CROSS-MEDIA ISOMORPHISMS IN TAÍNO CERAMICS AND PETROGLYPHS FROM PUERTO RICO

Peter G. Roe

Traditional art styles, like all aspects of the "affecting presence" (Armstrong 1971), possess both form and significance (Roe 1993b). "Form," in turn, subsumes the following variables: the technique of fabrication, which includes a knowledge of craft processes, familiarity with the raw materials, and their "inherent perfectible characteristics" (Link 1975), as well as the technic (Munro 1963) of creation. The latter includes standards of workmanship and ethnoaesthetics, e.g., criticism-audience/artisan interactions. "Significance" also involves many things, among which are function both intended and ascribed, as well as the polysemie "web of signification," composed of signs and symbols, that invisibly surrounds the artifact and determines both its use life-trajectory ("technotask" associations, repair, reuse) and "taphonomic" (discard, refuse, resource patch) fate. This paper will treat both aspects of certain archaeological artifacts; their form and significance, as they may be inferred from late prehistoric and proto-historic "Chican Ostionoid" ("Chicoid") petroglyphs from the famous Taino site of Caguana in the mountainous interior of Puerto Rico, the Greater Antilles.

The first, or formal, level of this analysis addresses the existence of "cross-media isomorphisms" in Chican Ostionoid art. Specifically, I discover incised design layouts of the sort frequently found on Chican ceramics "encysted" within specific design fields of "stela" petroglyphs of the western bordering stone alignment in the largest ball park, plaza A, cf the site of Caguana (Capá), Utuado. This important late ceremonial-residential site1 (Alegría n.d.) in the central highlands of Puerto Rico is associated with both Ostiones (Ostionan Ostionoid) and Chican Ostionoid (Capá) ceramics (Alegría 1983:78). It has been identified, at the latter end of its occupation, as the seat of the Taino chief Guarionex (Rouse 1952:478). Among the important monuments of the site is the largest and most impressive of the west alignment stela. It bears a full-body stylized female figure incised into its face, the oft-illustrated Diosa de Caguana (Figure 1 ) as Alegría (1978) has called her. I will utilize the cataloging system proposed by Oliver (1992: Figure 5) for the west alignment glyphs and characterize her as "Petroglyph 9". Flanking her, to her right, and separated by two large menhirs, one of them decorated with aheart-shaped face ("Petroglyph 8") is another larger boulder with a long-beaked, egret-like bird incised on its face ("Petroglyph 7," Figure7). Together, I argue, they constitute parts of a lithographic "scene" that visually annotates a Guianan myth2. This is an important tale of creation about the origin of Women as a Fish-Frog (Aquatic) Woman Seductress armed with a vagina dentata and the Phallic-beaked Bird who "breaks her teeth" to convert her into the first marriageable woman and the ancestress of the species.

Multi-Media and the Methodology of Lithographic Documentation

I initiated this petroglyph documentation project during April of 1989, seeking to obtain good rubbings of these famous petroglyphs in view of the inadequacy of the published renderings. Before I began researching and teaching on the island one of the methods of recording petroglyphs was freehand sketching. Figure 2 illustrates the pit-falls of such dependence on the variable graphic skills of different observers. C-1 is the accurate inked-in version of a traced early Chican Ostionoid beach petroglyph from the Maisabel site (Roe 1993a). Figures 2a-h were the carefuil attempts of my Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe (CEAPRC) graduate students to draw this image free-hand!

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638 CROSS-MEDIA ISOMORPHISMS IN TAINO CERAMICS AND PETROGLYPHS

Chalked-in photographs offer a less skill-dependent method for capturing petroglyphs, but one which is not without its own limitations (the often distorted photos being later traced and inked-in to produce line drawings).

While regular and chalked-in3 photographs are useful, as Oliver's (1992) study demonstrates, rubbings reveal hidden details that often escape visual examination in the field. However they are best applied to fairly smooth-faced, shallow-relief carvings like those at Caguana. Whether applied with the expedient of crumpled-up carbon paper or using a wax resist (Hayward, Mélendez and Ramos 1992), rubbings are capable of detailed 1:1 renderings (Figure 7c) which can later be traced and inked-in (Figure 7a). For deeper-relief and irregular-surfaced petroglyphs, like those in eolinitic beach rock of Maisabel (Figure 9) or the limestone-cavern petroglyphs of Cueva del ¡ndio near Arecibo, casting techniques such as peels, monotype printing (Frassetto 1960:382) or clear polyethylene tracings are all helpful in wresting details from the rock.

My field team and I first employed clear polyethylene tracings of the petroglyphs, having innovated this technique on the island with the unique eolinitic Elenan Ostionoid "beach rock" petroglyphs of the Maisabel site, Vega Baja, on the central coast of Puerto Rico (Roe 1991 a, see Figure 9). There I had also employed a componential approach to the figurative (anthropomorphic) petrogiyphs (1991a:Figures 34-35), breaking them down into component design motifs and cataloging them by mutual similarities (1991 a:Figures 17-32), rather like what I had earlier done for the more complex figurative style of Chavin in ancient Peru (Roe 1974:Figures 9-10).

Feeling that a "multi-media" approach would help in documenting rock art, where the weaknesses of one technique are complemented by the strengths of another, and where graphic redundancy is the goal, not a limitation, we employed three different methods at Caguana. In addition to black-and-white and color photography done at different times of the day (and seasons) to catch eiusive details in the stones, we employed rubbings with carbon paper on large sheets of fine-grained papersecured to the monoliths. Later, sheets of clear polyethylene were affixed to the stones and a tracing was made with permanent fine-tipped "Sharpie" markers. Both techniques produce a two-line, non-contrast-coded rendering.

During the tracing process constant reference was made to both the monoliths and the rubbings, which were spread out on the ground in front of them. Lastly, the tracings were placed over the rubbings to reveal details not captured on the polyethylene. This "layering" can be done in the field where such omissions can be corrected by consulting with the original stone.

Each medium yields its own information, rubbings conveying the natural undulations of the rock and the bordering lines of the faint incisions, while tracings allow incision width to be captured for later conversion to solid-line black contrast-coded drawings at 1:1 scale (Figures 3-7). The inked renderings are then photographically reduced to avoid scaling errors. Another advantage of the tracing is that the polyethylene can be cut with "darts" so that three-dimensional carvings can be copied onto two dimensions. Such was the case with Petroglyph 21, a partially-buried "crowned" head. This was incised into a small curved boulder (Figure 6a) and thanks to the use of darts and subtle re-scaling from the slightly distorted tracing, a relatively accurate rendering (Figure 6b) was made.

Despite these methods, and others to be tried such as the use of life-modeling compound to do "peels" of the stones, there will always be ambiguity in details. Therefore, multiple alternate reconstructions are the last stage in the process (Figure 4). The "variant" original field polyethylene tracings stand as "graphic predictions" to be confirmed or discontinued as new techniques are utilized, or novel examples are uncovered. Only by testing variants can a "dialog with the dead" be carried on in a predictive manner in arte rupestre.

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Of Problem Orientation and the Serendipity of Discovery

The problem orientation for the Caguana project was two-fold: (1.) to obtain comparative data for a generative grammar of petroglyphs and the inventory of their motifs for the island, as part of an on-going effort to define rock art style-provinces, and (2.) to check the chronological inferences which I had made for the Maisabel petroglyphs (Roe 1991 a, 1993a) against the lithographic art of the later Taino prehistoric ceremonial site. The results, however, raised an issue that had not originally been a part of the research design: the discovery of cross-media design layouts isomorphic in conception between incised Taino stonework (on sculptural "idols" and petroglyphs) and incised ceramics. "Hidden" within the design fields of the major component body parts of the lithographic (anthropomorphic and zoomorphic) depictions were classic BocaChicadesigns! Specifically, the wing element of the "egret" (Petroglyph 7) depicted to the right of the Goddess (the "Frog Lady," Petroglyph 9) is treated as an analogous design field to the sub-rim, above-carination field of the most common form of restricted "Chicoid" (Chican Ostionoid) bowls (see Figure 8). Both fields are filled with similar triangle and roundel design layouts. There were to be other unanticipated discoveries on the "syntactic" and the "semantic" levels of this figure as well, as we shall shortly see.

A Famous Subject: The Frog Lady

The Frog Woman of Caguana is Puerto Rico's most famous petroglyph. One reason forthis pictorial prominence is its unusual state of preservation. Alegría, the director of restoration at the Caguana (Capá) site, explains its pristine character by noting that it, and the other large flanking menhirs, fell forward into the plaza, that is, on their faces. This was due to their aboriginal method of support (the wedging of small rocks at the monument's rear). Thus their fallen condition effectively protected the carved faces from weathering and collector-vandal discovery (Alegría 1983:79), at least until their re-erection.

