Cueva San Borjitas DStretch Home Slideshow Home

	Slideshows
Introduction Our trip to San Borjitas.	Ceiling Tour of the spectacular ceiling paintings.	Walls The walls of the cave.

My images and enhancements can be seen in the following link. They are indexed visually.
This means you click in the index (which is an image) to see the images and enhancements for that region.

Visual Index to Images and Enhancements

The image I use as an index is an illustration of the complete ceiling by Campbell Grant from his book
Rock Art of Baja California.

INAH archaeologist María de la Luz Gutiérrez has numbered the figures in the cave.
To see her numbering click on the image below.

History of Research

Cueva San Borjitas was known to the Jesuits and was mentioned in the writings of Clavijero (1785) and Miguel del Barco (first published in 1972). Leon Diguet [photo], originally an engineer at the mines at Santa Rosalia later conducted several archaeological expeditions in Baja California in the late 1800's. He reported on many painted sites including San Borjitas in Note sur la pictographie del la Basse-Californie (1895). A translation appears in Rock Art of Baja California by Campbell Grant (1974), Dawson's Book Shop, Los Angeles.

In 1951 Barbro Dahlgren [photo] and Javier Romero studied San Borjitas for INAH and published a study of the cave in Cuadernos Americanos 58(4), 1951. This is the first in-depth scholarly study of the paintings in the cave. Dahlgren studied the superposition of the figures in the cave, named several figure styles and produced a drawing of the ceiling. Click on the image above to see the drawing from Cuadernos Americanos.

In 1974 Campbell Grant published the book mentioned above. In it he discusses San Borjita and provides photos plus the drawing of the entire ceiling that I am using for my visual index. He also worked on a chronology of the figures based on superposition that is slightly different than Dahlgren.

In 1975 Harry Crosby [photo] published The Cave Paintings of Baja California. It has been revised and republished several times since then. This book is by far the best source of information on the Great Mural paintings of Baja California. Crosby describes his visit to San Borjitas and includes several photos and drawings from the cave.

Today research continues. María de la Luz Gutiérrez is the INAH archaeologist in charge of the painted caves in Baja California Sur. She has collaborated with Alan Watchman in an ongoing project to date the paintings in the cave. Their initial results indicate a possible age of 7500 years for some of the painting.