# Cave Art and Sacred Caves (c. 1450)

URL: https://allhistories.com/jamaica/timeline/1450-cave-art-and-sacred-caves
Location: Mountain River Cave, St Catherine
Themes: main-event

Jamaica's limestone landscape is riddled with caves, and the Taíno treated them as sacred places linked to their origin myths, in which the first humans emerged from caves. Many Jamaican caves were used to bury the dead and to keep zemís and offerings. Across the island archaeologists have recorded dozens of rock-art sites, with petroglyphs (carved images) and pictographs (painted images) of faces, figures, animals and abstract designs. The most famous is Mountain River Cave in St Catherine, a national monument whose walls and ceiling bear numerous pictographs drawn in black pigment, including human figures, birds, fish and a possible cacique wearing a headdress. Other important sites include Two Sisters Cave near Hellshire and Pantrepant in Trelawny. Caves near White Marl and elsewhere contain human burials, sometimes accompanied by dogs and grave goods. Cave art is one of the few direct expressions of the Jamaican Taíno that survives in its original setting. Many sites have been damaged by guano mining, vandalism and development, and the Jamaica National Heritage Trust now protects the most important ones. Their images are widely used in modern Jamaican design and in celebrations of the island's indigenous past. At this point in the timeline (c. 1450), no named ruler of Jamaica is recorded in this dataset; the island (Xaymaca) was home to Taíno villages under local caciques whose names have not survived.

## Why it matters
Jamaica's rock art preserves the Taíno's own images of their world.

## Sources
- [Wikipedia — Petroglyph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroglyph)
- [Jamaica National Heritage Trust](https://www.jnht.com/)
- [Encyclopaedia Britannica — Taino](https://www.britannica.com/search?query=Taino)
- [Wikipedia — Taíno Xaymaca (period overview)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta%C3%ADno)