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=Mona's Cave=

Cueva de las Monas is an important ancient site to understand the social-historical processes that occurred in the central and western part of Chihuahua and also to learn more about pre-Hispanic Tarahumara world: stories, myths, legends, rituals, etc., as well as to determine if there was an Apache presence in the site.

Cueva de las Monas is located at Chihuahua municipality to the north of the city and corresponds to an archaeological site with pre-Hispanic rock paintings. It was found in the second half of the 1980s, when the first studies of the historic site’s components were done. In the 1990s, because of the increase on the number of tourists, the first cleaning works started, security fences were installed along with indication signs and route trails were delineate. Not only Chihuahua state is represented in the shapes and colors of the drawings of the cave walls, but also the north of Mexico.

Interpretations of this landmark started on the late 1980s and they had led to different conclusions about who paint them and the age of the paintings. The first exponents considered that was the Conchos Indians who made most of the paintings. Later, as a result a new discovery, it is considered that the Tarahumara Indians were responsible for the largest number of paintings. At least three pictorial stages are presented in the Cueva de las Monas: Archaic (+/- 500d.C.), Colonial (S.XVII-XVIII) and Apache (S.XIX).

History Background
The archaeologists of Mexico’s national institute of anthropology and history, conclude that the cave wall scenes painted coincide three different cultural eras.

One of those eras is a late archaic period represented with abstract motives or artifacts like spearheads that age 500 years before our era. Another period is located immediately before and after the contact with the Spaniards. Finally, in a cavity around the cave there are found Apache representations of the 19th century.

The archaeologist Enrique Chacon Soria of the INAH-Chihuahua center says that these paintings lead us to a more ancestral Tarahumara culture, this tribe did not settle in this area, but it is verified by ethnohistoric sources that Raramuri groups crossed this mountain range towards the desert to collect peyote, known as the sacred cactus. The site that could have been a camp for nomads and hunter-gatherers was later used as a ceremonial space by the nomads.

Description of the drawings
"The stone art refers to the vision of the first men who inhabited America and the following populations, from hunters-gatherers to the most complex agricultural societies, such as those who built Paquimé".

The front face of the cave shows an image that reflects a woman next to a “Shaman” with a stick in one hand and in the other a kind of a musical instrument called GÜIRO, alluding to the ritual of the peyote rasp, and aside a man in the middle of a circle that symbolizes the sun, participating in a spiritual ceremony of their groups, all on a white background.

Following from left to right, in the images seen from the front, a human figure appears with arms surrounded with leather and metal armor that symbolizes a Spaniard from the colonial era, mixed with other drawings from two thousand years ago, like chains, zigzag images, points and figures similar to a jellyfish.

The cave paintings reflect the ancient worldview of the native groups who captured on the Tova-rock the "Myth of the Giant",Ganoko, a figure that stands out above the rest because of its size, with its arms hanging down to the sides, which shows its great hands open in a challenge, as a way to explain mythical beings taller than the pines that taught the Tarahumara how to grow corn, but the titans ate the raramuri children. So, one day tired of this cruel situation, they decided to murder the giant with a traditional meal mixed with poisonous seeds.