Reef Bay Trail Petroglyphs

Introduction

Text-to-speech Audio

Created by the Taino people between eleven hundred and two thousand years ago, these prehistoric petroglyphs in Virgin Islands National Park on the island of St. John can be found on a rock above a pool of water along the Reef Bay Trail. The carvings are thought to be symbols for water. Other petroglyphs represent Taino ancestors. The site was placed on the National Registry of Historic Places in 1982. A new set of petroglyphs was found in 2011 after people from the Friends of Virgin Islands National Park found them. The most recently found petroglyphs are thought to be between 1,500 and 2,000 years old.

Images

Backstory and Context

Text-to-speech Audio

Most of the petroglyphs on the Reef Bay Trail in Virgin Islands National Park are thought to date from 1100 AD to 1400 AD. Petroglyphs are rock carvings. They are located at the upper waterfall in the Reef Bay valley, just off the Reef Bay trail. They've been studied for several decades. These petroglyphs represent Taino ancestors, and were carved where their ancestors gathered. They were carved to communicate with the supernatural world, but were also meant to enforce religious doctrines. In the words of Virgin Islands archaeologist Ken Wild, "petroglyphs were carved where their ancestors gather, whether caves or water pools; a place to come and communicate with their ancestors in order to make it rain, cure the sick, and in general insure a healthy and prosperous community." Similar carvings are found elsewhere throughout the Caribbean, including nearby Puerto Rico and Hispaniola..

Initially, the Taino had a simple society. By the 1490s, there was a complex hierarchy, wherein the chief's ancestral lineage was worshipped. But within 20 years of the arrival of Christopher Columbus, their entire culture was destroyed.

Additional carvings were found in 2011, when park workers found a roll of film in their archives. The faces on the more recently discovered petroglyphs were compared to the Saladoid pottery style found in nearby Cinnamon Bay and Trunk Bay. So these petroglyphs probably date back to 500 AD or as early as 1 AD, and perhaps even earlier. The geometric style of these carvings is also found in St. Lucia and even Venezuela. The Saladoid culture was a pre-Columbian indigenous culture of territory in present-day Venezuela and the Caribbean that flourished from 500 BC to 545 AD. They were initially concentrated along the lowlands of the Orinoco River. They then migrated by sea to the Lesser Antilles, and then to Puerto Rico and the surrounding islands. This shows how the native peoples traveled and settled throughout the Caribbean while holding onto their cultural beliefs.

Sources

Repanshek, Kurt. "Lost" Petroglyphs Rediscovered at Virgin Islands National Park, National Parks Traveler. March 1st 2011. Accessed July 21st 2020. https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2011/03/lost-petroglyphs-rediscovered-virgin-islands-national-park7690.

Lewin, Aldeth. 'Lost' petroglyph rediscovered on St. John, Virgin Islands Daily News. February 22nd 2011. Accessed July 21st 2020. https://archive.is/20130208230532/http://virginislandsdailynews.com/news/lost-petroglyph-rediscovered-on-st-john-1.1108430.

Wild, Kenq. Petroglyphs of Reef Bay, U.S. National Park Service. Accessed July 21st 2020. https://www.nps.gov/articles/petroglyphs-of-reef-bay.htm.