Picture-Writing of the American Indians: Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1888-89, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1893, pages 3-822Mallery, Garrick
History
Picture-Writing of the American Indians: Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1888-89, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1893, pages 3-822
Mallery, Garrick
Picture-writing, Indian
The reproductions of the large wall pictures discovered in
that cave displayed, in part, so excellent technique that the
question arose how much of this excellence is to be attributed to
the prehistoric artist, and how much to his modern copyist. Mr.
Vilanova, who visited the cave soon after its discovery, and who
regards the wall pictures as prehistoric, being about equal in age
to the Danish Kjökken-möddings, states that the pictures given are
pretty faithful imitations of the originals. The published drawings
are all found on the ceiling of the first cave; on the walls of
the subsequent caves are seen sketches of those pictures, which
the artist afterwards completed. The outlines of all the drawings
have been cut in the wall with coarse instruments, and nearly all
the bone implements found in the cave show scratches, which render
it probable that they were used for this purpose. The colors used
consist merely of various kinds of ocher found in the province,
without further preparation. Finally Mr. Vilanova reports that in
the cave farthest back there was found, in his presence, an almost
perfect specimen of _Ursus spelæus_.
Don Manuel de Góngora y Martinez (_a_) gives the account translated as
follows:
The inscriptions of Fuencaliente are of great interest and
importance. About one league east of the town, on a spur of the
Sierra de Quintana, at the site of the Piedra Escritá, there is an
almost inaccessible place, the home of wild beasts and mountain
goats. Beyond the river de los Batanes and the river de las Piedras,
looking toward sunset and toward the town, the artisans of a remote
age cut skillfully and symmetrically with the point of the pickax
into the flank of the rock and of the mountain, which is of fine
flint, leaving a facade or frontispiece 6 yards in height and
twice as wide, and excavating there two contiguous caves, which are
wide at the mouth and end in a point, making two triangular niches
polished on their four faces. On the two outer fronts to the left
and right appear more than 60 symbols or hieroglyphs, written in
a simple and rustic way with the index finger of a rude hand, and
with a reddish bituminous pigment. The niches, about a yard and
a half in height, 1 yard deep, and half a yard at the mouth, are
covered by the exceedingly hard and immense rock of the mountain.
There is formed, as it were, a vestibule or esplanade before the
monument, and it is defended by a rampart made of the rocks torn
from the niches, strengthened with juniper, oaks, and cork trees.
The half-moon, the sun, an ax, a bow and arrows, an ear of corn, a
heart, a tree, two human figures, and a head with a crown stand out
among those signs, the foreshadowings of primitive writing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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