ROCK PAINTING

Rock paintings

Rock paintings and incisions of the prehistoric periods are to be found all over the world, and serve as a testimony to the preliterate history of human cultures. Rock art, the first permanent form of visual communication known to man, the same art which led to the invention of writing, goes back almost to the origins of mankind. In fact, in Tanzania, as in Australia, there are rock paintings which it would appear go back 40,000 years and more (Anati, 1989). Since most of the works of rock art were, or were related to, initiation rites, or were part of religious practice and its context, the idea that these works should be associated with the use of hallucinogenic vegetals (as has already been put forward for some specific cases on the basis of ethnographic and ethnobotanical data) comes as no surprise. This use, where it arises, is historically associated with controlled rituals involving social groups of varying dimensions. It is perhaps not a chance occurrence that the areas where examples of rock art are to be found - areas in which it is most often asserted that the use of hallucinogens might have taken place, on the basis of the scenes represented or on the basis of the consideration that this practice might have served as a source of inspiration - are also the areas where the most famous examples are to be found in terms of imagination, mythological significance and polychromy. In California, the rock art of the regions inhabited by the Chumash and Yokut, a polychromic manner of painting - particularly evident during the stylistic phase known as the Santa Barbara Painted Style' has been associated with the toloache cult centered around Jimsonweed (a hallucinogenic plant of the Datura genus) known to have been used by a number of Californian and Mexican Indian tribes (Compbell, 1965:63-64; Wellmann, 1978 and 1981). Apparently, the first examples of Chumash rock art date back to 5,000 years ago (Hyder & Oliver, 1983). The impressive Pecos River paintings in Texas have also been associated with the mescal' cult (Sophora secundiflora, hallucinogenic beans of which were used during rites of initiation on the part of the Indian tribes of the region) (Howard, 1957). Furst (1986) affirms that the mescal cult goes back 10,000 years, which is to say back to the Paleo-Indian Hunters Period at the end of the Pleistocene period. Archeological excavations carried out in the areas where paintings are to be found reveal mescal seeds which go back to 8,000 B.C, when Carbon-14 dated. Peyote (Lophophora Williamsii) has also been found during some of these excavations (Campbell, 1958) An interesting and quite explicit use of cohoba, a hallucinogenic snuff taken from the Anadenanthera peregrina tree has been documented among the peoples of the Borbon Caves art in the Dominican Republic (Pagan Perdomo, 1978). This art is probably an example of the Late Antillian Culture of the Tainos and goes back to a period shortly before the arrival of the Spaniards. In this painting, the subject of inhalation of cohoba - by means of cane pipes - is repeatedly represented (Franch, 1982).