The Jolja’ Cave Project

The Previous Studies of Jolja’

The Jolja’ paintings were first brought to the attention of outsiders in 1961 by Wilbur and Evelyn Aulie. The Aulies were missionaries working in the Tumbalá region who compiled a Ch’ol/Spanish dictionary, and recorded some of the contemporary Ch’ol beliefs (Aulie and Aulie 1978). In the Aulies’ dictionary, it is noted that the Joloniel cave was used for rituals (Aulie and Aulie 1978:53):

Hay una cueva en Joloñel donde nuestros antepasados entraron a adorar a sus dioses.

"There is a cave in Joloniel where our ancestors entered to adore their gods".

Their dictionary also includes references to Don Juan as does an article on Ch’ol religion by Whittaker and Warkentin (1965).

Gertrude (Trudy) Duby Blom and her husband Frans Blom lived in San Cristóbal de las Casas. Frans was a Maya archaeologist and Trudy was an avid photographer who was well known for her pictures of Chiapas. On April 26 of 1961, Trudy, Wilbur Aulie, his son Edward and several members of the Tumbalá community journeyed by mule from Tumbalá to Jolja’. Near the cave, they were joined by Joloniel community members. The expedition spent several hours in the cave during which Trudy photographed Groups 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 using black and white 120 format film. In some cases, she made several exposures of the same group with varying degrees of success. None of Blom’s photographs are completely in focus, and this problem speaks to the difficulty of photographing in a low light environment.

In May of 1961, Frans Blom forwarded photographs of the Jolja’ paintings to Eric Thompson, who eventually published examples from Group 2 and Group 5 in his 1975 introduction to the reprint edition of Henry Mercer’s The Hill-Caves of Yucatán. Thompson commented on the early style of the paintings, and suggested a date of A.D. 300.

As noted above, Navarrete, Martínez and Muñoz conducted an archaeological investigation of the region including Jolja’ in the early 1970s. In a Mexican newspaper article, Navarrete noted that several of the inscriptions had been damaged (Excelsior Newspaper 4.8.1974). Recently, Navarrete published a color picture of Group 2 Painting 2 in a magazine article on Tila (Navarrete 2000).

The negatives and photographs made by Trudy Blom during her lifetime are housed in the Na Bolom Museum in San Cristóbal de las Casas. Some of the Jolja’ negatives in the archives are copy negatives made from photographs. It would appear that the original negatives were misplaced by Blom at some point, and replacement negatives were made by photographing a photograph. For example, the original negative for the Group 2 picture which was published by Thompson (1975) is missing, and subsequent publications of this image are from a copy negative. The copy negatives as well as the remaining original negatives have been assigned archival numbers by the museum.

Berthold Riese (1981) made drawings based on Blom’s photographs, and published them in a short Mexicon article. These included examples from Groups 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.  Riese’s Group 3 drawing is, however, oriented the wrong way. It should be turned 90 degrees so that the number prefixes of the calendar round are in the position of superfixes.

José Alejos García (1994) visited Jolja’ in 1984 while researching an ethnographic study of the Joloniel area. His black and white photographs include examples from Groups 2, 4, 5 and 6.  Of particular interest is his picture of an idol in the form of a dripwater formation and several pre-Columbian axe blades. Alejos García also briefly referred to some of the contemporary ceremonies conducted in the cave in another volume on twentieth century land reform (Alejos García 1999).

In his 1986 book on the history of Tumbalá, local historian Miguel Meneses López recorded in both Ch’ol and Spanish some of the contemporary beliefs about the Jolja’ cave, and reproduced a color photograph of the figures in Group 2.  In 1988, he also published a pamphlet in San Cristóbal that contained references to the ceremonies and beliefs about the cave. In 1997, a second edition of his 1986 volume was issued with some modifications. A significant deletion in the new edition is a story that concerns a tatuch who entered the back of the cave to pray for rain.

In several articles and in her survey book on Maya cave paintings, Andrea Stone (1987, 1989, 1995) reproduced three of Blom’s photographs of Group 2.  She also presented her own drawings of Groups 2, 4, 5, and 6 based on Blom’s photographs and Riese’s drawings. She discussed the Early Classic style of the paintings, and correctly noted that the different groups were not contemporary with each other. Jolja’ is also mentioned in two other general surveys on Maya caves and rock art (Bonor Villarejo 1989:177; Pincemin Deliberos 1999:99-102).

In 1998, members of the Joloniel community discovered a looter’s trench in the inner recesses of Cave #1.  With funding from the Instituto Nacional Indigenista, the community installed a concrete wall, wire fence and metal gate across the mouth of the cave to protect it. This was an enormous undertaking that required the men of the community to haul huge cement blocks on their backs from the village to the cave. Because of the remoteness of the cave and the lack of a full time caretaker, the paintings are still vulnerable to looting and vandalism.

In that same year, Walter (Chip) Morris, who was at the time the director of the Na Bolom Museum, was awarded a National Geographic Society grant to organize the museum archives. As part of that process, the archivist Fabiola Sánchez, her husband Ian Hollingworth and anthropologist Alejandro Shesena traveled to Joloniel and assessed the present condition of the paintings. They also made a preliminary map of the main passageway of Cave #1, and recorded a cave petition made on their behalf by the Tumbalá tatuch Miguel Arcos Méndez (Arcos Méndez 2001).

In January of 2000, Karen Bassie, Alfonso Morales and Julie Miller visited Jolja’ while touring the region. With permission from INAH, Karen Bassie, Marc Zender and Jorge Pérez de Lara photographed the paintings with ultraviolet film and made preliminary drawings in April.

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