Cueva Ahumada
Encyclopedia
| Name: | Cueva Ahumada |
| Location | García García, Nuevo León García is a municipality located to the northwest of the Monterrey metropolitan area in the state of Nuevo León, Mexico. García had, according to the 2005 census, a population of 51,658 persons... , Nuevo León Nuevo León Nuevo León It is located in Northeastern Mexico. It is bordered by the states of Tamaulipas to the north and east, San Luis Potosí to the south, and Coahuila to the west. To the north, Nuevo León has a 15 kilometer stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border adjacent to the U.S... |
| Coordinates | 29°35′40.04"N 108°09′25.15"W |
| Culture | Coahuiltecan Coahuiltecan Coahuiltecan or Paikawa was a proposed language family in John Wesley Powell's 1891 classification of Native American languages that consisted of Coahuilteco and Cotoname. The proposal was expanded to include Comecrudo, Karankawa, and Tonkawa... - Alazapa |
| Period | 6,000 Before Present Before Present Before Present years is a time scale used in archaeology, geology, and other scientific disciplines to specify when events in the past occurred. Because the "present" time changes, standard practice is to use AD 1950 as the origin of the age scale, reflecting the fact that radiocarbon... |
| Foundation | |
| Decline | |
| Language | Cohauilteco Coahuilteco language Coahuilteco was a language isolate that was spoken in southern Texas and northeastern Coahuila . It was spoken by one tribe of a group of American Indian hunter-gatherers named the Quems.... |
| INAH Official Page | Non existent |
Cueva Ahumada is an archaeological site
Archaeological site
An archaeological site is a place in which evidence of past activity is preserved , and which has been, or may be, investigated using the discipline of archaeology and represents a part of the archaeological record.Beyond this, the definition and geographical extent of a 'site' can vary widely,...
located within several canyons in the La Rinconada village, García Municipality
García, Nuevo León
García is a municipality located to the northwest of the Monterrey metropolitan area in the state of Nuevo León, Mexico. García had, according to the 2005 census, a population of 51,658 persons...
, in the Nuevo León
Nuevo León
Nuevo León It is located in Northeastern Mexico. It is bordered by the states of Tamaulipas to the north and east, San Luis Potosí to the south, and Coahuila to the west. To the north, Nuevo León has a 15 kilometer stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border adjacent to the U.S...
state, México. Cave painting
Cave painting
Cave paintings are paintings on cave walls and ceilings, and the term is used especially for those dating to prehistoric times. The earliest European cave paintings date to the Aurignacian, some 32,000 years ago. The purpose of the paleolithic cave paintings is not known...
in northeastern Mexico covers two types of artwork: rock engraving, also called petroglyph
Petroglyph
Petroglyphs are pictogram and logogram images created by removing part of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, and abrading. Outside North America, scholars often use terms such as "carving", "engraving", or other descriptions of the technique to refer to such images...
s (Pictogram
Pictogram
A pictograph, also called pictogram or pictogramme is an ideogram that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object. Pictographs are often used in writing and graphic systems in which the characters are to considerable extent pictorial in appearance.Pictography is a...
or pictographs). A third type of rock art, geoglyph
Geoglyph
A geoglyph is a large design or motif produced on the ground and typically formed by clastic rocks or similarly durable elements of the geography, such as stones, stone fragments, gravel, or earth...
s so far has not been detected in this region.
Cave painting art is found in all human occupied continents, it is a world heritage, as proclaimed by UNESCO. Its antiquity goes back to the dawn of human prehistory. In France and Spain, the most ancient cave paintings date back to 30,000 years Before Present
Before Present
Before Present years is a time scale used in archaeology, geology, and other scientific disciplines to specify when events in the past occurred. Because the "present" time changes, standard practice is to use AD 1950 as the origin of the age scale, reflecting the fact that radiocarbon...
. (Or BP)
Northeastern México - Cave Painting
In the American Continent, these manifestations occurred from one end of the continent to the other and can be traced back to its first settlers. In northeastern Mexico, human occupation is confirmed at least to the end of the last ice age, approximately 10,500 BP. Some sites have earlier occupations, Radiocarbon dated to the early Archaic period in the Americas, as is the case in Cueva Ahumada, Garcia, from 6000 BP. It cannot be safely claimed that age, but there is a possibility.First Settlers
A lot remains to be studied about the first settlers of northern Mexico, especially in Nuevo LeónNuevo León
Nuevo León It is located in Northeastern Mexico. It is bordered by the states of Tamaulipas to the north and east, San Luis Potosí to the south, and Coahuila to the west. To the north, Nuevo León has a 15 kilometer stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border adjacent to the U.S...