A more significant reason for the prominence of this petroglyph is that it is the most complex full-figure anthropomorphic lithograph surviving relatively intact from the island. However, if my reconstruction is correct, her "consort" the flanking Petroglyph 10 (to "her" left), is even more complex than the Frog Lady (Figure 4). According to Oliver's identification (1992:35), Petroglyph 10 is a male (albeit lacking genitalia). I believe that he is correct for two reasons. Both derive from lowland South Amerindian practice, in sartorial art as in the mythology. Myths are, after all, the verbal art that acts as the "sartorial code's" charter (Roe 1990a). The first reason stems from the lowland practice of making men's equipage more complex than women's. Men dress in plumes and bright bangles (Mentore 1992, on the Waiwai) because they emulate the colorful birds of the middle and upper forest canopy, which are also important spirit beings in their celestial worlds. Thus men transform themselves into ambulatory avian symbols, "microcosms of the layered macrocosm" of their world view (Howard 1991 ). Women, in contrast, dress in the simple, somber colors of terrestrial birds and aquatic life forms in identification with the lower reptilian realms from whence they were "fished up" as primordial Fish Women. What chronicler information we have (Alegría 1992) conforms to this rule by showing how elaborately the caciques dressed while making no mention of similar elaboration for their wives. These reasons alone suggest that the male "ancestor" of Petroglyph 10 should be more complex in his finery than his bactrian consort, Petroglyph 9.

The graphic evidence on the stone itself confirms this as well as the "nesting" of geometric designs within "representational" depictions. Note that the interstices of the female figure's body (Figure 3a), the "negative" spaces between the arms and the thighs and between the ear spools and the crooked arms, are filled with typical Chican geometric designs. They metaphorically play off the roundels of the belly and the ear spools respectively. Her consort's interstitial designs (Figure 4) are also barred, as tier's are, although they are more complex with the addition of nested triangles. Oliver (1992:34) designates these

640 CROSS-MEDIA ISOMORPHISMS IN TAÍNO CERAMICS AND PETROGLYPHS

as "rib" motifs, and he is doubtlessly correct since they occupy the proper anatomical position at the sides of the torso. He decodes these, along with the closed "slit-like" eyes as indicating death or ancestorhood.

I also agree with this supposition but suspect that the meaning of these lines may have been more polysemie than just indicating death. Both cave pictographs on the Island of Mona (most of whose ceramics and associated ball courts are Chican in phase) and Chican Ostionoid woodcarvings, as well as stone and clay sculpture, show a figure with skull-like features, prominent bones and sharply-defined ribs. Paradoxically, he is also often shown, unlike in this case, with an erect and life-like phallus. He is frequently shown seated on a stool, a power object in the lowlands and a shaman's accoutrement par excellence. This "old man" Is frequently also depicted with the elbows-on-knees seated posture used by Carib (e.g., Makiritare a.k.a. Ye'cuana or Yekuana) Culture Heroes when they "think" the world into being. Snuff tablets are found on the heads of such Greater Antillean figures (Stevens-Arroyo 1988:Figure 1?) and other hallucinatory paraphernalia is frequently stashed with these sculptures as cave deposits. Caves appear to have been associated with both the dead and the shamans who accessed them as ancestors (Roe 1991 a:321 ). Since we know that the ecstasy of psychotropic drug-induced hallucinations are likened to both the experience of death and the intense sensations of orgasm, and that there is a close lowland symbolic nexus between sex and death (Roe 1982:160), then these "skeletal" figures may also refer to shamanic ecstasy, and, by extension, communication with non-ordinary beings (spirits).

My argument is that the absence of the penis on the Caguana petroglyph does not mean that this masculine figure lacks it, rather that the organ is "hidden/' representing the restraint of the marriage rules. The Guianan myths make it clear that this figure is a Solar analog (his elaborate double diadem=feather headdress alone signifies that). The Sun often uses animal and avian intermediaries to have sex with his "fishy" bride because he knows the disastrous consequences of unbridled lust. His younger brother, the Moon, lacked such restraintand loses his member, "devoured" by the vaginadentataoühe Fish-Frog Lady. In the Yekuana myths the wise Sun-figure Wanad/'shows his control by first having an egret penetrate her vagina with his long, sharp and hard beak, letting her piranha offspring blunt their teeth on his proxy's "iron" appendage. Then, the Sun uses the "Generative Culture" skills of fish poisoning to extract her ophldian-fish-like progeny and consúmate the marriage himself. No wonder the restrained "masculine" petroglyph lacks a phallus while his seductive "bride" displays her genitals!

The second reason why I agree with Oliver's assignment of male sex to Petroglyph 10 is his decoding of the enigmatic " I " shaped object below the figure's posterior and between his legs as a "stool" (Oliver 1992:36). Not only does this object look like Guianan stools, such as the Walwai aio but it coheres with the sexual identification established above since only men use stools. Women in the Guianas, as in the lowlands generally, either sit directly on the ground or on woven mats placed on the ground. This is in accordance with the "positional code" of comportment which redundantly establishes the equation, Men:Above::Women:Below This spatial relationship is also demonstrated in how hammocks are slung in a house, a man slinging his above his wife's. Powerful men like caciques, shamans and elders are especially linked to their stools as "seats of power" in both the sacred and the secular sense. Indeed, elaborately wrought carved wooden seats, duhos, always anthropomorphic or theriomorphlc in design, are a frequent' and very elaborate Chican artifact type (Rouse 1992:Figure 31 g). Therefore, the fact that he is seated on a stool supports the masculine identification of the Frog Lady's consort.

Details present above the ear spools (Rouse 1992:Figure 28 top) indicate that this figure had a double crown, as does the slightly earlier El Bronce precursor (Roe 1991a:Figure 14b). The "wrapped ancestor," another well-preserved "crowned" figure along this alignment, has a complex alternating zigzag design layout in his incised and excised crown (Figure 3b). The preserved line departing from

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above Petroglyph 10's left ("his" left) ear spool indicates the beginning of one such diagonal line separating the triangles. Therefore, I have reconstructed the elaborate crown of Figure 4 in a similar way, that is, on alignment-internal evidence. These interstitial designs of the male figure are half-present and only need to be transversely reflected, as I have done, to complete them. Lastly, the complex diagonality of the male's preserved interstitial designs mirrors the equally complex diagonality of his crown motif, which I have had to reconstruct, thus lending some support to that reconstruction on figure-internal evidence. If I am correct, the pairgraphicallyreflectacommon lowland "form code" equation:Male:Rectilinear::Female:Curvilinear

But this reconstruction must remain a "graphic prediction" since the Frog Lady's consort has suffered from both breakage and weathering. The Frog Lady, in contrast, is well preserved and displays the evident skill of its carver, both on the level of conception and on the level of execution. For these reasons this image is a suitable subject for iconographie speculation, as when Olsen (1974:Figure 43c) identified her with the Taino earth goddess Atabeyra (Attabeira), an identification, with a specific linkage to frogs, water and fertility, also made by Stevens-Arroyo (1988:162).

Yet, despite this repeated portrayal, I was dissatisfied with the verisimilitude of the various published photographs and drawings. Alterations ranged from the "excessively designed" line drawing on the cover of Gómez and Ballesteres's book (1978), with its vertically exaggeration, to the "pictorial overinterpretation" of Olsen's drawing (1974:133), showing a non-existent baby emerging from the belly roundei. Cleariy, more field investigation was needed.'

Is the Media the Message? Art as Material Communication

Before discussing the new renderings it is useful to place the method I am using in its theoretical context. I define "style" as a particular systematic selection, from among known alternative possibilities, of the rules and elements of form to create an affecting presence which is recognizably the product of a given social group in time and space (Roe 1993b). Yet, art style requires a "vehicle," and the media supplies it. The earlier "Boasian" (1955[1927J) perspective, coming as it did from the Germanic technological tradition of Gottfried Semper, regarded the media as primary. This was a case of "technological determinism" that saw many stylistic patterns as "resultant form" from some technical process in a specific medium. This process is exemplified by the role of the "tyranny of warp and weft" (Roe 1989a) in generating similar rectangular designs in twill-weave basketry among otherwise unrelated groups. Such an "over-determined" view is now supplemented With a more idealist framework of technical processes whereby the artisan may be said to be locked in a "dialog" with the raw material (Link 1975). Here original intent, the culturally-stereotyped "goal," interacts with the "inherently perfectible characteristics" of the medium to effect a compromise, the work of art. For example, one may want to carve curvilinear designs across the grain of bamboo, but the bamboo protests, in kinetic feedback, and suggests carving with the grain instead, that is, in rectilinear designs. Noticing th¡s resistance one's goal may shift to accommodate this new material reality.

