The Nazario Collection (), also known as Agüeybaná's Library (), Father Nazario's Rocks (), and the Phoenician Rocks (), are a cache of carved stones that originated at Guayanilla, Puerto Rico. According to contemporary accounts, the statuettes made of local serpentine rocks were first discovered by Catholic priest José María Nazario y Cancel during the 19th century, and feature unidentified petroglyphs that have been speculated to be connected to the Old World for over 130 years. Their original site was not far from Yauco and was underground, where it was hidden under a slate that concealed a tunnel. Overwhelmed with the quantity and difficulty of transporting a trove that totaled more than a ton, he opted to abandon his individual approach and recruited locals to aid in the moving of the rocks to his house, where he conducted the first research on them by comparing them to similar objects from other countries. Nazario would combine his research with his religious background, leading to the hypothesis that there might be some connection between them and the Ten Lost Tribes.
Due to the ramifications that their authentication would have on mainstream concepts of Pan-American history, the authenticity of the pieces has been in question from the onset, with researchers providing conflicting opinions. Despite this, several foreign archeologists traveled to Puerto Rico in order to study the pieces. Among those that inquired on the matter was ethnographer Alphonse Pinart, who examined the pieces and concluded that they were "undoubtedly authentic". The explorer also expressed concern that some people could try to falsify pieces to receive gifts in exchange for them. Locally, historians took an interest in the matter while archeologists did not study them for decades. After the death of Nazario, most pieces were kept at the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture (ICP), with others being kept by the UPR and foreign institutions in New York, Spain and Paris. During the 1980s, the Collection attracted historian Aurelio Tío, who tried to recruit a variety of institutions to the cause of studying the pieces.
During the 2010s, the study of the pieces was led by archeologist Reniel Rodríguez Ramos of the University of Puerto Rico at Utuado in collaboration with experts from Universidad del Turabo, the University of Miami and University of Haifa, among others. Radiocarbon dating of soot impregnated in the glyphs supported an ancient origin, with a date range of 900 BC – 900 AD. Geological studies concluded that the petroglyphs were carved in Puerto Rico and that the serpentine rocks were local. Preliminary results using high power microscopes found that the technique used was unlike any those of the local native groups, while another from a use-wear laboratory concludes that stone tools were used. Preliminary epigraphic studies found similarities between the petroglyphs and the Libyco-Berber alphabet as recorded in the Canary Islands and the Tartessian language of the Iberian Peninsula.
Discovery and relocation Exploration at Río Coayuco
The discovery of the rocks is attributed to Catholic priest José María Nazario y Cancel, a native of the municipality of Sabana Grande that had settled in Guayanilla and had received education at the University of Salamanca that included, among other things, the study of ancient languages. The popular story of the event was told by the priest to historian Adolfo de Hostos. According to this narrative, sometime during the late 1870s the minister was summoned to the deathbed of a local woman of Taíno ascent. There she, who was aware of Nazario's interest in archeology and native history, decided to reveal the location of a long-hidden collection of artifacts. This knowledge had been covertly passed from generation to generation throughout the centuries, but she decided to reveal it in hopes that the priest would recognize its historical importance and safeguard it from that point on. With time, the old woman was given the name of "Juana Morales" and was claimed to be "the last descendant" of Agüeybaná II or Agüeybaná El Bravo, the last ruler of the Puerto Rico natives and military leader during the Spanish–Taíno War of San Juan–Borikén (from whom the rocks get one of their colloquial namesakes), elements that were not found in the original version. There is no record of an elder person by that name dying during the time in the municipality's records, but there is a local Morales family that lives at Barrio Indio and has its oral tradition of the events dating back to at least the 1970s.
Nazario then traveled between municipalities until he arrived at a riverside location in what is now speculated to have been the modern barrio Indios, reaching a stone slab that was meant as a marker. Digging the terrain, the priest found a tunnel and continued rummaging until he reached an alcove within which were more than 800 rocks and stones of varying sizes several of which had anthropomorphic shape, all covered in unknown petroglyphs that did not match any Amerindian civilization known to have lived in Puerto Rico or the Caribbean. From 1880 onwards, the rocks were taken to Nazario's personal house at Guayanilla, not the parochial house, where he kept the other fragments of this finding and several other archeological pieces as part of his collection. Nazario gave the people involved in the extraction a modest reward for bringing pieces there. In 1883, Agustín Stahl and Román Baldorioty de Castro visited the house and discussed the possibility of creating the Puerto Rico Museum of Natural History.