, of those who left permanent marks on rocks of Frontón Piedras Pintas in the municipality of Parás
Paras, Nuevo León
Parás is a rural municipal town in the state of Nuevo León, Mexico, founded on February 17, 1851. It lies about 45 minutes southwest of the Falcón Reservoir in Tamaulipas. It was once "Rancho Huizachal de los Canales". The name Parás is derived from Jose María Parás y Ballesteros, the first...
; Boca de Potrerillos
Boca de Potrerillos
Boca de Potrerillos is an archeological site located some 14 km from the municipal head of Mina, Nuevo León, México. About 60 km north east from Monterrey within the inter-sierra valleys of the Sierra Madre Oriental is the “mouth” or entrance to the Potrerillos Canyon between the Zorra...
and Chiquihuitillos
Chiquihuitillos
Chiquihuitillos is an archeological site located in the city and municipality of Mina in the Nuevo León State, México. In general throughout northeastern Mexico archaeological wealth is priceless...
in Mina
Mina, Nuevo León
Mina is town and municipality located at northwestern part of the northeastern Mexican state of Nuevo León. The population was 4,309 at the 2005 census. The municipality is part of a historical region called Valle de Salinas which was an administrative area of the New Kingdom of León during the...
; Cueva Ahumada, Nacataz and Icamole in the municipality of García Municipality
García, Nuevo León
García is a municipality located to the northwest of the Monterrey metropolitan area in the state of Nuevo León, Mexico. García had, according to the 2005 census, a population of 51,658 persons...
, and hundreds of other sites scattered throughout the State of Nuevo León.
These settlers often are simply described as Chichimeca
Chichimeca
Chichimeca was the name that the Nahua peoples of Mexico generically applied to a wide range of semi-nomadic peoples who inhabited the north of modern-day Mexico and southwestern United States, and carried the same sense as the European term "barbarian"...
s or Aridoamerica
Aridoamerica
Aridoamerica, also known as the Gran Chichimeca, is a term used by Mexican archeologists to describe a region of the southwestern United States and the northern and central regions of Mexico, in contrast to Mesoamerica, which lies to the south and east...
ethnic groups of the north, to differentiate them from the large and rich cultural Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica is a region and culture area in the Americas, extending approximately from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, within which a number of pre-Columbian societies flourished before the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the 15th and...
groups.
They are said to have been Nomad
Nomad
Nomadic people , commonly known as itinerants in modern-day contexts, are communities of people who move from one place to another, rather than settling permanently in one location. There are an estimated 30-40 million nomads in the world. Many cultures have traditionally been nomadic, but...
s or semi-nomads, but did not just wander about, they followed “regular movement patterns” within recognized territories; What anthropologists define as territorial nomadism". The truth is that they did not build urban complexes as the center of Mexico, whose splendor cast a shadow that diminished Aridoamerica study for a long time.
Specialists have differentiated several language nucleus among the tribes that inhabited the region, but have failed to have a consistent approach by placing them in the families of the Athabaskan languages
Athabaskan languages
Athabaskan or Athabascan is a large group of indigenous peoples of North America, located in two main Southern and Northern groups in western North America, and of their language family...
, the Coahuilteco language
Coahuilteco language
Coahuilteco was a language isolate that was spoken in southern Texas and northeastern Coahuila . It was spoken by one tribe of a group of American Indian hunter-gatherers named the Quems....
or the Hokan languages
Hokan languages
The Hokan language family is a hypothetical grouping of a dozen small language families spoken in California, Arizona and Mexico. In nearly a century since Edward Sapir first proposed the "Hokan" hypothesis, little additional evidence has been found that these families were related to each other...
. Those who inhabited the region of what is now the city of Monterrey were called Los Aguaceros and Malincheños.
They lived in caves and river ravines. Where vestiges of their life were left in paintings and rock engravings, items that could be used as amulets in fertility or puberty initiation rites, mortars (Molcajete
Molcajete
A molcajete is a stone tool, the traditional Mexican version of the mortar and pestle tool, similar to the South American batan used for grinding various food products...
s), carved stones and spear points of all kinds, ranging from some several thousands of years ago (such as those found in the municipality of Los Ramones
Los Ramones
Los Ramones is the name of a municipality and its corresponding seat of government and main population center in Mexican state of Nuevo Leon.-Location:...
, Nuevo León, over 11,000 years old) to those used by Comanche
Comanche
The Comanche are a Native American ethnic group whose historic range consisted of present-day eastern New Mexico, southern Colorado, northeastern Arizona, southern Kansas, all of Oklahoma, and most of northwest Texas. Historically, the Comanches were hunter-gatherers, with a typical Plains Indian...
tribes, well into the 19th century
19th century
The 19th century was a period in history marked by the collapse of the Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Holy Roman and Mughal empires...
