The constant and creative flux of the largely nomadic indigenous past – underwritten, like the classical or biblical past well known to the Spanish invaders, by the universal imperatives of ‘man’s need to eat; and the authority
1 D.E. Ibarra Grasso and R. Querejazu Lewis, 30,000 años de prehistoria en Bolivia (La Paz and Cochabamba: Los Amigos del Libro, 1986), p.14.
2 L. Caballero, S.J., Relación de las costumbres y religión de los indios manasicas, edited by M.
Serrano y Sanz (Madrid: Librería General de Victoriano Suárez, 1933 [1706]), pp. 38–43.
3 L. Caballero, S.J., ‘Diario de la cuarta misión a los manasicas y paunacas, 1707’, in J. Matienzo et al. (eds.), Chiquitos en las Anuas de la Compañía de Jesús (1691–1767) (La Paz: Instituto Latinoamericano de Misionología de la Universidad Católica Boliviana, 2011), pp. 46–83 (p.
64).
DAMAGE LIMITATION IN THE MISSION TO THE CHIQUITOS 43 of such professionals as the warrior, the healer, and the poet or scribe’, as Brotherston puts it4 – was endlessly recalled in song and story and existed iconographically in the markings drawn on or carved into rock. The 2014 register of the Sociedad de Investigación del Arte Rupestre de Bolivia includes 50 sites of rock paintings or carvings in the Oriente, many with evidence of later overdrawing, indicating that the site retained its ideological significance over centuries.5 Indeed, German researchers in the 1960s and 1970s were led to remote sites by eager indigenous guides, who could not explain the marks but sensed a link to their ancestors.6 Bolivian rock marking tends to be either in places with an amphitheatre-like quality or hidden away and ‘secret’.7 In an article published in 2007 on the drawings in the cave of Juan Miserandino near Santiago de Chiquitos, S. Calla Maldonado notes that although the ‘shamanic model’ of interpretation of rock markings is criticised by some as too general, the diverse nature of the marks and the numerous ways in which they can be read make it impossible to discredit.8 Given the geographical location of this region between the Amazon and the Chaco, it is probable that any ceremonies involved in the process of rock marking would have incorporated the consumption of hallucinogens, smoked or drunk, by a priestly elite. In 1706 the missionary Lucas Caballero noted the use of a ‘foul-smelling’ black liquid in the process of initiation of a new mapono [shaman]9 by the Manasica people whom he was intent on converting and ridiculed the claim by his interpreters that this dark liquid enabled the mapono to ‘fly’,10 as, of course, a psychotropic drug would have done (‘fly’ retaining its inverted commas here).
In 1981 the anthropologist Jürgen Riester published a monograph, Arqueología y arte rupestre en el oriente boliviano, as an offshoot of anthropological
4 G. Brotherston, Image of the New World: The American Continent Portrayed in Native Texts (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), p. 18.
5 Matthias Strecker of the Sociedad de Investigación del Arte Rupestre de Bolivia (SIARB) defines a sacred site as one where it can be assumed rites were performed by specialists (conversation 1 Feb. 2011).
6 The rupestre expert Karl Kaifler recalled his period in San José de Chiquitos in the 1970s when, once his interest in rock markings became known among Chiquitanos and Ayoréodes, he was told by them of more and more sites. His escorts to each site were pleased the sites were there; they told him that they did not understand the marks but that they were ‘to do with their ancestors’ (conversation with Karl Kaifler, 7 March 2014); Riester writes: ‘While I was in Santiago I learnt from an old Chiquitano man that there were rock drawings to the southwest.
Thanks to the help of this man I was able to visit this site’ (J. Riester, Arqueología y arte rupestre en el oriente boliviano (Cochabamba and La Paz: Los Amigos del Libro, 1981), p. 167).
7 Conversation with Matthias Strecker of SIARB, 1 Feb. 2011.
8 S. Calla Maldonado, ‘Documentación de las pinturas de la Cueva de Juan Miserandino, Reserva Municipal del Valle de Tucuvaca, Depto. de Santa Cruz’, Boletín, 21 (2007): 17–37 (23).
9 The use of the word ‘shaman’ is controversial. It is used here in the sense of a figure from a professional elite charged with mediating encounters with the supernatural.
