Picture-Writing of the American Indians / Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1888-89, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1893, pages 3-822

by Garrick Mallery

Marcano (c) describes Fig. 152 as follows:

The chain of Cuchivero, situated in Venezuela between the Orinoco and the Caura, shows on its flanks small plateaus on which are numerous stones which seem to have been aligned. This chain is separated by a deep valley from that of Tiramuto, from which were copied the petroglyphs here presented. The one represents a single sun, the other two suns joined together. The rays of the former run from one circumference to the other. The other two are joined together by a central stroke, and the rays all start from the outer circumference.

Fig. 152.—Cup sculptures in Venezuela.

The same author (loc. cit.) thus describes Fig. 153:

These designs, taken on the little hills of the high Cuchivero, differ altogether from the preceding. a is a very regular horizontal grouping. It begins by a spiral joined to three figures similar among themselves, and similar also to the eyes of jaguars which we have often met with. There follows a sort of isolated fret; at its right is another, larger and joined to a circle different from the preceding; it has a central point, and the second circumference is interrupted. The figure terminates in a spiral like the one at the beginning of the line, and which, being turned in the opposite direction, serves as its pendant.

Fig. 153.—Cup sculptures in Venezuela.

b is formed of two horizontal rows one above the other. We there find first of all two frets united by a vertical stroke ending in a hook. The characters which follow, resembling those of a, are distinct in each row, but on closer inspection they are seen to have a peculiar correspondence.

Dr. Ladisláu Netto (b) gives copies of carvings on the rocks in Brazil on the banks of the Rio Negro, from Moura to the city of Manaus, and remarks upon the characters reproduced here as Fig. 154, that they represent the figure of the multiple concentric circles joined together two by two, as were found on several other rocks in the same region, and as they appear in many inscriptions of Central America and at various points of North America.