Wider Context and Landscape Setting

The new petroglyphs on Montserrat are a valuable addition to the corpus of Caribbean rock art. Although the distribution of petroglyph sites in the Lesser Antilles remains patchy and imperfectly known (Table 1), studies by Dubelaar (Reference Dubelaar1995), Jönsson Marquet (Reference Jönsson Marquet2002), and Hayward and colleagues (Reference Hayward, Atkinson and Cinquino2009, Reference Hayward, Schiepatti and Cinquino2015) allow some broad generalizations. Fourteen of the 25 main islands have known petroglyph sites, but many still do not; surprisingly, those without known sites include islands such as Antigua that have both an extensive history of archaeological exploration and a long record of human habitation. In general, larger islands are more likely to have petroglyphs than smaller ones, but the numbers vary greatly. On Guadeloupe, for example, 26 sites with a total of 1,200 individual petroglyph images have been recorded compared to Martinique with only 3 sites with 35 images.

Table 1. Lesser Antillean Islands with and without Rock Art.

Source: Dubelaar Reference Dubelaar1995:23, Table 1, with corrections and updates.

By far the most common locations for petroglyph sites are near the coast or along watercourses, with inland rock formations and caves each accounting for only 14%. It is hard to know whether this siting reflects actual Indigenous preferences or is a consequence of patterns of archaeological exploration; few of the Lesser Antillean islands have been systematically examined, and many surveys have focused on coastal regions. These sites are frequently covered with very dense vegetation, which makes them inobtrusive and hard to detect. Montserrat provides a case in point. Beginning in 2010, SLAM conducted a thorough survey throughout the entire north of the island without encountering any petroglyphs (Cherry and Ryzewski Reference Cherry and Ryzewski2020); the Soldier Ghaut petroglyphs were found entirely by chance.

The site's setting is unusual for rock art locations in the Lesser Antilles. It lies at an elevation of 270 m asl in a deep ravine, about 2 km from its mouth. At the site location, Soldier Ghaut is a canyon about 15 m high and 8–10 m wide formed by two almost vertical cliffs, covered with vegetation. The natural rock is made up of volcanoclastic deposits with occasional areas of fairly soft, consolidated ash with relatively smooth surfaces; it is on one of these surfaces that the petroglyphs have been engraved by either scraping or pecking with a hard object (Figure 2). Some of them are positioned fairly high up on the wall and today are out of reach, but this may be a function of erosion of the ground surface since Amerindian times.

Figure 2. The main panel of petroglyphs covering the rock face on the right bank of Soldier Ghaut. (Color online)

The Soldier Ghaut Petroglyphs

There are nine separate elements on the right bank, within an area measuring 220 cm horizontally and 324 cm vertically. Their size is somewhat larger than the norm in Caribbean rock art, with the tallest of the complex anthropomorphs reaching 93 cm. The only engraving found on the left bank of the ghaut is a very large face outlined by an incised square, 50 × 50 cm (Figure 3). Within it are two eye lines with lateral lobes and a straight mouth surmounted by a triangular shape that might suggest a nasal appendage rather than a nose proper. The face itself is common enough, but its square outline much less so: among the few parallels are Yambou 5 on St. Vincent and the tiny figure at the Morne Rita Cave, Marie-Galante, although both are much smaller (Dubelaar Reference Dubelaar1995; Kirby Reference Kirby1970:125).

Figure 3. Petroglyph J (“squarehead”) on the left bank of Soldier Ghaut. (Color online)

The main body of petroglyphs, on the opposite right bank, is divided into two groups by a roughly horizontal incised line (I), 80 cm long. Three of the representations (A, B, and D) are simple faces of the kind that abound in Caribbean rock art: they comprise three cupules indicating the eyes and mouth, in one case with an enclosing circle to frame the face (Figure 4). A triangular depression (C) might be part of another such face and perhaps is unfinished.

Figure 4. Petroglyph elements: (A–D) faces on the right bank of Soldier Ghaut (photographs and photogrammetry by Christian Stouvenot, drawings by Samantha Ellens). (Color online)

The remaining figures are more elaborate. Element F (Figure 5, right), situated highest on the wall and almost 70 cm tall, may best be read as a representation of a figure in a batrachian squatting position, with body, arms, legs, and a round head with ears or other appendages; the style is filiform (i.e., lines symbolize the members). This type is relatively common in Caribbean rock art, the most famous example being the squatting frog-woman, often identified as Aterbey, the Taíno deity of fecundity, at the ceremonial center at Caguana in Puerto Rico (Oliver Reference Oliver1998); other filiform, squatting representations have been reported in the Dominican Republic, St. Kitts, and Guadeloupe, as well as in rock art in French Guyana and Suriname (Dubelaar Reference Dubelaar1995; Hayward et al. Reference Hayward, Atkinson and Cinquino2009:142; Mazière and Mazière Reference Mazière and Mazière1994:340).

