Archaeologists have unearth long - lost prowess from a civilization that once inhabited the Caribbean .
Known as the Tainos , these people once live on the island of Mona , Puerto Rico – now an uninhabited nature reserve – in the 14th century , before the arrival of Columbus . Now gone , thousands of piece of Taino art have since been found in caves on the island , offering a fascinating glimpse into their acculturation .
The enquiry has been led by the university of Leicester and Cambridge , the British Museum , and the Centre for Advanced Studies of Puerto Rico . A paper describing some of the findings is available in theJournal of Archaeological Science .
The artistic creation so far come from 70 cave on the island , with dozens left to search . The images show animal and human faces , along with a telephone number of abstract patterns .
“ Most of the precolonial pictographs are in very narrow spaces late in the cave , some are very hard to get at , you have to crawl to get to them , they are very extensive and humidness is very high but it is passing rewarding , ” say Victor Serrano , a member of the student team at the University of Leicester , in astatement .
“ reckon a social networking site , where instead of having a varlet with mail service of people here you have an actual cave bulwark or roof full of different pictographs . ”
This paper details the squad ’s findings from 2013 to 2016 , undertaking fieldwork that was fund by National Geographic . Carbon and uranium - thorium dating were used to narrow down the engagement of the cave art . The dating method localize the art at up to 800 old age one-time , in the 14th and 15th hundred .
There were a number of method used to paint on the walls . The more primitive , notesThe Independent , is that the Tainos drag their fingers along the wall , a transfer a layer of calcite to unwrap lighter rock .
Another method acting involve using bat body waste , which had turn yellow , brown , and red-faced from mineral absorbed from the cave floor . Some plant rosin is evident in the key too , help it stick to the rampart , while others plainly used wood coal .
The Tainos were at last wipe out by disease , shortage , and war as a solvent of Spanish colonization . These picture , however , give us a fascinating insight into this extinct civilisation .
“ For the million of autochthonal people living in the Caribbean before European arrival , cave lay out portals into a religious land , and therefore these fresh discoveries of the artists at work within them capture , the essence of their belief systems and the edifice cube of their cultural identity , ” said Dr Jago Cooper from the British Museum in the financial statement .
