March 24, 2008 — Somewhere on the big island, on a picturesque but — by St. Croix standards — perfectly ordinary rock outcropping, are two abstracted faces the size of a man's hand ground into the rock by people who lived here up to 2,000 years ago.
Next to one face with three lines underneath is a small ground impression, about the size of a silver dollar, similar to the mortar, or bowl, of a mortar and pestle. Called petroglyphs, these images were created by the pre-Columbian Taino inhabitants of St. Croix.
The enigmatic images were found by amateur St. Croix archeologist and East End Marine Park Ranger John Farchette III in July 2000. Their location is being kept under wraps for the time being, because of concerns the rare and irreplaceable cultural artifacts could be vandalized or cut out and stolen.
"The real danger is graffiti," Farchette told the Source during a recent hike to the carved stone images' remote location. "These are the first petroglyphs found on St. Croix since 1923."
In the 1920s, Danish archeologist Gudmund Hatt surveyed Salt River, documenting the presence of an ancient Taino ball court lined with large stones engraved with figures and symbols, Farchette explained.
Hatt packed up those petroglyphs and shipped them to Denmark, where they reside today, he said. So Farchette's find are the only stone carvings known to be on St. Croix right now. But, as ancient footprints run everywhere on St. Croix, at any time a hiker or someone digging in a field could find another.
The Taino people inhabited a number of islands in the Lesser and Greater Antilles, including Puerto Rico.
Starting around 400 B.C., the ancestors of the Taino people began moving up the Antillean archipelago from the Orinoco River delta of modern-day Venezuela. They traveled up through the Virgin Islands, taking root in Hispaniola and moving back down the islands to some degree. The Taino people and culture that Columbus encountered had been on St. Croix for many centuries when Columbus encountered them in 1493, That encounter left one native and one of Columbus' crew dead, and is the first documented resistance to Europeans in the New World.
Accounts from Columbus' journey treat the Carib as a different, more aggressive people than the Taino, but Farchette says the two are separate branches, or societies, composed of the same ethnic people.
"They are difficult to distinguish in the archaeological record," he said. "The only distinction between the Carib and the Taino, or Arawak, is an ornament they wore around their knees."
One of the St. Croix petroglyphs is believed to be a representation of Attabey, a major Taino god, and the bowl could have been used for the religious cohoba ritual, he said. For medicine, guidance and religious experience, Taino caciques — or shamans — would grind the seeds of a particular native tree into powder, with some other crucial ingredients, making a psychoactive powder.
The Taino sometimes mixed cohoba with tobacco to maximize its effect. Taino shamans took cohoba to cure illnesses for individual patients and to ensure the well being of the community. Caciques took cohoba to communicate with zemies (spirits and ancestors); they acted as the primary intermediaries between people and the supernatural realm.
Before ingesting such hallucinogenic mixtures, caciques and shamans fasted and purged themselves with vomiting spatulas of wood and bone to consume the "pure foods" of the spirits. The spatulas are often ornately carved. Then they inhaled their concoctions using delicately carved snuffers of wood and bone.
So it is possible, even likely, that many centuries ago, Taino priestesses and priests stood at the sight of the St. Croix petroglyphs, preparing and consuming cohoba and experiencing visions.
While the only extant petroglyphs known on St. Croix, there are petroglyphs deep in the V.I. National Park on St. John. Those carvings are an ecotourism attraction for St. John, with a small Petroglyph Trail leading to them off the park's Reef Bay Trail.
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