Forbidden Islands
11 Ancient Structures in Jamaica No One Can Explain
Jamaica has a 17th-century city lying on the floor of Kingston Harbour, three carved wooden gods that were carried out of a mountain cave in 1792 and shipped to the British Museum, and a gallery of paintings hidden 60 feet down a vertical shaft that no one has ever managed to date. Most of these places were built or carved centuries before Columbus arrived. Almost none of them have answers.
In this video, we explore:
→ Three Taíno wooden gods, a rain-giver, a birdman, and a stand for hallucinogenic ritual snuff, found hidden together in a cave near a mountain summit in 1792, then taken to London, where they still sit in the British Museum
→ A rock shelter whose engravings are counted among the finest in Jamaica, scarred with modern graffiti before archaeologists could record figures whose meaning has never been recovered
→ A single human face carved into the wall of a cave above a freshwater sinkhole, in a cavern that holds almost no sign anyone ever lived there
→ A limestone wilderness the British army could never conquer and surveyors have still never fully mapped, holding Maroon and Taíno stonework no one has counted
→ The largest Taíno town ever found on the island, its burials 700 to 1,000 years old, with a modern highway cut straight through it
→ The largest building still standing from 17th-century Jamaica, and not one record says who raised it, when it was finished, or why
→ Hundreds of carved Spanish stones blending European gargoyles with Taíno spirits, and an argument that has never been settled over whose hands cut them
→ A Maroon stronghold the British burned in 1734, hidden so deep in the Blue Mountains that most of it has never been excavated
→ A gallery of Taíno paintings at the base of a 20-meter vertical shaft, never directly dated, with 13 figures no one has ever identified
→ 148 painted images in a cave so hard to reach that a heritage guide once reported no visitor had been inside in over two years
And at number one: an entire 17th-century city of taverns, warehouses, and brick streets resting on the floor of Kingston Harbour under up to 40 feet of water. On the 7th of June, 1692, an earthquake liquefied the sand it was built on, and two-thirds of the town slid into the sea in minutes. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in July 2025, and after seventy years of diving, only about 40 percent of it has ever been surveyed. The rest is still down there.
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SOURCES & FURTHER READING
UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Archaeological Ensemble of 17th-Century Port Royal (List ref. 1595, inscribed 12 July 2025)
Jamaica National Heritage Trust (JNHT), site records for Mountain River Cave, Two Sisters Cave, and Seville
The British Museum, Zemi figures from Vere, Jamaica (registration Am1977,Q.1-3)
Society of Antiquaries of London, 1799 record of the Carpenters Mountains figures (published in Archaeologia, 1803)
Loubser and Allsworth-Jones, "Caring for the Spirit Helpers: Recording, Graffiti Removal, Interpretation, and Management of the Warminster/Genus Rockshelter," in Rock Art of the Caribbean (University of Alabama Press, 2009)
P. Allsworth-Jones, Pre-Columbian Jamaica (University of Alabama Press, 2008)
L. G. Atkinson, "Sacred Landscapes: Imagery, Iconography, and Ideology in Jamaican Rock Art," in Rock Art of the Caribbean (2009)
Atkinson and colleagues, Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage (2023), on White Marl
Silverberg, Vanderwal and Wing (1972), White Marl radiocarbon dates
Jamaican Caves Organisation, The Caves of Portland Ridge (2022), on Potoo Hole
Fincham and Fincham, Jamaica Journal (1997), on the Potoo Hole pictographs
The Jamaican Historical Society Bulletin (October 1995), on Colbeck Castle
K. Agorsah, University of the West Indies, Nanny Town excavations, 1990 to 1994
UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List, and the Cockpit Country Heritage Survey (2009)
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Published Jun 14, 2026
