Painted Stone Site: Indigenous Calendar
Machine translation from the original, not yet reviewed by the author.
Original in Spanish
The ‘painted stone’ of Calderas is a stone with many petroglyphs, located in the town of Calderas, in the Province of Chiriquí. It is one of the best-known petroglyph sites in Panama, among villagers and archaeologists alike. It is even recorded in Neville A. Harte’s book “Panorama of Panama Petroglyphs” (1961). Because of this fame, the stone has already received attention in the past (unlike Polanco and Los Olivos, which we had to show to archaeologists of the Smithsonian and of the INAC (the National Institute of Culture) for the first time in 2000 and 2001). For that reason, we will not devote ourselves to describing the stone in detail, but will focus instead on explaining our hypothesis that one of these drawings is an indigenous solar calendar.
Located forty-five minutes by car from the city of David, the ‘painted stone’ of Calderas displays a great many unsettling drawings carved over almost its whole surface. Including spirals, faces and reptiles, its designs are very varied, with a sequence of seven ‘T’s pointing East standing out.
On the following pages I present a simple hypothesis about the meaning of one of them, based on the movement of the sun. The hypothesis set out on this page has been on the web since March 2000, and it is an entirely original work of the author (Roberto Pérez-Franco).