Premium
PREHISTORIC PORTO RICAN PICTOGRAPHS
Author(s) -
FEWKES J. WALTER
Publication year - 1903
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1525/aa.1903.5.3.02a00020
Subject(s) - prehistory , archaeology , puerto rican , geography , history , ethnology
Not the least significant of the many survivals of a prehistoric race in the West Indies are rude pictures cut in rocks and called pictographs or petroglyphs.' A study of their forms, geographical distribution, and meaning is an important aid to our knowledge of the origin and development of Antillean culture; it affords valuable data bearing on the migration of the race and points the way back to its ancestral or continental home. Although there exists considerable literature on the pictography of the Lesser Antilles, the Bahamas, Jamaica,2 and Porto Rico, little has yet been published on that of Cuba and Santo Domingo. Both of the latter islands were thickly settled at the time of their discovery, and we should expect to find in them many pictographic evidences of prehistoric occupancy.3 Undoubtedly continued research will make them known to anthropologists. The most important contribution to the pictography of Porto Rico is by A. L. Pinart,' whose pamphlet, although rare, is accessi-