Inscriptions from the Cova de la Font Major cave system in Catalonia, northeastern Spain, are prompting a rethinking of prehistoric population and cultural trends. Credits: Vergès Bosch, JM, Salas-Altès, M./Antiquity
Archaeologists have described hundreds of rock carvings dating back about 26,000 years in a cave frequently visited by tourists in Catalonia, a region of northeastern Spain thought to be almost devoid of Paleolithic art.1. The results were published in the journal Antiquity on November 5.
Josep Maria Vergès Bosch, an archaeologist at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA) in Tarragona, Spain, spotted prehistoric carvings among more modern graffiti in the Cova de la Font Major during an excavation planned for 2019.
Vergès and archaeologist Míriam Salas-Altès from IPHES-CERCA studied 280 Paleolithic artistic motifs, including 55 representations of animals, from the cave. “The amount of art discovered at the Cova de la Font Major is exceptional,” says Salas-Altès.
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The cave system – made up of more than 3.5 kilometers of underground passages that have been occupied numerous times throughout human history – has been open to the public for seven decades and became a museum in the 1990s.
The designs were easy to miss. “When you light the engravings directly, they are really difficult to see, you have to play with the light from different directions to see the depressions,” explains Salas-Altès.
Researcher Míriam Salas-Altès documents carvings in a tunnel in the cave system. Credit: Josep Maria Vergès/IPHES-CERCA
The engravings include images of animals such as a horse, a bear and an aurochs (the ancestor of domestic livestock), as well as a myriad of swirling lines. A handful of prints reveal how artists used “natural lines or cracks in walls,” says Salas-Altès. For example, “one is used to represent the ground under a horse.”
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