. The density of prehistoric domestic waste, found in the area confirm that there was a relatively large population, at least seasonally. Radiocarbon tests placed the earliest occupation in Boca de Potrerillos
Boca de Potrerillos
Boca de Potrerillos is an archeological site located some 14 km from the municipal head of Mina, Nuevo León, México. About 60 km north east from Monterrey within the inter-sierra valleys of the Sierra Madre Oriental is the “mouth” or entrance to the Potrerillos Canyon between the Zorra...
about 8000 years ago.
Cueva Ahumada Exploration
Between 1960 and 1967, an archaeologists group from the Texas UniversityTexas University
Texas University or t.u. is a derogatory name for the University of Texas at Austin, mostly used by students at rival Texas A&M University.Texas University may also refer to:...
, Austin
Austin
Austin is the capital of the U.S. state of Texas.Austin may also refer to:-In the United States:*Austin, Arkansas*Austin, Colorado*Austin, Chicago, Illinois*Austin, Indiana*Austin, Minnesota*Austin, Nevada*Austin, Oregon...
, headed by Jeremiah f. Epstein, undertook an extensive research program in the area.
The program started the Nuevo León prehistory discovery. American archaeologists who participated became the first generation of trained specialists. Worked at sites that revealed the first State prehistoric cultural sequences, but provided very little data on rock art. These sites are primarily located in the Center and South of the State, and the project focuses on the sequence of stone artifacts. Virtually ignores the existence of cave painting manifestations, to the extent that the final publication on La Calzada, Nuevo León, the archaeologists do not even mention the existence of paintings and petroglyphs located at few meters from the excavation place.
Only one site with cave paintings was excavated, Cueva Ahumada, and John Clark brief report is the only publication on the cave painting produced by the Texan project. Obviously the report is based on a brief visit, documents only a small sample of the paintings and petroglyphs present, and provided minimum comments about the relationship with the associated archaeological context. The Cueva Ahumada Texan project provided the first radiocarbon dates Nuevo León, but the rest of the results were never published. Recent excavations led by Moises Valadez provided more comprehensive data on the context of this site. However modest, the Clark report seems to be the first reference on Nuevo León cave painting art in scientific literature, and starting point for all subsequent studies.
In contrast to the indifference to cave painting art by Texan investigators, the visit to Cueva Ahumada by Mexican archaeologist Antonieta Espejo provided a unique site description, before the first excavations. She belonged to the first generation of Mexican archaeologists trained in the 1940s, and although developed most of her professional career in other parts of Mexico, her short stay in Nuevo León in the 1960s produced the first documentation of several cave painting art sites in the State. She performed the first time evaluation of cave painting art of the region. Her visit to Cueva Ahumada is not intended to be more than a mere recognition, but greatly expanded our vision of the site environment. Collected valuable information from local informants and documented the pristine condition of a site which, in later years, has undergone lots of damage and misfortunes.
Project affects the Site
Recently a road was built near the archaeological site, over the next few months site rehabilitation works will be made as well as the placement of a wire mesh to control visitor access.Pathway construction has not damaged the paintings area, although these have temporarily disappeared, covered by the large amount of dust lifted at the road side.
INAH specialists have reported that rain will "naturally" wash the rocks and the over 5000 year old painting will again be visible.
Once the road work is completed, INAH archaeologists will begin cleaning the archaeological area, as well as installation of a wire mesh and the path ways to allow access for visitors, because since the paintings are located atop a rock shelter, climbing is complicated and risky.
Other Sites in Nuevo León
- Frontón de Piedras Pintas, Parás Municipality.
- Boca de PotrerillosBoca de PotrerillosBoca de Potrerillos is an archeological site located some 14 km from the municipal head of Mina, Nuevo León, México. About 60 km north east from Monterrey within the inter-sierra valleys of the Sierra Madre Oriental is the “mouth” or entrance to the Potrerillos Canyon between the Zorra...
and ChiquihuitillosChiquihuitillosChiquihuitillos is an archeological site located in the city and municipality of Mina in the Nuevo León State, México. In general throughout northeastern Mexico archaeological wealth is priceless...
in Mina, Nuevo León - Cueva Ahumada, Nacataz and Icamole, in García, Nuevo León.
- Another site in Los Ramones, Nuevo León, over 11,000 years old.
External links
- García Municipality, official site (Spanish)
- Nuevo León State, oficial site (Spanish)
- Hacia la definición de un estilo: Las pictografías de Chiquihutillos en el noreste Mexicano. Solveig A. Turpin, Herbert H. Eling y Moisés Valadez Moreno. El estilo Chiquihuitillos (William Breen Murray) (Spanish)
- Prehistoric Murals Milenio
- Coahuiltecan Indians