280 Ice Age Engravings Found in a Spanish Cave Tourists Visited for Decades
Archaeologists found about 280 engravings roughly 26,000 years old in Catalonia's Cova de la Font Major, including 55 animals and possible 'animation' scenes.
Archaeologists have identified about 280 Ice Age engravings on the walls of the Cova de la Font Major, a cave in Catalonia, Spain, that people have been walking through since at least the 12th century. The engravings are roughly 26,000 years old, according to a study published this week in the journal Antiquity and reported by Smithsonian Magazine.
The find is the third-largest collection of Ice Age engravings known from the Mediterranean side of the Iberian Peninsula. Before it, Paleolithic rock art in Catalonia was “very scarce,” said Josep Maria Vergès of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES).
What the engravings show
The IPHES team recorded the markings during excavations in 2019. Among them are 55 animals, including horses, deer, a bear and early forms of wild cattle, along with dozens of abstract lines, loops and patterns. The researchers suggest some of the abstract shapes may stand for land or water.
At least 20 of the engravings may work together like a prehistoric “movie or animation,” co-author Míriam Salas-Altès told Nature. In these panels the same animal is repeated with its head and legs in shifting positions, which could be meant to show it running. That reading is the researchers’ interpretation, and the paper does not claim to know what the artists intended.
How the team dated them
Inside one engraved groove the team found bits of charcoal and, next to it, a small flint bladelet. Radiocarbon dating of the charcoal gave the age of about 26,000 years. Because only one groove supplied datable material, the date applies most directly to that spot, and the full set of engravings may span a range of time.
The cave was used on and off for a very long period. The oldest signs of people inside date back roughly 41,000 years. One gallery was occupied during the Neolithic, up to 7,400 years ago, and an area near an entrance was apparently busier in the early Bronze Age, between 4,200 and 2,700 years ago, when pieces of a dagger, a sword and an axe were left there. The researchers have not worked out what any of these groups used the cave for, whether shelter, ritual or something else.
How visitors missed them
The cave system holds two miles of passages and underground rivers. People have explored it for centuries, scratched graffiti on its walls and, in the 1990s, opened a museum there. The engraved gallery itself has been open to tourists since 1957.
Earlier visitors assumed the walls were too irregular in shape and color to hold ancient art. Lighting also played a part, Salas-Altès told Nature. A light aimed straight at the wall makes the shallow grooves almost disappear; they show up only when light comes from the side and casts shadows into them. Vergès said it seemed hard to believe that nobody crossing the gallery had noticed them before.
Why it matters
Paleolithic rock art is plentiful on the Iberian Peninsula but unevenly spread, with the richest record in the neighboring Franco-Cantabrian region. The Catalan engravings look different from that style, and the researchers argue they belong to a Mediterranean tradition with its own identity. “Northeastern Iberia holds first-rate Paleolithic rock art sites,” Salas-Altès said in a statement.
If that holds up, the map of Ice Age art in western Europe gets a new region to study. The team says Catalonia deserves more attention in research on the period, and other caves there that were written off as too rough for art may be worth a second look with angled light.
Source: Smithsonian Magazine
