LEICESTER, ENGLAND—Archaeologists have discovered evidence deep in a Caribbean cave that complicates the popular image of early European colonizers as unbending religious hardliners, according to a report in The Guardian. Walls in the cave, on uninhabited Mona Island, feature indigenous spiritual iconography alongside sixteenth-century European religious markings, including Christograms, abbreviations for Jesus Christ, and Latin sentences. The archaeologists who discovered them suggest that the juxtaposition illustrates a spiritual exchange between the two groups. “It is truly extraordinary,” says Jago Cooper of the British Museum. “It is proof that the first generation of Europeans were going into caves and being exposed to an indigenous world view. I can’t think of another site like this in the Americas.” Since 2013, the team has been exploring around 70 cave systems on the island, which is 40 miles west of Puerto Rico and was claimed for Spain by Christopher Columbus. The researchers believe the Christian markings were made by some of the earliest European colonizers in America. “This is not zealous missionaries coming with their burning crosses,” says Alice Samson of the University of Leicester, “they are people engaging with a new spiritual realm and we get individual responses in the cave and it is not automatically erasure, it is engagement.” For more on archaeology in the Caribbean, go to "Tracing Slave Origins."