Early research Nazario named them antropoglifitas (hispanized from the Greek "antropōmorphos", which relates to having human-like characteristics, and "gluphē", which refers to carvings) and considered each individual piece a volume in a larger story. In his writings, Nazario stated that they had been found packed in a small area and at a distance that was "not extraordinarily away from Guayanilla", speculating if they had been hidden there to avoid being lost at war (between the local and foreign natives) due to its proximity to the chiefdom of Agüeybaná. The priest was close to physician and author Manuel Zeno Gandía, with whom he exchanged correspondence and would later join him in a historical debate over the location of Columbus' arrival to Puerto Rico. Nazario gave him two pieces of the Collection to him and requested that they were kept safe and close. In 1881, when Zeno Gandía was chosen as representative of the Puerto Rican media in the activities held to commemorate Pedro Calderón de la Barca's second centenary in Spain, he took the pieces to the founder of the Museo Nacional de Antropología, Pedro González de Velasco, who according to the author insisted in keeping one of them. An agreement was reached between both, where the Spaniard accepted naming it after Nazario and gave credit to its discovery in Puerto Rico. This event caused a temporary estrangement between Zeno Gandía and the priest. After González de Velasco died the following year, the destination of the piece became unknown.
The first formal mention of the Collection was made by Alphonse Pinart in 1890, noting that the discovery was made near Yauco, in a place that he identifies as "Hanoa, Puerto Rico", and that some pieces displayed signs of being "undoubtedly authentic", but assumed that unscrupulous people fabricated their own to receive a reward. He further noted similarities between the characters in the Collection and known ancient alphabets, but declined speculating further on the matter. Pinart also embarked some pieces with him to the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro from which they were moved to the Musée du quai Branly when the former institution closed down, 38 pieces remain there and form the largest known concentration outside of Puerto Rico. Nazario later noted that besides France, other pieces had been taken by the researcher to Copenhagen and Philadelphia.
In 1893, Nazario wrote a piece named Escritura Aborigen de Carib (English: "Aboriginal writing of the Carib"), where he detailed his interpretations of the petroglyphs. Analyzing the inscriptions, he dismissed a Taíno or Arawak origin and by 1897 had concluded that the carvings were more reminiscent of Chaldean or Hebrew languages, saying that he recognized some of the characters present. Nazario also asserted that based on the study of the petroglyphs, it was safe to conclude that the Pre-Columbian inhabitants of Puerto Rico had perfected writing beyond the natives of Mexico or Peru, speculating that the pieces could have been a Pre-Columbian national archive of some kind. Nazario would then begin an effort to translate the characters phonetically after acquiring a copy of 1889's Historia De Las Naciones: Caldea (English: "History of the Nations: Chaldea") and using the characters present in a Babylonian religious artifact reproduced there. The document would be modified and later become known as Escritura Fonética de los Indios de Puerto Rico (English: "Phonetic orthography of the Indians of Puerto Rico"). Nazario hypothesized that perceived linguistic similarities could imply that some of the Ten Lost Tribes crossed Asia making their way into the Bering Strait and traveled from there to North America, before dividing somewhere near Central America, from where they arrived to the Caribbean.
The conclusions reached by Nazario were met with skepticism by mainstream archeologists who labeled him as "imaginative [and/or] crazy", as it implied contact with the New World prior to Columbus' voyages, and speculation emerged that he perhaps paid a local jíbaro (a class of Puerto Rican countrymen) to sculpt the stones with a machete or file and that the petroglyphs were meaningless. A man only known as "Curros Quirós" was said to be involved in this practice, which modern academics consider the first recorded instance of archeological falsification in the Caribbean. In 1894, Nazario met Cayetano Coll y Toste, which whom he had been involved in a number of historical debates, at San Juan. Both discussed the possibility of the historian aiding in the process of deciphering the characters in the Collection, but the effort was aborted when the condition of sending the pieces to San Juan (to be returned later) was proposed. According to historian Otto Sievens, several of the rocks were thrown into a cistern at Guayanilla's church when the Americans arrived during the Spanish–American War. By 1903, Nazario was holding conferences about the Collection, which were unsuccessful in gaining the desired attention.
That same year, Jesse Walter Fewkes of the Smithsonian Institution, visited Puerto Rico and reportedly offered Nazario $800 to buy the pieces, but the offer was declined. In his subsequent report, the anthropologist concluded that the assemblage was the most intricate one among those that gathered native petroglyphs in Puerto Rico. However, in his examination of the carvings Fewkes also commented that the inscriptions were not Amerindian in origin and labeled them as "exotic", leading to an assumption that they may not be ancient. In his field notes, Fewkes notes that he was unable to find Nazario during a first visit in 1902, returning the following year. He also stated that the entire Collection was under a roof, that the pieces were classified by priority, and that the priest gave him his writings (which he discarded as not being authored by a scientist). Despite his skepticism, Fewkes took some pieces with him, which he placed in an exhibit along pieces of dubious origin at the National Museum of Natural History based on his initial assessment. This led to unrelated American archeologists assuming that the rocks were a forgery, discontinuing their investigation for several decades. Influenced by their foreign peer, local archeologists also lost interest in the Collection and stopped their inquiry for decades.