I argue that cultures that give a central place to art in their cultural style will have artists who tend to "override" the physical properties of a medium, and imprint the same selection of rules and elements upon a whole range of media irrespective of their divergent special properties. Such groups will be very "un-Boasian" in their technique. Their material culture will demonstrate a surprising stylistic uniformity regardless of the medium chosen. The riverine Panoan Shipibo of the Peruvian montaña, is one such group. The structure of their design system comes through remarkably "unfiltered." Shipibo qüëhë (designs) betray a clear genetic similarity across a range of media from incised and painted ceramics, warp-patterned and embroidered textiles and body painting, to diagonal beadwork and woodcarving!

642 CROSS-MEDIA ISOMORPHISMS IN TAfNO CERAMICS AND PETROGLYPHS

DeBoer, also a student of the Shipibo, has found that their stylistic "totalitarianism" is not always emulated by other lowland groups. Now working with the Chachi of the humid Ecuadorian coast, he has shown how they, in contrast to the Shipibo, are very "Boasian." Among the Chachi every medium determines its own sub-style; the various "media styles" are unique, having nothing in common with each other (DeBoer 1991 )! If the Shipibo are prone to turn the "dialogue with the media" into a monologue from the artist's perspective, the Chachi let the media itself determine the course of the conversation. To paraphrase McCluhan, for them the "media really is the message"! I believe such "media monologues" exist because their styles have lost their aboriginal "semantic loading." That is, being now exclusively secular through culture loss, these various "media-styles" are free to go their own way, to die out and be bom again as tourist whims dictate. The Chachi are, as the late prehistoric archaeological record and their own tribal legends reveal, "deculturalized" recent migrants from the adjacent highlands (Tolstoy and DeBoer 1989:302). They now occupy an unenviable position on the bottom of a regionafethic hierarchy {mestizos-blacks-lndians). Moreover, their material culture has suffered progressive simplification, including the disappearance and reappearance of whole media such as backstrap loom weaving, recently reintroduced for the tourist trade (the latter with the instrumental help of Peace Corps personnel)! In contrast, the Shipibo place great cosmic and therapeutic importance on their style (Gebhart-Sayer 1984, 1985), and are secure at the apex of their own emic regional hierarchy (riverine Shipibo-iower tributary Pisquibo-interfluvial Remo Indians-mestizos, cf., Roe 1988). Moreover, the Shipibo enjoy, even today, a comparatively unacculturated status.

What are the consequences of this model for the Taino of the protohistoric Greater Antilles? We know, thanks to the "precocious ethnography" of Fray Ramón Pané) (1974[1498?]), and the labors of many authorities like Alegría (1978), Rouse (1952, 1992), Arrom (1975), and López-Baralt (1977), etc., that religion was of great importance in their chiefdoms, marked as they were by aprofusion of art in multi-media. I therefore predicted, and confirm herein, that the Taino, like the confident Shipibo, were distinctly "un-Boasian" in their determination to impress the properties and designs of one medium (wood or ceramic' incision) on another (stone incision). Thus, Taino material culture was marked by pervasive "cross-media isomorphisms" that stood as mute evidence of the importance of the centrality and sacredness of their affective material culture.

This was undoubtedly related to another phenomenon that is still alive in the cognate lowland Amerindian cultures of the Guianas. I alliteratively term this mechanism "myth-material cultural mutual referentiality." It is a process first noted by Fock (1963:92, n.5) among the Cariban Waiwai. He found that speaking of an item of material culture invoked the myth that it illustrated, while eliciting the myth called up a demonstration of the material item that is the myth's tautological "empirical" evidence (Roe 1989a).

But Boas had many ideas, and most have fared better than his technological determinism. He also noted that traditional groups tend to have a "paramount media" (my terms). This is a media in which they excel above all others, and which therefore tends to impress its properties on their art's general principles, including those executed in other media. An example of such media paramouncy is the preeminent role of woodcarving among the Northwest Coast peoples. This medium "conditioned" their stylistic expression in everything from Chilcat blankets to cedar bark hats (Holm 1965). The "paramount media," in turn, tends to reflect group ecology and resource orientation. For the riverine Shipibo, for example, it is pottery; for the upper tributary and backwoods Waiwai, it is twill-weave basketry. These are products of the floodplain and the forest respectively. I suspect that the paramount medium for the Taino was woodcarving and, by extension, bone and shell carving. Therefore, since incising in clay is analogous to incising on more obdurate media, media paramouncy is yet another reason why a cross-media relationship is demonstrated in their ceramics, shellwork, bone and stone carving.

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The appearance of similar techniques and patterns in divergent media tends to give such traditional societies their visual "harmony," an air of conceptual coherence which on every level redundantly inculcates the central principles of their culture. Cross-media isomorphism therefore also fulfills the subconsciously didactic aspect of culture.

The Aesthetic Syntactics of Petroglyphic Statements

These traditional art styles have a formal order which is amenable to componential and generative grammatical analysis, both as a way of paraphrasing known layouts within the extant archaeographic or ethnographic corpus, and as a method for predicting new layouts when, and if, the analyzed corpus is expanded via new excavations or fieldwork (Raymond, DeBoer and Roe 1975). Utilizing parsimoniously-formulated design elements, rules and motifs as a heuristic, the analyst constructs "kernel design layouts," primitive combinations or "visual statements" that yield higher-order transformations with the addition of single new rules or recursive steps in the application of established rules (Roe 1980:Figure 8).

An interest in reconstructing and/or depicting whole series of Taino design layouts goes back to Perez de Silva and de Hostos (1981 [1939]) and has been carried on into more recent times (Gómez and Ballesteros 1978:104, figuring from Priego). An ordering of design derivations in related sets has also appeared (Jiménez Albertus 1972), although these sets have not been arranged generatively in linked derivational chains. To remedy this omission on the level of the "ancestral" styles to the Chican Ostionoid and Esperanzan Ostionoid, I have hypothesized some of those chains as a way of distinguishing between Cedrosan and Huecan Saladoid design grammars (Roe 1989b: Figure 52). I have also applied the aesthetic syntactic method to Elenan representational petroglyphs (Roe 1991a: Figure 35).

The last design layout in that chain is like those infinite horizontal band designs found on the above-carination design field of Boca Chica style restricted bowls (García Arévalo 1977:17). It appears in virtually identical form as the head-band on an anthropomorphic three-pointer's forehead (Arrom 1975: Figura 33). In Figure 8a-d it appears adapted to form the body and neck of the bird petroglyph by rotating one of the transverse-reflected, concave-faced triangles flanking the central roundel ninety degrees above that body roundel. Thus the wing joint roundel becomes both a "joint" and an "eye" with the tapering wing element extending from it. An avimorphic ceramic effigy vessel from La Altagracia in the Dominican Republic (Alegría 1978:80) has that design layout in the same wing element as the Caguana petroglyph! Similar treatments of the wings of carved stone sculptural birds, termed "idols" in the literature, are all closely cognate (Fewkes 1907: Figure 37). The Long-Beaked Bird also appears on three-pointers (Arrom 1975:37, from Puerto Rico). One such three-pointer has the bird-with-wing-element and displays a cognate design motif to that of the Caguana bird's wing (Fewkes 1907:Figure 20). Analogous wing treatment appears in carved bone avimorphic vomiting spatulas (Caro Alvarez 1977b:23,25), on the wing of a carved wooden idol from the Greater Antilles depicting the Long-Beaked Bird (Rouse 1948:Plate 89h), and on a carved manatee bone artifact from Puerto Rico depicting the same bird (Rodríguez López 1989: Figura 9c)

We know that roundels with a central punctate, in anthropomorphic as well as theriomorphic Taino carvings, represent joints (Arrom 1975: FiguraZ; Caro Alvarez 1977a:29). Moreover, there are examples of the eye being treated in a similar manner as Figure 8d, with a roundel-and-punctate. This is significant because current Guianan Carib groups like the Waiwai regard the joints of the body as "eyes" that look into it. They are doorways through which spirit influences can enter and leave the body. Joints are, after all, "openings" since when one butchers an animal one disarticulates it, "opens it up," at the joints. Another use for the roundel is to indicate the pregnant belly of a woman in a ceramic Boca Chica effigy bottle from the Dominican Republic (García Arévalo 1977:20, also pictured in Alegría 1978:Figura 11). In this example

644 CROSS-MEDIA ISOMORPHISMS IN TAINO CERAMICS AND PETROGLYPHS

the belly roundel with its central navel becomes 'Ihe torso's eye." It parallels the Frog Woman of Caguana's belly motif. While Olsen was clearly wrong in his drawing (1974:Figure 43d) of the belly roundel representing the head of an emerging infant, he was not far from the mark since the roundel locates the womb of this were-amphibian female. The same organization occurs on the "womb-hump" of the famous ceramic male figurine which Arrom has identified with the mythic figure of Deminán Caracaracol (Arrow 1975:Plates 56-57). Modern Guianan ethnography of the Yekuana, a Cariban group closely related to the Waiwai (Guss 1989), reveals how even purely "geometric" designs carry rich iconographie meaning. Hence, I believe that the importance of the roundel in all Taino art, and on the two main petroglyphs discussed herein, derived from the fact that it represented an "opening" toward spiritual ingress-egress into/out of the body; it was a portal for the illumination of the soul.

