gallon drums and needs to be hidden somewhere— thus Raphael’s extensive knowledge of all caves in the area. He did well for a while and bought several small parcels of land and saved money but eventually got busted, spent some time in jail and lost most of what he had. He now lives with his wife, Morena, and subsists by working with his machete chopeando, making charcoal, and foraging ñame, a tuber resembling a sweet-potato, in the bush which also leads him to discover more caves that no one else knows about.

One day earlier in the week we visited two caves, both of which we had to rappel into and neither of which turned out to have either pictographs (paintings or drawings on the cave walls) or petroglyphs (carvings in the limestone walls or calcite formations). Close to half the caves in the country contain some kind of indigenous art, usually a crude, often nearly invisible, petroglyph or two on a stalactite near the cave entrance in partial daylight. The first cave turned out to be very small. The floor of the second cave directly below the entrance was covered by a six foot tall pile of garbage (partial list includes pampers, tampons, pig bones, rotten chunks of wood, tires, plastic oozing shopping bags, chicken carcasses, unidentifiable glop and detritus) with no way of avoiding landing in it and sinking up to the knees.

Practically none of these caves have names and because we need to refer to them somehow in our databases the three of us confer on the spot. We might name them after the owner of the property or after a distinctive tree growing in or near the entrance. We called the first cave Cueva Colorado after some reddish iron oxide stains on the walls and the second the Cueva de Cojo, because the owner is lame. Other memorable names have included Cueva de Los Puercos Muertos (entrance clogged with pig bones, hides and carcasses), Cueva de Caoba Condenada (mature mahogany tree near the entrance that Raphael estimated was worth 3000 pesos at the sawmill, sure enough when we returned to that cave a month later, the tree was gone), and Cueva de Mano Mocha because the owner had lost a hand in a machete incident.

Thursday, after buying the usual lunch provisions in Valiente, we picked up Raphael at his house and drove over to the Barrio de La Cucaracha (Cockroach Barrio) to check out a few caves. The first was the Cueva de Bienvenido that was shaped like a very low crawlspace and was in the back yard of Bienvenido’s small house. We crawled and slithered around in it and found a half dozen petroglyphs and a nesting chicken. Bienvenido served us all coffee and gave us some plantains for the road.

The next site we visited looked a lot like Bienvenido’s— two shallow sub parallel wandering ridges pocked with various open-air abrigos or natural rock shelters and alcoves. We clambered down a short slope and wandered through the scrub poking our heads into the little pockets and hollows in the limestone walls until we came to the back of a low horseshoe shaped formation. We crawled in through a low opening, stood up, turned our headlamps on and immediately saw numerous, dark, clear, large charcoal pictographs. We quickly reconnoitered the rest of the cave and found many other paintings and went back to the guaguita to get our recording gear.

We were parked on the side of a dirt road  with grass growing in the middle of it, about 50 meters from the cave entrance. Raphael mentioned at the last minute that maybe we should not leave anything of much value in the guaguita because it was a lawless barrio and so I carried all my camera stuff down into the cave.

About two hours later, while I was photographing in an open clearing within the cave, I heard a distant buzzing noise but thought that it was probably a car alarm somewhere far away. The sound continued for 20 minutes or so and eventually Raphael walked up to check and a minute later I heard a shrill call ¡DANIEL, VEN ACÁ, LA GUAGUITA! I dropped my archeologist’s scale and went running and sure enough, someone had jammed a screwdriver into all the key entries of the guaguita and then smashed the driver’s side window in frustration. Broken chips of tempered glass all over, shades of my youth. The bags that we had left behind were in disarray and the seats turned up to expose the engine. They had been looking for the battery to sell as scrap. Luckily a chip of glass had gotten lodged under the horn cushion on the steering column and shorted out the horn which had stuck in the ON position and was blaring and which had evidently spooked the ladrones and was the buzzing noise I had heard from afar. They stole only my favorite flip-flops and my machete. They left Alain’s bag containing 100 meters of climbing rope and my bag of climbing gear worth maybe $500 USD along with the ashtray full of change and our street clothes. We had been lucky.

As I was probing the violated door locks with my key and trying to raise the back hatch, which had also been unsuccessfully jimmied, a small crowd of villagers gathered. Arguments broke out over whom the thief might have been; one woman hiked up her skirt and shook her butt in the direction of an old man in an unspoken answer to some unspoken challenge; naked children darted between the legs of taller onlookers. I left Raphael in charge and went back to the cave and collected my camera gear and got Alain, who was still in the cave obliviously working. I swept glass chips off the seats onto the road and rearranged the packs and we left.

Later we learned that local tigueres and drug dealers occasionally use that cave to torture and kill captive rivals. They reportedly noose the victim on the surface and throw him down through a skylight in the cave so that he is hanged in one of the rooms in the darkness below.

We went back to finish measuring and photographing the Cueva del Barrio de La Cucaracha a few weeks later, but this time we parked in the yard of a trusted acquaintance of Raphael.
Raphael went back on his own a few times looking for someone wearing my sandals but no luck. Evidently the prime suspect kept stealing until his neighbors got sick of it and he was killed about a year later,

The Guaguita “safely” parked

Examples of the art can be seen HERE in a photo gallery of the same name; and is discussed beginning at the 6 minute 30 second mark of the Powerpoint video below that I presented at the IFRAO conference in Bolivia in 2010 with the help of Robert Mark.