After teaching photography for eight years in the Visual Arts Department at Simon's Rock College I am now devoting my time documenting pre-Columbian cave art in the Dominican Republic.

I have traveled and photographed in Europe, North Africa, and the Caribbean, and was the assistant field botanist on two field trips to the rain forest of Guyana, South America. I have had numerous short fictions published, most notably in the book, October Mountain Anthology, while my photographs are represented in a number of private and institutional collections, and I have received awards and fellowships for both my writing and my photography. Recent shows included photographs of fossilized rhinocerous in Nebraska, a series of photographs of partially erased blackboards, a group of portraits produced with cameras I constructed myself and a group of landscapes utilizing both pinhole photography and xerography. 

An exhibit, Huellas Pictograficas, of my 26x36 inch handprinted photographs of cave drawings in the Dominican Republic showed at the Museo del Hombre Dominicano in Santo Domingo in 2006 and many images remain on permanent exhibit there.

January 6, 2010 I will have a wall of photographs at the Museo de La Cofradía de los Congos del Espíritu Santo in Villa Mella, Santo Domingo.

Prints of some photographs of cave paintings and my limited edition book Rock Art of the Dominican Republic may be purchased HERE. All images from  the Color Cave Paintings are available-- EMAIL for available sizes and prices.

For accounts of life in the Dominican Republic and other writings go to my Writing Page.

Watch for my article--FINGER FLUTING AND OTHER CAVE ART IN CUMAYASA, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC to appear in Rock Art Research in November, 2010.

Galleries  B&W Cave Paintings Color Cave Paintings El Pomier #1,#2, el Símbolo El Pomier #4, #5, el Puente, Tammy Dominguez, Scarlet Las Maravillas, Cumayasa Cotuí-- Hoyo de Sanabe, el Chorro Cueva de la Cidra, Rio Limpio; Cueva de las Aves, Hato Mayor Erasures Pinhole Portraits Particle Theories Evidence of Life Cocker Spaniels

I am a firm believer in the hands-on, build it yourself approach to life-- I often build my own cameras, and here I am building my own concrete block foundation

Taíno Cave Art Photographed (Spanish, French, German)

These pictographs were drawn on the walls and ceilings of caves in the Dominican Republic by the indigenous peoples who lived here from about 8,000 years before the present until shortly after the arrival of Columbus in 1492.

The paint that they used was usually made from charcoal mixed with animal or vegetable fat to yield a workable consistency.

Some of these pictographs were found in the entrances of the caves where there is daylight but many others were found deep in the cave system in total darkness and in small, uncomfortable spaces that were very difficult to reach.

Many anthropologists believe that the artists were shamans under the influence of the hallucinogenic herbal mixture called cohoba that was inhaled through the nose and that these drawings had spiritual and religious significance for the Taíno.

It is possible to interpret many of these images intuitively but others are quite abstract, and it is these enigmatic designs that I find the most interesting because they seem to be drawn from a universal unconscious world and seem to be about what is underneath the surfaces of both the Earth and our understanding of the world around us.

Daniel DuVall 2010 

El Hombre de Guajimico por Alexa Voss  Doctoral thesis in Spanish (PDF 70mb.)

Catalog for Huellas Pictograficas, 2006, solo exhibit of photographs of cave paintings .PDF

Email-- danrupestre@gmail.com