The application of this interpretation to the stelae at Capá reveals hitherto unnoticed features. First, with reference to the Diosa de Caguana (Figure 3a), notice that while previous renderings had not shown them clearly, the Frog Lady has two pendant breasts. They are portrayed as triangles with a "cleavage triangle" between them. All these motifs are connected to the belly roundel with its central punctation indicating the navel. The cleavage triangle has a much smaller centrally-nested triangle within it. When the image is turned 90 degrees (and viewed horizontally, that is, using "anatropic organization"), the belly roundle with flanking cleavage triangle becomes analogous to the similar body roundel of the Long-Beaked Bird1 (Figure 7a) and its flanking triangles. The faces of these triangles become concave through the application of a "conformational rule" as they visually interact with thedominant roundel. These two designs, in turn, are transparent echoes of one common Boca Chica layout (Figure 8b), consisting of the,central roundel-with-punctate, flanked symmetrically by conformationally-altered concave-faced triangles with smaller nested triangles and paired curved-line segments. Similar spaces between body parts also form triangles which are filled in turn with serially-positioned, slightly curved lines, such as the "negative" spaces between the torso and the "displayed" arms and legs of the Frog Woman. The interstitial triangle formed by the space between her male consort's arms and ear spools creates a similar design (Figure 4).

In terms of Taino phase stylistic diagnostics, the Diosa de Caguana and her consort have the "V" shaped forehead (hairline) motif as well as the semi-circular crown diadems and the round earplugs with central punctations that echo the belly roundel (Roe 1991 a). Among the Guianan Waiwai the vertical zones of the body are coded as a "cosmological body" in feather art. The somatic geography mirrors in a "microcosm-macrocosm" fashion, the vertical structure of their stacked universes (Roe 1990a:Figure 5). Applying this recapitulation to the Frog Woman supports the assumption that such "upper body" features as her diadem and ear plugs indicate special status (as in a high-ranking supernatural). The result of the "V" hairline is to create a "heart-shaped" face, as in Figures 3b, 5a-c, and 6b from the same row, including the' "wrapped ancestor" of Figure 3b4, a sure Taino petroglyphic diagnostic. Unlike the earlier Elenan petröglpyhs, this Taino depiction also indicates the nose in a flattened manner, emphasizing the wings of the nostrils. Lastly, the "goggle" eyes, which are connected, form a negative hourglass figure at the nose bridge.

It is with the Frog Lady's "companion," the Long-Beaked Bird, however, that the transparent relationship between banded geometric deisgn organization and free-floating, or uninclosed, stylized Taino designs becomes evident. Both the bird's neck and its tail are really just the transverse-reflected concave faced triangles referred to above. They derive from Boca Chica inifinite horizontal band layouts. The central roundel (Figure 8a-d) acts as the pivoting point. One of the flanking elements is rotated 90 degrees (8c), becoming the neck of the bird while its horizontally-reflected counterpart turns into the tail. Parenthetically, this "kernel statement" in the style has, I believe, great antiquity and can be traced back to Saladoid design motifs and layouts (Figure 8e) via a"derivational chain" reinforcing Rouse's (1986) reconstruction of a direct in situ "devolution" of artistic modes.

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But What does it Mean? The Iconography of a Petroglyphic Frieze

These methodological and formal levels are just the heuristic ''enabling technology" of a cultural analysis. More comprehensive interpretation must also invest form with meaning. Fortunately, what defines the "protohistorical" period in the Greater Antilles, immediately predated by these petroglyphs, are early, albeit often garbled, chronicles on Taino society and culture5. Based on analogy with my own ethnographic field work in lowland South America, from the Shipibo of the Peruvian montaña in the southwest of the Amazon to the Cariban Waiwai of the Guianas on the northeast, as well as closely-cognate Guianan Yekuana mythology. We can supplement and extend Pane's fragments. His "mythlets" are mere fragments of, and frequently compound, whole cycles of South Amerindian myths. An understanding of the latter can tie together the verbal and the visual arts in the ancient Caribbean. These connections also suggest why the Caguana images were so sacred that redundant "cross-media" designs had to embellish them.

We know that a South Amerindian group may have multiple theories on such important questions as the origin of women. These theories all cohere, however, with "androcentric gestation" concepts which picture females as secondary "artifacts" created from Nature by Proto-Cultural masculine Culture Heroes or their theriomorphic damodedes (to use the Yekuana equivalent of avatars), like the Yellow Jaguar. Yet all the disparate theories (the Wooden Bride, the Fish-Frog-Turtle Woman, the Feminine Food Tree, the Gourd Woman, etc.) are part, as mythemes, of a vast transformational cycle that links each zooeme with the next (Roe 1982:Figure 4). In all of these mythic cycles women are linked with water and are conceived of as soft, round, and hollow containers.

Yet these slippery First Females are not without their dangers. While sex is graphically and enthusiastically described, with many of the metaphors used in the myths being biological ones of the most explicit kind, paradoxically there exists a pervasive pattern of sexual antagonism in the lowlands. Perhaps, This is due to the absolute mutual dependency that is forced upon each sex by the other within the context of a ubiquitous, and similarly-organized, sexual division of labor. This "iron embrace" simultaneously segregates certain tasks for each sex, while at the same time it makes their functions mutually complementary. Thus, each sex can accuse the other of not doing its share and view itself as being exploited. Women complain that men do not hunt-fish enough; men grumble that their women are demanding and shrewish. Against the backdrop of this constant domestic friction the pattern of stereotyped, public sexual antagonism arises as a psychological mechanism for depersonalizing the conflict. The debate shifts from the domestic stage of the abused wife and aggrieved husband to an impersonal "battle of the sexes" enacted publically, and ceremonially, in the village plaza. This antagonism is also reflected insexual residential segregation (men'shuts), masked masculine dancers with phallic flutes whose secrets are proscribed to women under sanction of gang rape, theories of the polluting aspects of menstruation, etc. In this context of attraction-repulsion the eagerly anticipated and widely-engaged-in, indeed institutionalized, extramarital affairs become "anxious pleasures" (Gregor 1985) indeed.

I have also suggested that this ambivalence toward sex derives from the fact that intercourse conceptually converts "masculine" entities into "feminized" entities (what was hard becomes soft, whatwas dry becomes wet, cf., Roe 1982:172). The hidden anxiety such a "sex change" entails is reflected in the pervasive lowland mytheme of the vagina dentata arid murderous Forest Ogres or Aquatic Seducers "armed" with outsized and/or deadly genitalia. Of these aquatic, seductive, but dangerous, women, the Frog Woman Seductress comes equipped with a vagina dentataor its structural inverse, a muscular vagina that elongates men's phalli excessively, rather than truncating them (shortening them excessively). Thus the lengthened organ becomes the Anaconda-like ambulatory phallus, cf., Roe 1992. Another "primordial

646 CROSS-MEDIA ISOMORPHISMS IN TAÍNO CERAMICS AND PETROGLYPHS

female," the Fish (Piranha) Mermaid, daughter-lover of the Anaconda-Caiman "Dragon" (Roth 1915), is similarly armed6. Men, in myth, avoid these dangers by copulating with passive "hollow women" (Gourd Women, Turtle Women, etc.). Mythically, men thus abrogate gestation for themselves. The fetus becomes a congealing mass of repeated male ejaculations; it has to be actively "constructed" by numerous acts of copulation in which the active partner is the male. Not only do these concepts explain the lowland patern of "plural genitors", post-partum food taboos and the couvade, but they relegate the feminine role to that of a purely passive "container" within an official masculine ideology of public "Generative Culture" power.7

Most of these "artifactual women" are present in Pane's accounts of Greater Antillean Proto-Cultural (Roe 1988 for terms) origin. Indirectly (Stevens-Arroyo 1988:88), the rebellious Yayael'ssecondary burial in a suspended gourd becomes, via the intercession of a female (his mother), a "Gourd Mother" of fish and a World FJood. Here reference to the masculine "appropriation" of gestation in the lowlands in the form of theskull as "bony womb"(Roe1991 b)becomes necessary to understand why Vayae/'sbones, sequestered in a gourd, become fish when the gourd is ruptured. We also need this lowland metaphor to comprehend a similar act of masculine appropriation in the hallucinogen-laden mucus=metaphoric semen8-induced swelling on the back of the syphilitic Deminán Caracaracol. His brothers perform a "caesarian section" upon this reversed "masculine womb" (hard, on the back/not soft, in the belly) using stone axes (Stevens-Arroyo (1988:125), as one would attack a tree and, by extension, the Wooden Bride. Their labors yield the round, hard, hollow, casque of the bony-encased Turtle Woman, also of lowland Carib (Waiwai)9 symbolic affinity.

