bajalera - 4-4-2008 at 04:19 PM
When Jesuit missionaries questioned Indians about the spectacular works of art that decorate some of the peninsula's caves and rockshelters, the
natives told them a tall tale. The murals, they said, were created by giants who could reach the high ceilings of caves and paint them, even while
lying down with their backs to the ground.
Padre Miguel del Barco was skeptical. People whose arms could reach from floor to ceiling in a lofty cave, he figured out, would have to be more than
30 feet tall.
Barco and several other peninsula missionaries were curious about the land and its people, and carried out the kind of investigations that would
eventually be formalized as archaeology.
Padre Jose Rotea, assigned to San Ignacio, had reported that some bones found in this mission's area looked really old. When Barco asked for more
information, Rotea gave him three reasons for believing that a race of giants may have lived on the peninsula.
First, an Indian had taken him to a place where, years earlier, the man had seen bones that appeared ancient. Here the padre dug up "a very large
piece of a skull" and several vertebrae, as well as other bones that were fragile or broken.
Rotea took the vertebra back to San ignacio, and later reported that they were three time larger than "those of our dead" (without explaining how this
comparison was carried out). His collection also included a jawbone and some teeth, sent to him by Padre Jorge Retz of Mission Guadalupe.
Second, Rotea said that at a place named San Joaquin there was an open-sided rockshelter that was 30 to 36 feet wide and about 18 feet high, extending
inward to around 18 feet. Painted from top to bottom, the shelter had figures Rotea identified as men, women and animals, "in colors similar to those
found on Trese Virgenes Vocano: red, black, yellow and green."
In pre-Mission times the Indian men of the peninsula did not wear clothes, but most of the painted figures that appeared to be male were clothed.
Others assumed rto be female had garments resemblling the huipils of Azted women.
Some of the animals--deer and rabbits, for example--were native to the land then called California, but two of them--a pig and a wolf--were not.
Rotea, a Mexican Jesuit who was a peninsula missionariy for nine years, didn't explain why he identified a rather rough drawing as a wolf rather than
a coyote.
Third, the missionaries at Guadalupe and Mulege told Rotea a story that Indian elders said had been passed down from parents to children for uncounted
generations. Long ago, men and women of unusual height had come from the north. Some of these tall people went to the coasts of the south, while
others took to the harsh mountainous interior. The rock art was created by the mountain people, who eventually killed one another off.
[Next: Early Archaeological Investigations]
islandhop - 4-4-2008 at 04:37 PM
I sometimes imagine, while viewing rock art in Baja, a mountain person father yelling at his kid to quit writing on the walls.....
David K - 4-4-2008 at 05:04 PM
Great stuff Lera...
Here is a thread from 2003 by jrbaja (Ski Baja for a while) on the bones and giants: http://forums.bajanomad.com/viewthread.php?tid=2067
and here is a recent thread of yours where I produced the page with mention of the 11 foot tall remains at San Joaquin in the Cliff Cross Baja Guide:
http://forums.bajanomad.com/viewthread.php?tid=27011#pid2624...
Looking forward to more Baja history and mystery!!!
[Edited on 4-5-2008 by David K]