The Pomier Caves, Dominican Republic

The Pomier Caves are a series of 55 caves north of San Cristóbal in the southern Dominican Republic, and they hold the largest collection of rock art in the Caribbean.

There are roughly 6,000 drawings, carvings and pictographs in them: birds, fish, reptiles and human figures, made from about 2,000 years ago onward. The work is primarily Taíno, but also Kalinago and Igneri, the pre-Columbian peoples of the Bahamas, the Greater Antilles and parts of the Lesser Antilles. The paintings were made with charcoal mixed with animal fat.

What has preserved them is the caves themselves. Archaeologists credit the natural humidity that comes with the depth of the caves for keeping the art intact for two millennia.

The caves were first documented in 1851, and the threat to them is not time but quarrying. Uncontrolled mining of limestone nearby has already damaged them, which is the blunt problem with rock art in a rock that is worth money.

Protection came in 1996, when the Anthropological Reserve of Cuevas de Borbón in San Cristóbal was enlarged specifically to shield the El Pomier caves from limestone quarrying. That raised their protection category and brought them into the National System of Protected Areas under the country's general environmental law.

Archaeologists have been consistent about their importance since the caves were first described, and have argued specifically for preserving them. The art spans three peoples and two thousand years in one place, which is what makes the quarrying beside it so hard to justify: the rock being sold for aggregate is the same rock the record is drawn on.