In addition, the related Antillean Gourd Mother plays the role of the truncated World Tree=Food Tree=Wooden Bride of South America. It is the "Mother" (origin) of the Sea, in another Taino version of the advent of the World Flood and fish (1988:103). Since this time the "fractured=cataclysmic birth" out of the gourd is mediated by males, this myth is a direct inversion of the previous tale, which was mediated by a woman. The linkage is double : not only are women aligned with water and floods (in the language of analogy they are more "watery" than men, being associated with the multiple liquids of menstrual blood, the water of parturition, and mother's milk), but the round gourd breaks like the doomed ancestress Itiba Cahubaba.

From the Gourd Woman and the Turtle Woman it is a short metaphoric "hop" to the Frog Woman and the Fish Woman in Taino verbal and visual art. The links are, again, the syphilitic tricksters, the Caracaracols, water and a "descent" from trees. I argue that the South Amerindian Wooden Bride is metaphorically the "tree" from which the Antillean Proto-Women descended10. She too has an "inoperative vagina." The Cellulose Lady and the Fish Woman are incomplete and they are both excessively natural. These natural connections also explain the linkage between disease and women, mediated, as it is in the lowlands, by the analogy drawn between mensutration and rot/fermentation. To paraphrase the central myth from Pané (1974[1499?]:27-28): Men without women are bathing in water, rain comes and, being lusty, they search for women, finding slippery Eel (Proto)-Women slithering in a tree (Stevens-Arroyo 1988:168-169).

Could these women of Pane's account be some transformation of the Frog Woman? There seems to be some basis for this inference since the men of the myth find "sexless creatures," Proto-Women with "uncarved"=inoperative vaginas descending from the trees. Trees are the natural domain of tree frogs who announce themselves particularly after a rain. Moreover, these creatures are wet and slippery, like frogs, but are likened to another cold, "fishy" life form; they are described as appearing like eels11. The men cannot hold onto the squirming "Proto-Women" and call in the scabarous Caracaracols, whose grippy palms hold them fast while the Woodpecker Inriri Cahubabayaelpecks proper vaginas with his phallic beak. The bird thinks the creatures are logs, thus making the Wooden Bride reference even clearer. As a result of this "somatic carpentry" the Indians first acquire "real" women.

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These "Fish Women" join the other "real" woman of Taino mythology, the similarly "artifactual" Turtle Woman cut out of a parturitive male with stone axes. This coupling suggests that the Turtle Woman is a variant of the Wooden Bride, as are the Fish-Eel Women, since they are all hewn from wood, or hewed as if they were wood. The carvers are men or masculine damodedes like the Woodpecker who utilize their naturefactual "axes." Among the Guianan Waiwai, the Woodpecker's beak is mythically likened to his own (naturefact) stone "axe" (Roe 1985).

So tight is this redundant mythic "net" of symbolism, that we can pursue such a "Wooden Bride" interlude, through the shared Jobo (tree, Spondias /utea)=Honey (tree)=Sex nexus12, to the similar role of the "Celestial Bird" (masculine, solar-symbol), the Crimson-Crested Woodpecker of the Yekuana of Guiana.13

But the "Long-Beaked Bird" of the Caguana petroglyphs, pictorially cannot be a Woodpecker. Perhaps it is an even longer-beaked Phallic Bird which acts as a Woodpecker? One candidate is the White Egret, also a major character in Yekuana mythology. It is another masculine Solar Bird whose long beak "breaks" the teeth of the vagina dentata of the Fish Woman (Civrieux 1980:34)!14The iconography of the "Long-Beaked Bird" to the right (the appropriate masculine lowland direction, from her point of view) of the Frog Woman at Caguana, its tall legs, and its long beak and rear-projecting crest (Figure 7a), all argue for an Egret. The same species of White Heron or Egret which acts as the solar bird "tooth breaker" of the Guianas exists in Puerto Rico. It is the Common Egret {Casmerodius albus egretta) (Biaggi 1974:Lámina 12), as well as analogous species such as the Snowy Egret (Leucophoyx thula thula) (1974±árnina 13). However, I believe the bird that was represented in the Caguana petroglyph was a different species from these slightly-built, white forms. Analogy and iconographie evidence suggest it was the West Indian Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias adoxa), which nevertheless has prominent circular patches of white on its folded wings15- This decoding derives from the lowland pattern of utilizing the largest exemplar of each order as the "species paragon" for the entire set in myth16. In addition, the degree of crest formation on this species matches the exaggerated crest on the Caguana petroglyph. Therefore, I argue that the placement of these two stelae was not accidental. Instead they compose a "frieze," a "petrified" scene from a central myth of the primordial creation of women.

Too long have petroglyphs been treated as isolated "statements" in prehistoric art. Fortunately, we are now beginning to envision, in at least certain contexts, the possibility that spatially-related petroglyphs may be syntagmatically related as characters in the successive episodes of myths; verbal art made stone. Earlier (Roe 1991a), I argued that another lowland South Amerindian mythic "scene" is represented in Antillean petroglyphs, precisely the one just mentioned, the 'The Sun's Fish Trap." I decoded this mytheme in aseries of related "beach rock petroglyphs" from the preceding Elenan phase at the Maisabel site (Figure 9). Since whole scenes are present in Hispañolan Tainan cave pictographs (Pagan Perdomo 1978), one should not be surprised to find them in Puerto Rican beach and ball park petroglyphs. While I have isolated another "phrase" from the later Caguana petroglyphs in the western alignment at that site, Oliver (1980, 1991,1992) has gone much further than I have to speculatively "decode" the entire Taino cosmology from this site and the specific sequence of petroglyphs in the alignment. While it is inevitable that one could quibble with some of the specific chalked-in photographs that he used to deduce that cosmology, or with specific assignments as to creature or spirit represented in his reconstruction, I believe that the essential outlines of his synthesis are true.

Nowhere is the persuasiveness of Oliver's system better illustrated than in his decoding of the cosmological "centrality"of the cacique (1992:37) as represented by the "liminal" Petroglyph 11 (Figure 5a). To the cacique's right lie the ancestral set, the Frog lady and her consort the "Solar" Elder Brother of the

648 CROSS-MEDIA ISOMORPHISMS IN TAINO CERAMICS AND PETROGLYPHS

Magical Twins, cf., Roe 1982, with their closed enigmatic "'dead eyes," elaborate crowns and displayed/ occluded sexuality. To his left stand the wide-eyed "live", young, "asexual=prepubescent" pair of Bactrian

r Twins - see Figures 5b and c, reconstructed from his chalked-in photographs, Petroglyphs 12 and 13. Are these slippery children Pane's 'Sweeping" abandoned children of the First Women who became bactrians and whose incessant crying became the shrill, but beautiful, "Din" of the chirping Tree Frogs?

The Last "Hop" in the Symbolic Pond: From Fish Woman to Frog Lady

The remaining link in this transformational chain is the one between the slippery, cold, and aquatic Fish Woman to the equally slippery, cold and aquatic Frog Lady. This association offers no problem in the lowlands since in many native ethnotaxonomies scaly fish and scaly reptiles-amphibians are grouped together as water denizens. Moreover, all of these life forms can appear as seductresses armed with vaginas dentatas (Roe 1992)! However, there is a Caribbean caveat. The "hurdle" for the hopping Frog Woman comes in the apparent Greater Antillean "disjunction" between the media and what they represent. We have the Fish Woman in verbal art (Pane's Eel Women myth), but not in plastic art (stone carving). In contrast, we lack the Frog Woman in verbal art, but have her abundantly represented in plastic art (the Caguana glyph). Either a real cultural "complementary distribution" of these "scaly women" was recorded by Pané, or, more probably, his slim volume did not capture the full richness of Taino verbal art, nor did it include all of that art's mythemes and the full transformational cycles that modern Guianan mythology reveals. Perhaps the Frog Woman tales are simply missing in Pane's account.

