Cinquino summary Rock paintings is located during the Caribbean. Puerto Rico registers one of many region’s maximum website densities of petroglyphs and pictographs, with rock paintings in caves, alongside waterways, and on boulders aligning ceremonial or public enclosures. those ceremonial enclosures include ready, point, earthen buildings with preparations of rock and earth embankments. those precincts and their rock paintings characterize favorite elements of the overdue prehistoric panorama that functioned in a number of contexts from non secular to social to political. Caguana, the greatest a number of enclosure web site in Puerto Rico, and different locales are used to enquire the character of this type of human-marked actual terrain. Human engagement with the normal atmosphere is multi-layered, interactive, and altering. throughout cultures and time sessions, this may consequence from more than a few elements, and should be followed via visible markers. Rock artwork represents a very extraordinary instance of human-marked actual terrain due to its sensory effect, as well as its relative immovability (Chippindale and Nash 2004a). those features shape a firm origin for incorporating panorama beneficial properties into rock paintings experiences (see, e. g. , the compilation by means of Chippindale and Nash 2004b). Rock paintings within the kind of A better half to Rock paintings, First variation. Edited by way of Jo McDonald and Peter Veth. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. released 2012 by way of Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 104 MICHELE H. HAYWARD AND MICHAEL A. CINQUINO petroglyphs and pictographs is located through the Caribbean in caves, alongside waterways, and on boulders aligning enclosures. The latter include point, earthen surfaces demarcated with various preparations of rock and earth constructions. One method in panorama reports perspectives inscribed destinations as locations for person and communal social kinfolk, so much quite regarding energy interactions (Arsenault 2004:72). Researchers within the Caribbean take the same standpoint. Enclosures are areas for staff monitors of energy, in addition to expressions of collective identification. even though they're frequently used to deduce degrees of overdue prehistoric sociopolitical association (e. g. , Siegel 1999; Curet et al. 2004; Curet and Torres 2010), their rock artwork isn't. Enclosures symbolize consciously selected areas that, via their building, remodel the panorama into locations of actions and areas of meanings (Rodríguez Meléndez 2007). Archaeological and ethnohistorical resources point out that those areas hosted a variety of occasions with non secular, secular, and political issues that concerned a number of societal segments. Their meanings derive not just from the various themed actions, yet from the presence of carved pictures at many enclosure destinations. Rock artwork at 4 well-documented Puerto Rican websites – Tibes, Caguana, Viví, Jácana – means that those pictures performed energetic roles in relationships among the residing and deceased individuals of societies, in addition to between island political divisions. The petroglyphs supplied visible and interactive referents for the continuing non secular connections among the residing and deceased, reflected the more and more complicated, stratified, and contested nature of overdue prehistoric polities, and served as statements of group id.