The Taíno and their Use of Caves

*This was written in September 2004 on request for the 6th-grade class of a friend who is a teacher at a small Christian school in Jarabacoa.

The Taínos' ancestors began settling on this island as early as 6,000 to 4,000 B.C.-8,000 years ago!--arriving in canoes from today's Yucatan and Belize in Central America, going first east to Cuba, then southeast to Hispaniola, which Native peoples called Quisqueya, Haití, or Bohío. Later groups arrived from northern South America, primarily from the Orinoco and Amazon River valleys and the Caribbean coast of today's Venezuela, canoeing northwestward from Trinidad and Tobago, one by one up the chain of islands to Puerto Rico and Hispaniola. There were at least four different "waves" of Native peoples who came here, all of whom eventually merged to become Taíno, which is what we call the Natives who were living here when the Spaniards arrived in 1492, though they used to be called Island Arawak because their language is based on Arawakan from South America. The Taíno sent out colonies to Jamaica, eastern Cuba, and today's Bahamas. We know more about the Taínos' culture than about their ancestors' culture, but the Taínos' spiritual ideas obviously developed from those of their early ancestors-a blend of ideas from several regions of the Americas. Caves played an important role in their spiritual beliefs and customs, in part, perhaps, because this island has so very many caves.

The Taínos' origin myth is centered around a cave that was right here on the island of Hispaniola. They say that the ancestor spirits lived in this cave, coming out only at night to eat jobos, a small plum-like fruit. One night the jobos must have tasted especially good, for some ancestor spirits were still outside the cave eating them when the sun came up and turned them into human beings. Did the Taíno really believe that there were no people on earth until this happened? I don't think so. Myths like this are teaching stories. This one appears to have been told in order to keep the people safely in their homes at night, except for special nights when their cacique (chief) said it was OK to go out and hunt hutías, a small nocturnal mammal. The Taíno weren't really afraid of the dark, but they taught their children that the nights belonged to the opia, ancestor spirits, who walked about trying to charm any young women who were outside instead of safe at home with their families. (Opia acted and looked just like human men except that they had no belly buttons.) [Photo: The "Between Two Worlds" photo representing how caves were considered to be doorways, portals, between the physical world and the spirit world, was taken by my friend Nick Higgins]

Although the Taíno were a Stone-Age people, even their earliest ancestors were already advanced to the stage that they did not live in caves. (They are called Stone-Age because they did not know how to smelt metal of any kind, so all their tools were made of stone, bone, and wood-they did, however, make beautiful adornments that they covered with gold "foil," gold that they pounded flat and attached with a natural glue.) The Taíno were agriculturalists. They planted fertile gardens called conucos. Their principle crops were yucca, corn, beans, squash, peanuts, and peppers--and they had advanced methods of irrigation. They also gathered fruit that grew abundantly in the forests, had fish farms in the rivers and incredible techniques for catching large ocean fish and reptiles, water birds, and the island's only mammals, the hutia and a similar rodent called a soledonon. The Taíno built large, comfortable, round homes of woven straw called bohíos, with palm-thatched roofs to keep out the rain and heat. Inside they decorated the walls with what the Spaniards called "tapestries," woven out of colorful fibers that they collected, and they wove cotton hamacas to sleep on, attached to the bohío's central pole and support poles along the walls. They lit small fires inside their bohíos at night, whose smoke kept mosquitoes away. The caciques and their families lived in larger, rectangular homes called caneyes, which also housed the statues representing the cacique's spiritual guides, his zemies, who protected the yucayeke (town) and helped the cacique make good decisions for the welfare of all his people. (The Taíno didn't worship the statues of the zemies, just like Christians don't worship the cross; they worshipped what the zemies stood for.) The caneyes had roofed porches where the cacique and other wise men of the yucayeke could sit in comfort, shaded by the sun during the day. The caney's porch faced the batey, a central plaza where special events like their ballgame (also called a batey) or their areitos, community-wide song and dance festivals, took place. The Taíno only used caves as shelters in times of emergency, like during hurricanes, or to escape from Spanish military patrols--but mostly they used caves for religious or spiritual purposes.

Each Taíno yucayeke had two leaders, who were complementary, like day and night, or yin and yang. One was the cacique, who, by consulting his zemies, made decisions on behalf of his people about when to plant, harvest, hunt or fish, and how to divide not only the labor but the food thus obtained. The other was the behique, who was a combination doctor and spiritual leader. The behique was responsible for training the young boys who would one day inherit the role of cacique (interestingly, these were the sons of the current cacique's oldest sister, not the cacique's own sons, for inheritance was through the maternal line). He was also responsible for healing the ill, for acting as "referee" during the game of batey, which was not just played for sport and exercise but which was also a religious ritual, and for everything that had to do with funerals and with worship of the spirits of the dead ancestors.

It is believed that caves were used by behiques as "classrooms" for the future caciques, or perhaps where the final lessons just before graduation were given and/or where the graduation ceremony was conducted. Some of the Spanish chroniclers mentioned this, and cave drawings of caciques in full ceremonial dress and of the cohoba ceremony appear to confirm this, although the trainings and ceremonies were conducted in secrecy, so we don't know much about them. The cohoba ceremony, by the way, was a very sacred ceremony done by both caciques and behiques, wherein they inhaled a hallucinogenic powder called cohoba, made from the powdered seed of a sacred tree, probably mixed with powdered green tobacco, in order to go into a trance and communicate more easily with their zemies, their spiritual guides. Many cave drawings, which specialists call pictographs, celebrate the sacred cohoba trance--you can clearly see the dujos, the low stools on which the cacique or behique reclined while taking the cohoba drug, and the long tubes called tobacos that they used to inhale the cohoba. Many caves also have piles of shells lying around. The behique ground the shells into a powder that he mixed with his cohoba, for the calcium acted as a catalyst to put him into a trance state more quickly.