Since the Frog Woman of Caguana appears in the western alignment, and the west is linked to women in the South Amerindian lowlands,17 as cardinal orientations are linked to calendrics, and calendrics to ethnoastronomy and the heliacal rising and setting of constellations, then Stevens-Arroyo's theories of a linkage between the Frog and the wet season, and planting, may also be true. We know that among the Waiwai the Frog constellation is a harbinger of the rainy season (Roe 1985), and that among other groups the Seductive Frog Lady is a prominent Star Woman (e.g., Wilbert 1978:209, where the night sky is the watery diurnal Underworld, Roe 1982). Therefore, by playing the ball game, while being watched over by the Frog Woman and her "artificer," the Heron, also a "rain/1 constellation,18 the Taino may have been ceremonially reenacting the shifts of the seasons and the continued subsistence of humans in a "ritually-regulated" cosmos.

Petroglyphic Scenes" as Evidence for Socio-Political Evolution

I have already offered a hypothesis about the association of certain kinds of material culture with specific forms of political organization (1989b, 1993a,b). Among tribal groups like the first Saladoid arrivals to the island I have proposed a pattern of "village specialists" who have mastered complex crafts like polychrome ceramics. Judging from current groups with similarly complex pottery traditions, like the Shipibo, the cognoscenti audiences that patronized such specialists demanded, and appreciated, novelty within a tradition of a material culture of "personal presentation." This is a kind of material culture where the artifacts presented, as in feast contexts, are small in scale, because they are meant to be appreciated close-up, and tend to be kinetic in function (rattle bases, whistling spots, etc.), because they function in service. In contrast to utilitarian ware, artifacts within such a fine ware are also creative in design. Such a material culture serves to display the cultivated nature of the host and the esteemed position of the guest in feasts which have multifaceted import in the lowlands: everything from trade and political alliance to marital alliance. The presentation of such artifacts reveals the "culture" of the individual and highlights his/her unique "assertive style" —à la Wiessner (1983).

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There is even evidence of ethnic specialization at this early time, the exotic stone processing centers of the Huecan Saladoid, as ethnic trading "enclaves" (?), are fully comparable with the Hacienda Grande phase jewel-like pottery production centers within the cognate Cedrosan Saladoid series. This is so because the rare, small-scale, exquisite "jewelry" produced by Huecan Saladoid artisans were analogous, in another media, to the small, precious, highly-wrought artifacts of clay in the Cedrosan Saladoid inventory. Since the latter style employed false negative, varying line width, and curvilinear motifs that are inappropriate in any other media than painting, we may conjecture that the "dominant media" for them was body painting, while the La Hueca style hints at woodcarving as the paramount media for that sub-series

During the "Epi-Saladoid" periods (Tibes-Monserrate) we see a progressive simplification in the pottery with first polychrome and false-negative painting dropping out and then even monochromatic painting disappearing. Incision assumes increasing decorative importance, until in the "pre-Taino" styles of Santa Elena and Punta Ostiones the simplification is almost total with only modeled-appliqued and incised layouts remaining. The latter are often reduced to just a set of vertical incised lines. This cultural "interregnum" may have been rather like a period of Kroeberian "Pattern Exhaustion," a lull between two major style cycles. Recently, Curet (1992) has argued that this very simplification in the pottery represents a process of incipient social complexity where the domain of simple earthenware pottery is "losing" symbolism at the same time as monumental stone work is mirroring increasing "communal ceremonies" such as the Ball Game. Independently (Roe 1993b) I have made the same argument forthe"crossing©over" of the locus of symbolism from "egalitarian" pottery to the implicit stratification represented by monumental stone carving and large architectural features as heralding the emergence of the "incipient chiefdom" out of the "complex tribe."

Thus it is not a paradox that during this Elenan and Ostionan time ecological adaptation to an insular environment was achieved through increased dependence on shellfish protein. A demographic expansion and a consequent explosion of sites coupled with an accelerated movement inland that was first initiated in Cuevas times resulted. Thus, based on association and stylistic arguments, it was at this time (800-1200 A.D.) that petroglyphs came in, a new media related to the simultaneous appearance of small ball courts (as at Tibes, cf., González.Colón 1984). This "changing of gears" represented a switch from the earlier material culture of "personal presentation" to a later display of "public power." One might further speculate that this transition probably marked an evolutionary stage of the "incipient chiefdom" out of the "complex tribes" of Epi-Saladoid times. Note that this is also the time that Puerto Rico becomes divided in two culturally, in the Santa Elena (east coast)/Punta Ostiones (west coast) pattern. Perhaps this insular bifurcation reflects emerging political poles centered, for the first time, on Rouse's (1986) "strait" model.

By Taino times the ball parks had grown large and complex while the small, often head-only, and crude Elenan Ostionan petroglyphs had turned into full-body, large and well executed figures such as those seen at Caguana (Roe 1993a). The increasing elaboration of large-scale stone carving, as in yokes, elbow-stones, big three-pointers (all made of local stone, cf., Walker 1993) is matched by relatively crude pottery marked by modeling and incision. This change of locus of "art," from pottery to monumental stone-carving and public constructions is illuminated by comparative studies that highlight earthenware pottery's nature as an "egalitarian" media unsuited for the new display of cacical power (Miller 1985). In its place stone carving on abundant and locally-available river boulders lent themselves to monumentality and a conspicuous display of power visible from long distances. Petroglyphs thus became the preeminent Greater Antillean art form. It is in that context that these large, frontally-organized "billboard" Caguana petroglyphs functioned. They are what I am calling the "menhir" or "stela type." Thanks to good preservation, we also know this "incising-carving" style was also present in monumental, and even more finely executed paraphernalia of status, such as wooden duhosaná idols. Hence, I take the "paramount

650 CROSS-MEDIA ISOMORPHISMS IN TAINO CERAMICS AND PETROGLYPHS

medium" in Taino art to have been woodcarving, a parallel development to the much earlier situation in Huecan Saladoid. No wonder, then, that we see a significant pattern of "cross-media" relationships between woodcarving, incised ceramics and petroglyphs.

Recently (1990), Abramson, in a cross-cultural structural study of symmetry patterns, has charted the appearance of such frontally displayed figures as the Frog Woman of Caguana. He classifies them as "displayeds" (1990:Figure 1). He notes that while they can be associated with either tribal societies or complex tribal societies evolving into Chiefdoms as isolated motifs,19 the way they are syntactically arranged with other related elements does provide a basis for inferring socio-political evolution from material remains. Specifically, in a manner reminiscent of Fischer's (1961) arguments, Ahramason (1992) notes that if the total configuration is rigidly bilaterally symmetrical, as in a central "displayed" flanked by profile figures "optically" derived from it by transverse reflection, then the design may indicate tribal affiliation. However, if the flanking elements are either asymmetrical or cannot be optically-derived from the central element then a hierarchy of imagery is present and one might infer the artists who produced it cama from more stratified societies such as chiefdoms or early states. An early state example of this asymmetry might be a Hittite frieze with the king flanked by profile lions.

If one consults Oliver's (1992:Figure 5) reconstruction of the total alignment of which the Frog Lady is a part, and if one accepts Oliver's decoding of petroglyph 11 as a portrayal of the Cacique, then we have precisely the asymmetrical, non-commutabie design layout that Abramson finds indicative of incipiently-stratified societies like a chiefdom. This is because the Frog Lady and her consort (Petroglyph 10) are the right-hand (closed-eyed="dead"=ancestral) "flankers" of the cacique (#11), as are the less elaborated (open-eyed, "alive"=descendant) pair on the cacique's left (Petroglyphs 12 and 13). The apparently incomplete representation of the cacique differs from his flankers (most obviously by what Oliver correctly identifies as a guanin pectoral),20 thereby clarifying the flankers non-derivable nature from the central figure. Thus the very form of the Frog Lady argues for the society for which she was a "heraldic" device. Yet, her symbolism harks back to the tribal egalitarian societies Taino society emerged out of. Religious symbolism, no matter what new political ends it is being used to support, is inherently conservative. Indeed, this "art of public power" was still a sacred art after all.

Abramson (Personal Communication, 1992) argues that the mere fact that one can make such a detailed iconographie decoding of a "scene" of petroglyphs is itself an index of socio-political complexity beyond the tribe. 'The fact that you can demonstrate that the art IS representational of mythic material is important, I feel, in considering (the) broader sociocultural structure in the history of these people. Tribal (my Type A) art actually does very little mythic representation. People will say, if one asks, 'Ye(s), that's the original ancestress, etc.,' but that's nor the main thrust of the art. In tribal societies, the art's primary function is to manipulate (transfer back and forth) spiritual substance, information, etc., to and from ancestral and living communities. This is not to say that Type A art people don't have elaborate mythologies- its just that their ART isn't usually and primarily involved with representing elements and events of such myths. So I would say that the complex and profuse iconography which you describe is itself an indication of the sociocultural structure (chiefly) of these people."