Figure 5. Petroglyph elements H (left), E (center), and F (right) on the right bank of Soldier Ghaut (drawings by Samantha Ellens).

The anthropomorph of Figure H has two oblique eyes set in a V-shape, large ears, and a big mouth enclosed within an oval (Figure 5, left). The hourglass body is made up of two opposing triangles joined at their tips, with spiraliform appendages, possibly filiform arms. This “body,” however, is not actually joined to the head, and it is also similar to the two smaller triangles (perhaps representing cemi, symbolic three-pointed sculptural objects that housed an ancestral spirit or deity) of petroglyph G, immediately to its left—so these triangles might be separate geometric elements of high symbolic significance. This hourglass motif seems comparable to so-called wrapped figures known from other islands. Roe (Reference Roe1991:335–336) interprets them as ancestors wrapped in their hammocks for burial, the hachure on their bodies representing the strings in the hammock's weave.

This interpretation may also apply to the final anthropomorph, Figure E (Figure 5, center), which has the characteristics of a wrapped body (several horizontal lines across the torso), plus a covered head from which extend two curly lines and laterally placed large eye lobes. This figuration has close parallels in examples at sites in the Parc Archéologique des Roches Gravées at Trois-Rivières in Guadeloupe, on St. Vincent, and elsewhere (Dubelaar Reference Dubelaar1995; Huckerby Reference Huckerby1914; Jönsson Marquet Reference Jönsson Marquet2002).

Interpretive Issues

Petroglyphs are difficult to date. Artifacts collected in the immediate vicinity may have nothing to do with the making of the engravings; no chronological or geographical serializations based on style have yet been shown to have any solid evidential basis; and if rock art locations were sites of repeated ritual performance, it is possible that different elements were added at different times. Although precise dating is not possible, we argue that the Soldier Ghaut petroglyphs belong to the Late Ceramic Age, perhaps even late in that period (Figure 6). Even though Montserrat has one of the earliest radiocarbon-dated sites in the Lesser Antilles at Upper Blakes (Cherry and Ryzewski Reference Cherry, Ryzewski, Hofman and Antczak2019), there is no evidence of a resident Archaic population on the island that might have created the petroglyphs. There are now a number of radiocarbon-dated Ceramic Age sites spanning the period from the occupation of Trants in the mid-first millennium BC to the settlement at Indian Creek in the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries AD (Cherry and Ryzewski Reference Cherry and Ryzewski2020:33–58). Yet as Roe and colleagues (Reference Roe, Hayward and Cinquino2018:197–198) have shown, there is an apparent hiatus in rock art with the arrival of horticultural Saladoid groups into the Lesser Antilles during the Early Ceramic Age. On Montserrat, Late Ceramic sites are the most abundant (Figure 6) and their inhabitants therefore perhaps the most likely to have created the rock art. If the parallel between Soldier Ghaut petroglyph F and the squatting frog-woman of Caguana is valid, it would imply a late date, because construction at Caguana began only after AD 1200. Finally, the rock on which the petroglyphs are incised is very friable, and it does not seem likely that these representations would have survived intact for several millennia.

Figure 6. Map of Montserrat showing sites dating from the Archaic, Early Ceramic, and Late Ceramic (map by Miriam Rothenberg). (Color online)

The images at Soldier Ghaut are undeniably part of the Indigenous iconographic repertoire of the Caribbean. Some of their elements, as noted, do have parallels at other sites in the Lesser Antilles—for example, faces with square surrounds, squatting figures, three-pointers, or wrapped ancestors—whereas others, such as plain dot-faces, are simply generic. It is difficult to provide a close reading of this small group of petroglyphs in symbolic, mythological, and functional terms by relying on analogies in narratives reported by the early chroniclers or on modern ethnographies of South American horticulturalists (see Dubelaar [Reference Dubelaar, Cummins and King1993] for the problems these pose). Nonetheless, given the role of these petrographic elements in the larger interpretive scheme elaborated by Roe and colleagues (Reference Roe, Hayward and Cinquino2018), as well as their proximity to a watercourse, it seems possible that they relate to the desire for reliable rainfall and crop fertility.