A few Taíno were entombed in caves, along with their possessions: beautifully decorated ceramic bowls with bats on the handles, gourds for water, necklaces of shell, bone, seeds, teeth and stones, elaborate stone mortars and pestles. They must have been special individuals, for most Taíno were not even buried, and Taíno caciques have been found buried in cemeteries, not in caves. The Taíno who were buried were first smoked to dry out their bodies, then wrapped in cotton cloth, and buried seated on their dujos, surrounded by their beautifully decorated possessions-sometimes they were accompanied by the body of one of their wives, who had been buried alive! But who were those select Taíno who were not buried but instead laid to rest on natural shelves within caves? Probably behiques, who were also probably the artists who painted the pictographs inside the caves.

Most pictographs were painted on the walls with sticks dipped into powdered charcoal mixed with animal fat or bat droppings, though in some caves they used natural white chalk or red clay. The artist drew the foods that sustained the Taíno population. There are drawings of corn (maize), birds, fish, frogs, turtles, insects, iguanas, and sea mammals, as well as of dogs, which were the Taínos' pets as well as companions for hunting hutias at night. There are drawings of guayos, stone graters, and of the cibucán, the woven tube the women used to extract the poisonous liquid from bitter yucca to make the bread called casabe. They drew hunting and fishing scenes, pictures related to child birth and reproduction, pictures of their caciques, of the behiques' fierce ritual masks, sick people, babies, and their creator spirits as well as the spirits of the wind, rain, and sun. No doubt these drawings were painted while the behique conducted special rituals and prayed that the harvest would be good, the schools of fish would increase, the sick people would get better, babies would be born without problems, the cool breeze wouldn't turn into a hurricane.... They drew many pictures of just heads because the Taíno appear to have believed that a person's soul or essence was inside the head. In fact, many important Taíno were buried headless, for their heads were kept in a basket or other decorated container in the family home. Ready for another surprise? The Taíno appear to be the inventors of the "happy face"!-you can see drawings of these smiling heads, many hundreds of years old, in caves all over the island.

The Taíno cave artists drew many pictures whose meanings we can only guess at. For example, two petroglyphs in the cave called Guácara de Sanabé, near Cotui, clearly indicate two men carrying another who is tied up and trussed to a pole-but the Taíno were said to peaceful! And we know they were not cannibals (in fact, although they said their enemies, the Caribs, were cannibals, we know today that was not true). So what do these scenes represent? No one knows for sure, but Domingo Abreau, a Dominican anthropologist, believes they represent sick people being carried to the cave to be cured. There are some other drawings that we think we have figured out, too, and they give us a glimpse into the complexity of meaning that was probably embedded into all of them. For example, it appears that birds represented humans in the pictographs-painted on a wall at the dark entrance to a tunnel might be a drawing of several birds, with the first bent low, a second twisting to the left, a third standing tall but bending to the right, etc., indicating the height and direction of the tunnel. Some experts believe that a drawing of five birds sitting on a branch in the cave called Pommiers near San Cristobal represents the five cacicazgos (main chiefdoms) that the island was divided into in 1492. Not all birds represented man, however, for owls and bats, the night "birds," appear to have represented the spirit world and/or death.

Some caves, even though they are near places that used to have large Taíno populations and have smooth walls on which it would have been relatively easy to paint pictures, have no pictographs at all. Other caves are full of them-they fill the walls, stalagmites, stalactites and ceilings. Why? A friend of mine who is psychologist and is fascinated by the Taínos' use of caves believes that some of them gave the Taíno a special spiritual feeling and others did not. He calls it their sense of "caveness." He explained that caves were natural portals, doorways, between the two separate worlds that the Taíno knew existed-the physical world of human beings and the spiritual world of the zemies. Caves were special places, neither here nor there, neither fully light nor fully dark. They were a place where humans and zemies could meet and try to come to agreements that would benefit both worlds.

The Taíno who had classes within the caves, the ceremonies held within caves, the pictographs, and the bodies of those were buried in caves, were special, sacred, secret. To ensure that no one interrupted a ceremony or entered an important cave without first being spiritually prepared, someone, probably a behique, sculpted a cave guardian out of a stalactite or stalagmite that faced the cave opening-that required many, many more hours of work than painting a pictograph. Because the Taíno had only stone tools, they had to "peck" out the shapes of the guardian slowly and carefully, which is why this type of carving is called a petroglyph. Sometimes the cave guardian was painted on a wall, rather than sculpted, like the guardian figure in the cave called Peñón Gordo in the East National Park near La Romana. It appears, however, that a painted guardian needed something special to help him protect the cave-this one has eyes in his hands as well as in his head.

If you are lucky enough to be able to explore one of Hispaniola's caves with petroglyphs or pictographs inside it, don't just look around you. Feel the cave. Reach into the darkness with your mind, not just with your flashlight. Do you have a sense of "caveness"? Imagine how you would feel if you were a Taíno behique inside the cave right now, all alone, with just a torch, a gourd full of black "paint" that you had made, and a homemade "brush" made out of a stick with a shredded tip. What would you draw on the wall that would represent your most important prayer for your people's welfare?

This page was created: Friday, 28 January, 2005.
Last Update: Monday, 31 January, 2005.