CONCLUSIONS

Not only does this discovery show a cross-media imposition of a design system in Taino art,21 and therefore the cultural centrality of the art (and also perhaps its sacred content), this petroglyphic "scene" clearly associates the ball park petroglyphs with the Taino occupation at the site. The subject matter of this petroglyphic "scene" is a transparent portrayal of the Frog Woman Seductress with vagina dentata of

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Guianan and Amazonian ethnographic mythology, together with her Phallic-Beaked deflowerer. The latter iconographie decoding, in turn, sheds light on the debate as to the putative Mesoamerican origins of the ball game in the Greater Antilles (Fernández Méndez 1979:69; Alegría 1983:2). It supports, at most, the stimulus diffusion of the idea of a court from Mesoamerica, but grafted ¡onto a South Amerindian lowlands (Jeff Walker, Personal Communication, 1990), the Frog Woman of Caguana and her Phallic Bird Consort croak and squawk for the parallel evolution in the Greater Antilles of the court they guard. These Caribbean constructions build upon South Amerindian roots where the ball game was played and is still played in the village plaza, without a court. It is the court these petroglyphs adorned and the monumentality of their petrified images, not their semantic content, which was the local invention and remains today one of the glories of a vanished people.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This report is based on fieldwork carried out during May, 1989, supported by the Centro de Investigaciones Indígenas de Puerto Rico and with the encouragement and backing of Dr. Ricardo E. Alegría, Director Ejecutivo of the Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y ei Caribe—(CEAPRC) As the restorer of the Centro Ceremonial de Caguana, Utuado, Puerto Rico and one of the foremost students of the cronistas I gratefully acknowledge his interest and tutelage but absolve him of any responsibility for the ideas expressed herein. My understanding of monumental Taino stonework has also benefited greatly from discussions with Drs. José Oliver and Jeffrey Walker. The author also expresses his gratitude to Sr. Hernón Ortiz and Sr. Geraldo Torres. The former (Ortiz) provided transportation and both volunteered their much-appreciated assistance in the field. Thanks also go to Sr. Bernardo Vega for pointing out to me his precocious recognition of the "wrapped ancestor" in Greater Antillean rock art.

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NOTES

1. While there are the remains of structures on the site (Mason 1941 ), there is some question as to whether Caguana was a residential-ceremonial site or a "vacant ceremonial center" with a small resident population and intermittent ceremonial use (visitation) by adispersed population. Due to the sparsity of refuse and what appears to be hierarchy of central places in the region (Oliver 1992: Figure 1), of which Caguana is the apex, Oliver (1992:6) opts for a purely ceremonial function for the site.

2. I join those who have recognized a systematic correspondence between Antillean art and mythology (visual and verbal art respectively) and the myths of the Amazonian-Orinocan-Essequiboan basins. Alegría (1978:52), Arrom (1975:20-21), López Baralt (1977:27), myself (Roe 1982:158), and, most recently, Stevens-Arroyo (1988:56,114).

I will be using modern Caaaariban groups like the Waiwai and the Uekuana to "decode" ancient Taino ("Island Arawak") iconography. Even though one can describe elements of "Carib Culture" or "Arawak Culture," or sub-systems thereof such as "Carib" or "Arawak Ethnoastronomy," the differences often turn on degrees of emphasis rather than whole systems due to the close historical relationships of these two "peoples" within the Guianan culture area.

Also, ethnographic analogy between live South American Caribs and dead Antillean Arawaks has as much to do with culture-historical exigency than it does with inter-tribal contact. Since the coastal groups suffered early and profound acculturation at the hands of expanding Western colonial society, while the interior peoples remained largely traditional up into the present (both the Waiwai and the Yekuana are "upper tributary-headwater peoples." Being protected by the white frothing "walls" of the falls-lined rivers that cascade off the Guianan plateau, both groups are comparatively less acculturated than their coastal Arawakan brethren, the "Lokono."

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3. Actually, less destructive highlighters like bread flour and water paste work nearly as well as chalk and will not cause exfoliation. This is the contrast-adding agent I have used to highlight Puerto Rican petroglyphs.

4. Contary to the current practice of referring to these figures as "swaddled infants" I have argued, based on burial patterns, that such figures with a lozenge-shaped body and rio limbs indicate a dead person wrapped in a hammock for internment. Since such figures often have "ancestral" connotations, I have referred to them as "wrapped ancestors" (Roe 1991a:335), Bernardo Vega (Personal Communication, 1991) made a similar equation almost two decades ago (Vega 1976:201) referring to dead caciques, based on ethnohistorica! data from Oviedo!

5. indeed, the relationship between the compressed and garbled myths recorded by Pané from the island of Hispañola and the fuller, separate cycles of myths recorded ethnograpicaliy from the Guianas bring to mind a parallel situation cited in Levin-Strauss (1982). He noted the same relationship between the "incomplete" myths of Vancouver island as compared to their Salish mainland counterparts (1982:27) among the Northwest Coast Indians. He also noted that the island myths could not be decoded save by preliminary recourse to their mainland prototypes. Similarly, I suggest that one cannot "decode" Pane's mythlets without recourse to the more complete cycles of myths recorded from related ethnographic groups in the Guianas.

6. The Orinoco delta of the Guianas provides the ethnographic analog of the snaky Eel women (and, probably via his confusion, of the Wooden Bride as well) of Pane's (1974[1498D narrative, as many Caribbeanists have recognized. In that Warao myth the culture hero Var(the Sun) has a woodpecker excavate the vagina of his Wooden Bride. She is the artifact of the old NahakoboniÇ'he who eats much," a probable anthropomorphization of the devouring Caiman-Anaconda Dragon like the Waiwai Urufiri [Roe 1989a], sent by another ogreish father-in-law). But then he has his prospective father-in-law remove a snake, not a piranha, from his potential spouse's newly opened vagina before proper sexual relations can take place (Roth 1915:130-131).

This myth also sees the presence of another "devouring" aquatic creature, the old Frog Hag, who poisons Yar's bride and occasions the "caesarian" birth of the Magical Twins. Roth (1915:135) offers another mytrrfrom the Guianas, this time from the Makushi (Macusi), which has also been recognized by Caribbean scholars as being relevant to their area. In this myth the Caiman (successor to the equally orally-greedy aquatic Lizard), has to placate the Sun for eating his fish kept in a fish trap. He does so by carving a Wooden Bride from the Jobo tree. But his "daughter" is also incomplete, lacking, as she does, a vagina. The Woodpecker must excavate her vagina for the Sun's connubial use. Again the unfortunate bride is impregnated with the Magical Twins, and is killed by the old Frog Hag and a Jaguar. The Twins once again enter the world unnaturally, via the opened belly of their mother.

7. There may be a hidden, parallel, and contradicotry (private, "domestic") female discourse that would either have feigned ignorance of this androcentric position or would actively have made fun of it (Cherenela 1991). However, since the "official" (that is, public) ideology is a male construct, and men were likely the religious specialists and the artists, the ones who were responsible for the Taino myths and the petroglyphs they annotated, one must come to terms with this ancient symbolism using the masculine perspective.

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Here I differfrom Stevens-Arroyo's (1988:117) tortured derivation of thismytheme (Guanguayo) from tobacco juice-infused saliva, despite the fact that the text derives the fecund fluid from the nose, not the mouth, of the old supernatural Bayamanaco. Rather, I believe the swelling on the back of Deminán Caracaracol is the result of the fecund qualities of the string of Cohoba {Anadenanthera peregrina) infused snot (the supernatural equivalent of semen, but ejaculated from above, not below).

There is a qualification in the Waiwai kinship terminology that Arrom used to make this equation of the Turtle with femininity in their mythology. Wayammu, which might be freely translated as a stereotyped endearment, "my little turtle," is a reciprocal term of address for "potential spouses," and therefore applies to both men and women. However, a contextual analysis of this affinal term would highlight the feminine qualities of the Turtle in Waiwai thought.

There is even some comparative evidence from northern South America that appears to echo the link between the Woodpecker and this "implicit" Proto-Woman in the Greater Antilles. This linkage is the feminine Food Tree as Fruit Tree (Roe 1982:139), its globular, juicy, soft fruits form so many pendant breasts. In Yekuana myth the femine Food Tree;-the original having been owned by the Yuca Mistress, and the cutting of which was planted by a woman, is therefore also a kind of Wooden Bride. "She" is attacked by the Crimson-Crested Woodpecker, hence actually by WanaoVhimself, who is the only bird to succeed iri cutting "her" down (Civrieux 1980:134). Her fall produces World Floods that carve the rivers like snakes, and in the resulting fertile, moist soil after the waters retreat, the women plant (1980:135).

Eels are ethnotaxonomically related in the South American lowlands to Anacondas, the "Father/Mother" of the Fish Woman. One also notes that the latter has an inoperative vagina as well. Moreover, Eels, Snakes and Worms are expelled from the,"inoperative" (or, should one say "hyper-active") vaginas of the Fish Women by fish poison as frequently as Piranha are.

