Petroglyphs in Sinaloa: An Ocean yet to be Explored
Juan González Morfín
Universidad Panamerican, Mexico
Submission: May 28, 2019; Published: June 25, 2019
*Corresponding author: Juan González Morfín, PhD in History of Thought, Universidad Panamerican, Hortensia 238 Axotla, Alvaro Obregon, Mexico City, Mexico
How to cite this article: Juan G M. Petroglyphs in Sinaloa: An Ocean yet to be Explored. Glob J Arch & Anthropol. 2019; 9(5): 555775. DOI: 10.19080/GJAA.2019.09.555775
Abstract
The construction of Brazilian society occurred in the midst of a cultural miscegenation that enabled titles such as racial democracy, however, this imaginary band of full equality and peaceful coexistence fostered the formation of provisional judgments that, not properly refuted, forged prejudices and stereotypes, the basis of hate speech. Understanding such elements of hatred will enable a better understanding of Brazilian society and an understanding of the existing social frictions. For this, a historical incursion was made, with a temporal range delimited to the relevant episodes within the context outlined, observing its social repercussions on the current composition of Brazilian society
Keywords: Elements of hate; Brazilian society; Racial democracy; Hate speech
Opinion
In 1949 engineer Gonzalo Ortiz de Zárate arrived in Culiacán. Of Spanish origin, he came to land in Sinaloa to work in Eureka, a construction company that would be in charge, at that time, to build the irrigation canals of the Sanalona dam. In 1956, the engineer Ortiz de Zárate, without abandoning the construction industry, began an interesting educational work: the Chapultepec Institute, whose spiritual formation would be entrusted to Opus Dei, a Catholic organization of which he himself was a part
As director of the Institute, Gonzalo organized multiple excursions to the most remote places of that northwestern state, and began to be interested in the findings of millenary engravings that he found in some stone walls, the same in the stream of the Mineral de Nuestra Señora, within the municipality of Cosalá, that in the steep massif of the Cerro de la Chiva, a few kilometers from the capital of Sinaloa.
A fan of the beach, there were many excursions to the varied and magnificent beaches of the Sinaloan Pacific. In one of them he found one of his best finds: more than 300 meters of rocks of volcanic origin piled at the foot of the beach with a huge number of engravings: evocations of the sun through concentric circles, flowers, animals, human figures... total, almost 650 different prints. The beach, already known then as “las labradas”, was in the set of small inlets near the mouth of the Piaxtla river, known as “Barras de Piaxtla”. Along 10 kilometers you will find scattered many small bays very similar to each other: a wide beach flanked by a rocky cliff that juts out into the sea. In almost all, the beach is excellent to enjoy the sea because of its fine sand and its mitigated waves. In this way, for the young students who accompanied Ortiz de Zárate on their excursions, it was doubly attractive to discover archaeological remains along with enjoying magnificent beaches. After repeated visits, Ortiz de Zárate was to observe that, although the rocks were in the same area, the engravings most likely belonged to different dates, even distant ones, since the making, being rudimentary in all cases, nevertheless It contained marked differences.
On the other hand, the erosion of the rocks allowed to see that there were much more ancient engravings. In addition, if you wanted to group them by families, the petroglyphs that seemed older were flowers and vegetables, followed by animals and humanoids and, finally, the newest and at the same time the most numerous, were those that evoked the sun and those that contained geometric figures. The beach was surrounded by bushes and, at least in a radius of 3 to 4 kilometers could not have established a human settlement, due to lack of resources, especially drinking water. This led to think that the artists who had carved those stones were pilgrims, who came to that place as a point of attraction and who remained there probably for cultural reasons and only for a short period of time.
Almost twenty years passed from the first notes taken by Ortiz de Zárate so that an important document, Petroglifos en Sinaloa, was published in 1976 by Fomento Cultural Banamex, with numerous data about the rock discoveries made by “Don Gonzalo” and his students from Chapultepec Institute. This work, although well documented, does not contain a systematic study of the petroglyphs, nor does it pretend to be a rigorously archaeological work, but rather an exact description of the places and rock discoveries of an explorer who was able to be dazzled by the millenary engravings that often I found in his raids. Although there were already previous publications on the subject, the study published by Ortiz de Zárate in 1976 was able to lay the foundations for more rigorous work presented later and it served that at the level of archaeological tourism, many people were interested in visiting the sites described in his work. Recently it has become an archaeological zone protected by the National Institute of Anthropology and History and open to the public at conventional times. Currently the literature on the subject has been enriched with new studies [1-4].
Unfortunately, many other findings of engineer Ortiz de Zárate remain unexplored; at least unexplored by experts. Such is the case of the petroglyphs that are on the walls that flank the river of the Mineral de Nuestra Señora, in Cosalá, municipality of Sinaloa famous for its mining production at the time of President Porfirio Díaz, municipality currently ennobled with the designation of “magical people” and with an inexhaustible wealth of archaeological possibilities, such as the petroglyphs pointed out, which are 13.5 kilometers from the municipal head and are, at first glance, the best can be found in the Mexican territory, with hunting scenes, figures anthropomorphic and zoomorphic. Serve this small cast of possibilities to arouse the curiosity of the seekers of prehistoric man in the state of Sinaloa.
References
- It is, the carved rocks. The site is located 55 kilometers from the port of Mazatlán and 160 from the city of Culiacá
- Lizárraga PA (1980) Nombres y piedras de Cinaloa Culiacán: Gobierno del Estado de Sinaloa.
- Santos Ramírez VJ (2005) Los Petrograbados del Norte de México Culiacán: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia Centro Sinaloa.
- De Cima J (2010) Los petroglifos de Las Labradas. Revista de la Universidad de México 14: 107-108.