10 Caballero, Relación, pp. 26, 29–30.
fieldwork in the 1960s and 1970s.11 The sites Riester investigated – most of them extremely remote and only accessible after several days’ journey on horseback and foot – are in the Serranía de San Simón and at Piso Firme,12 both in the north of the 18th-century mission’s vast catchment area; in the north-west, he explored a site beside the river San Julián, 20 kilometres from Yotaú.
In the east, his study covered the area around Roboré, Santiago and Yororobá;13 he also visited Piedra Marcada, south of Concepción.
In his survey of the area around Roboré, Riester found rock drawings of
‘single, double and triple wavy lines transformed into a great variety of zigzags’
and ‘motifs in the form of a grid and of rhomboids that partly cover an area 5m x 2.50m’14 (fig. 2.2) and a variety of what he interpreted as zoomorphic and anthropomorphic drawings, together with circular motifs, comb-like short vertical lines linked horizontally in a row and smaller lozenge grids made with red ochre pigment.15
11 The book’s psychedelic cover font and publication in a series called ‘Bolivia mágica’ have not stopped it from being quoted in subsequent, more specialised work, an indication of its pioneering importance.
12 Piso Firme was investigated by SIARB in 1999.
13 SIARB investigations in these areas took place from 1989 to 1993.
14 Riester, Arqueología, p. 175.
15 Riester, Arqueología, pp. 163–203.
Figure 2.2. Part of a rhomboidal grid marked in reddish pigment on a rock face in the Serranía de Santiago. (Source: J. Riester, Arqueología y arte rupestre en el oriente boliviano (Cochabamba and La Paz: Los Amigos del Libro, 1981), p. 176).
DAMAGE LIMITATION IN THE MISSION TO THE CHIQUITOS 45 Four hundred kilometres to the west, drawings in the River Mizque area documented by Roy Querejazu Lewis in 2001 show a startling similarity of motifs, perhaps indicating a common sacred sensibility across the pre-Spanish Oriente, not just in the practice of marking rock but also in the character of the marks.16 In the course of his research, Querejazu Lewis discovered that certain sites retained associative significance: on his second visit to Lakatambo during a period of drought in the late 1980s he found offerings of coca leaves and pebbles in small man-made dimples in the rock which had not been there on his first visit.17 Calla Maldonado notes that a folk tale current in 2004 around Roboré described brujos, witches, meeting in the cave of Juan Miserandino, where there were two walls of rock drawings.18 The meaning of the marks might have been lost but their presence continued and continues to lend significance to particular sites.
Their meaning might not have been entirely lost, however: a modern example indicates continuity of belief allied to the mark rather than the site. At a site between Santiago de Chiquitos and Roboré, Riester described his elderly Chiquitano19 guide’s analysis of one drawing: ‘It seems important here to give the interpretation of an indígena. Pedro Masiaré’s point of view is of limited value but it is founded in a religious world closer to that of the authors of the rock drawings than an anthropologist’s is’.20 The image that most affected Pedro Masiaré was one of a lozenge grid in which he saw Hichi-tuúrsch, the water jichi of Chiquito/Chiquitano belief, in the form of a serpent. This drawing has some lozenge shapes filled in with a smaller lozenge, what might or might not
16 R. Querejazu Lewis, El Arte Rupestre de la Cuenca del Rio Mizque (Cochabamba: Sociedad de Investigación del Arte Rupestre Boliviano, 2001).
17 Querejazu Lewis, El Arte Rupestre, pp. 97–8.
18 Calla Maldonado, ‘Cueva’, 19.
19 Chiquitanos is the modern name of the Chiquitos, in use since the mid 20th century.
20 Riester, Arqueología, p. 184.
Figure 2.3. Rock drawing given an ancient interpretation by a 20th-century Chiquitano.
(Source: J. Riester, Arqueología y arte rupestre en el oriente boliviano (Cochabamba and La Paz: Los Amigos del Libro, 1981), p. 177).
be figures with linked arms and a horizontal motif made of much smaller linked diamond shapes (fig. 2.3). 21 Hichi-tuúrsch was ‘Ysituu’, the water spirit of the Manasicas, documented by Caballero in his Relación of 1706.22 If Masiaré’s exegesis did indeed explain the drawing, belief in Hichi-tuúrsch would appear to date from considerably further back in history than the 18th century when Caballero noted it, as well as continuing in the modern day.