The Antillean "Women Mad About Jobo Fruit" echoes the .South Amerindian "Woman Mad About Honey", which Lévi-Strauss (1981) also links with the Clinging Frog Woman, dribbling saliva from her wide mouth. Both substances are, after all, excessively raw (uncooked) and seductive (sweet) natural foods emblematic of the classic equation Women: Nature: Men: Culture. The Gê area across the Amazon to the south of the Guianas continues the identification between the Red-Crested Woodpecker and the Sun, where the "hat" of the Woodpecker becomes the red headdress of the Sun (Wilbert 1978:41, on the Craho). Thus we find in the same region that the Sun obtains his honey from the Woodpecker (1978:51, on the Apinayé). Stevens-Arroyo (1988:144) has already pointed out that the Jobo fruit is regarded, even today, as a symbol of socially-irreponsible pleasure in the Greater Antilles. Honey (of the same golden color as the juicy fruit) is depicted in the same way in the Amazonian and Guianan lowlands.

The Woodpecker falls into the class of what I call "Celestial Birds" (Roe 1990a). This is because it is a diurnal bird and exhibits both strong/rapid flight and Light/bright colors. Colors, like the crimson it carries on its crest, are identified with fire and more specifically, the fire of the Sun's Scarlet Macaw Headdress (Roe 1985). The Yekuana have the son of the Sun, Wanadi, actually turn into the Scarlet-Crested Woodpecker when he rescues his Fish Woman bride (Civrieus 1980:40), his spirit leaving its form for all the living Woodpeckers.

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The White Heron is notdirectly linked with the Sun, buthe is indirectly so associated in Yekuana mythology probably because being a water bird he could not be related directly to the owner of water's "antidote," fire. Specifically, The White Heron is the double of the good White Men, the Iranavi. They are generous like the Sun and are considered to be his children. The Heron is not the embodiment of evil White Men, the Fañuru (note the dualism), who are stingy like the Moon. Since the culture hero, Wanadi, is the son of the Sun (a Sun double), and his "Celestial Bird" is the Crimson-Crested Woodpecker {Phlococcastes melanoleucos, d.f., Civrieux 1980:193), the "Celestial Bird" of the Good White Man should also be equated with the Sun's Son's Bird.

The Heron is a phallic bird, associated with women and their aquatic realm. Hence it is the ideal "third sex" figure (Roe 1982) to act as a seducer-deflowerer-preparer of the Fish Woman.

While notwhite in color, this large Heron has prominent white patches, most particularly around the top of the folded wing. It may not be a coincidence that this patch of white plumage forms a nearly-complete circle of contrasting white-and-black feathers against the celestial blue body color of the big bird. That feathered circle may be what is referenced in the body roundel of Figure 7a.

The position that the Gret Blue Heron might be the species depicted on the Caguana petroglyph because it is the only one of the herons to be selected in a "most notable" categroy by modern ornithologists (Rivera Cianchini and Mojica Sandoz 1981:9).

Many investigators, including this one (Roe 1983,1990b), have shown that the east-west axis is the central directional axis in lowland ethnoastronomy (the north/south axis, unlike in Mesoamerica, is weakly developed). Hut entrances, even burial orientations, frequently point to the east (or explicitly avoid the west, cf., Roe, Pantel and Hamilton 1990) since the east is the positive domain of the rising sun. This is because the "new" sun is often conceived to be young, recently reborn from its nocturnal voyage on the dark rivers of the cold subterranean, sub-aquatic Underworld/Night Sky. The Sun rises in the sky, accompanied by its light/bright plumaged solar birds in its celestial canoe. It is paddled in a "womb canoe" until the Sun reaches maturity at the zenith, the point of its maximum vigor and strength in this tropical equatorial zone of direct incidence sunlight. Bu then, continuing the circuit of daily periodicity, the Sun ages as it descends, limping, toward old age and death on the western horizon. There it bleeds (dusky orange light replacing the shining yellow-white light of the zenith) and is swallowed by the feminine Underworld, only to undergo digestion and gestation in that hollow, reptilian "womb". While these gastric events are going on, his quarreling "younger brother", the mutable, waxing-waning Moon, takes his elder brother Sun's place in the night sky, navigating the river of the Milky Way in his own dragonic canoe (Roe 1982).

Utilizing the data of Father Breton (1665) from the Island Carib, Robiou-Lamarche (1990:39) locates the Heron as a triangle of little stars beside Ursa Major. "It appears that this constellation was closely related or formed part of lúkúni-yábura, the canoe-of-the-heron, clearly identified by Breton as the Ursa Major." De la Borde ( 1674) recorded that the men called this constellation Savacu (Sawáku). "When this constellation hid below the horizon, entering into the sea, the Island Caribs believed that sawáku, the name given by the men, leaped to come out and appear on the other side of the horizon. This atronomic phenomenon... was called lachoúbaronné

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sawáku, that is, the 'leap of the celestial heron', and in the meteorological aspect, as believed by the natives, it produced thunderstorms and heavy rains (Breton 1965:165). Since the Heron is a shallows-hunting bird, its symbolism should be aquatic, a fit companion for the Frog Lady of Caguana.

Parenthetically, the most frequently illustrated and similarly-portrayed "displayed" figures (also frontal bas-relief monumental carvings) from the New World come from Manabé on the coast of Ecuador. They are comparable to the Caguana Frog Woman morphologically and in terms of materials, and stone bas-relief, although we do not know their "syntactic" arrangement with other sculpture. They are associated with late chiefdom-level societies (e.g., Manteño, 1990: Figure 3). Abramson classifies the kind of symmetry such "intermediary" societies produce as "Type C" (1990:167), although he does not list the Antillean Taino in his chart (1990: Fig. 13).

However, in a more recent paper (Abramson 1992) and in a Personal Communication (1992) he makes the observation that total spatial organization and the raw materials chosen for such architectural features may further elucidate the "social symbolism" of particular figures such as the Frog Lady and her associates." . . . I . . . did know that the (Taino) (we)re a chiefly society, and in this respect am not at all surprised that they have the same general hamlets-around-ritual-centers-w/plazas various people have described from the New Guinea highlands, Mayans, Polynesians, Amerind Moundbuilders... etc. The breakup of tribal villages (themselves typically coherently structures...), in which old-tribal subgroups (perhaps segementary lineages) dispers(e) into hamlets and ritual-administrative centers (...typically with stelae and plazas of stone rather than wood statuary) seems to be a standard feature in the changeover from acephalous tribal to chiefdom and town cultures." These "lithic statements" from Caguana seem to conform to Abramson's general premise.

While we do not know exactly out of what material this pectoral was made out of, I like Oliver's decoding of guanin, the red-orange gold-copper alloy called tumbaga in the South American Intermediate Area, for several reasons. The first is positional. As Oliver (1992:4) notes, the setting rays of the sun are of this color and the sunsets in the west, where this alignment is positioned. Thus the dusky red-orange color of guanin would have had important "ancestral power" associations for the caicque's pectoral consonant with the "ancestral" meaning of his right-flankers, the Frog Lady and her consort.

This recognition of the "cross-media" isomorphisms between Taino petroglyphs, stone sculpture and ceramics is parallel to that offered betwen Taino pictographs, such as those in the famous Cuevas del Borbon (Pagan Perdomo 1978; Veloz Maggiolo, Personal Communication, 1991 ) and the recently discovered fugitive (Genipa) painted cursive designs on the interior of unrestricted Chican Ostionoid bowls of the Boca Chica style in eastern Hispañola (García Arévalo 1991). We thus have cross-media isomorphisms within both methods of execution: painting (pictographs and interior ceramic vessel painting) and incising (petroglyphs, bas-relief sculpture and exterior ceramic vessel incision), showing the visual integration of the arts in ancient Taino material culture.

Indeed, even earlier instances of cross-media depiction exist, as in the intermediary ("incipient chiefdom," cf., Roe 1993a) shark menhirpetroglphy from the El Bronce ball park (?) alignment on the south coast of Puerto Rico (Robinson, Lundberg and Walker 1985:lll< Figure 9). There, the incised and pecked eye and gill slits of the sharkbecome the roundel and flanking concentric semi-circles and triangles Chican Ostionoid ceramic motif pictured here in Figure 8c! This pre-Classic Taino (Ostionan Ostionoid) instance forms the perfect development precedessor for the later cross-media pattern revealed at Caguana.

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664 CROSS-MEDIA ISOMORPHISMS IN TAÍNO CERAMICS AND PETROGLYPHS

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666 CROSS-MEDIA ISOMORPHISMS IN TAÍNO CERAMICS AND PETROGLYPHS

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