90 BULLETIN 14 7, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



in one design is symmetrical and not extemporaneously conceived. 

 It probably represents a popular form of bird zemi and therefore 

 must be considered as a phase of aboriginal religious painting. 



It is significant that no painted or etched form appearing on the 

 smooth rock walls of the caves may be interpreted as at all resem- 

 bling a mammal form of any description. It is not clear why this 

 should be so, as the middens within the caves Avhere the pictographs 

 and petroglyphs appear contained bones of jutias and of other mam- 

 mals which made up a portion of the diet of at least the later cave 

 population. 



There are two elaborately painted figures of conventionalized 

 human figurines appearing on the walls of the " Railroad " cave that 

 require special mention (pi. 6, Nos. 3-4). They are the most elabo- 

 rate cave paintings thus far known from any of the islands of 

 the West Indies. Although conventionalized as to arm, leg, hand, 

 and foot design, the technic is intelligible and does not depart 

 widely from details appearing in some of the other paintings repre- 

 senting the human figure. It is in the portrayal of the head, the 

 accompanying ear pendants, and the headdress forms that the novel 

 features of the figurine paintings become most apparent. No figure 

 from any of the known collections of rock inscriptions or rock paint- 

 ings resemble these paintings. They are therefore interesting in the 

 extreme as peculiar excrescences of Antillean art expressed, so far as 

 is known to the writer, nowhere on pottery designs or elsewhere in 

 art forms from the West Indies. 



In general, the resemblance to South American pictographs and 

 petroglj^phs as figured by Kock-Gruenberg, Farabee,^° and others is, 

 if not striking, at least apparent. The resemblance apparently is 

 with that portion of northern South America north of the Amazon 

 River, in Brazil, the Guianas, and Venezuela. One point of differ- 

 ence that at once suggests itself as important is the fact that the 

 South American prototypes occur along the streams, on bowlders, 

 on granitic rocks, in the open savannah, and among the foothills, 

 while those of Samana appear only on the walls of caves sufficiently 

 smooth and even enough in texture to be adapted for the purpose of 

 such aboriginal pictographic records and artistic efforts. Another 

 point of distinction from the South American area is that the glyphs 

 of the latter area are more varied ; that is, offer a greater variety of 

 forms, and introduce many figures executed entirely in a curvilinear 

 design, such as does not occur in the paintings and glyphs from 

 Samana. Two illustrations of petroglyphs from St. Vincent, in the 



^ Some South American Petroglyphs, Anthropological Essays, in Holmes Anniversary 

 Volume, pp. 88-95. Washington, 1916. 



