Cave Paintings Research Articles

A new subject in the study of the Great Shigir Idol

This article describes the views proposed by researchers over the years on the dating of the Great Shigir Idol (originally found in a Ural peat bog) and the interpretation of images carved on the body of the wooden sculpture. Special attention is paid to finds from the Volvoncha I settlement (the Eneolithic) located on the Konda River in Western Siberia: these discoveries allow a comparison with the anthropomorphic creatures on the idol, composed in the skeleton version of the X-ray style. Analogues of the Shigir images can be found among figurative images in cave carvings. An anthropomorphic image from the Far Hall of the Ignatievka cave allows us to not only identify the sex of the characters at the base of the idol, but also to propose a radical revision of the age of the Shigir sculpture. 14C calibrated dates obtained in Russia and Germany indicate that the larch from which the idol is carved is from the early Holocene, which demonstrates the validity of searching for parallels in other artefacts of late Paleolithic art. This is relevant to not only cave painting, but also to small art objects found in Western European monuments, which implement similar artistic techniques like the transfer of perspective. It is from this point of view that the carvings - chevrons above some of the likenesses on the idol – are studied in this paper. Each element of the chevron reflects a separate figurative image, following the principle “pars pro toto”. In the Shigir sculpture, one can discern a new iconographic canon in the representation of anthropomorphic images, with wide variation in the X-ray style.

The Superb and the Awesome: Animals in Muna-Madan

From the earliest cave painting to the most recent human expressions, both real and fantasized animals have continued to haunt our memory and imagination. Such animals have found their metaphoric, symbolic or metonymic equivalents in our ways of thinking about culture and have largely populated all genres of literature including fables and allegories. They are today invariably tied to our thoughts, motivations and feelings in ways that demand our concern. While we have hunted them or captured and domesticated them for our use, we have also distanced them as inferior beings or stopped to question our own moral superiority over them. However, we have not stopped marveling at the variety and beauty of the animal kingdom with an emotional entanglement which transmutes the wild and dangerous into superb and awesome creations that fill us with wonder and respect. I aim to dwell upon this emotional entanglement to study how Laxmi Prasad Devkota populates his long narrative poem, Muna-Madan, with animals and, in the process, show how these animals reflect the delightful and the tragic mood of the poem.

A Paleolithic bird figurine from the Lingjing site, Henan, China.

The recent identification of cave paintings dated to 42–40 ka BP in Borneo and Sulawesi highlights the antiquity of painted representations in this region. However, no instances of three-dimensional portable art, well attested in Europe since at least 40 ka BP, were documented thus far in East Asia prior to the Neolithic. Here, we report the discovery of an exceptionally well-preserved miniature carving of a standing bird from the site of Lingjing, Henan, China. Microscopic and microtomographic analyses of the figurine and the study of bone fragments from the same context reveal the object was made of bone blackened by heating and carefully carved with four techniques that left diagnostic traces on the entire surface of the object. Critical analysis of the site’s research history and stratigraphy, the cultural remains associated with the figurine and those recovered from the other archeological layers, as well as twenty-eight radiometric ages obtained on associated archeological items, including one provided by a bone fragment worked with the same technique recorded on the object, suggest a Late Paleolithic origin for the carving, with a probable age estimated to 13,500 years old. The carving, which predates previously known comparable instances from this region by 8,500 years, demonstrates that three-dimensional avian representations were part of East Asian Late Pleistocene cultural repertoires and identifies technological and stylistic peculiarities distinguishing this newly discovered art tradition from previous and contemporary examples found in Western Europe and Siberia.

DESERT TRACES MADAIN SALEH SITE MUSEUM

The project is a Site Museum of Madain Saleh in Al-Ula, Saudi Arabia. It is a unique and rich city of architectural heritage and nature, a place that is described as “an open-air museum.” Madain Saleh, also known as Al-Hijr is the first inscribed World Heritage property in Saudi Arabia. It has a notable number of monumental tombs and decorated facades that date back to the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD. Along with many inscriptions, cave drawings, and water wells. The uniqueness of Madain Saleh comes from being the meeting point of the late Antiquity civilizations. As well as from its significance architecture and decorations that was cut into sandstone and still preserved. The site and its original function; as funerary architecture, is the driving force of the design. The proposed space program consists of archaeological museum, research, auditorium, entrance and administration, and outdoors zone. This study also proposed the best location at Madain Saleh as the project site location according to the site evaluation result. The aim of the project is to connect the bond between humans and nature, humans and the architectural spaces, and most importantly humans with themselves.

Percepção de Impactos Ambientais do Turismo nas Pinturas Rupestre de Carnaúba dos Dantas – RN

The objective of the work was to evaluate the profile and environmental impacts at the Archeological Site xique-xique I, where the cave paintings of the city of Carnaúba dos Dantas - RN are located. The methodology included bibliographic research, questionnaire and site visit. 20 people were interviewed. It was found that there are environmental impacts, permanent risks of degradation by anthropic, natural factors and also by factors of human transformation caused by tourism present in that environment. Among the main impacts were cited: graffiti, deforestation and accumulation of solid waste. These factors can cause some paintings to disappear. The impacts are mainly associated with visiting practices by tourists themselves.

Deep time in Cave of Forgotten Dreams

This essay considers how Werner Herzog’s 3D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011) presents the entanglement of human drawing with natural formations of rock in a place where beauty is repeatedly ascribed to both these elements – the spectacular Chauvet Cave in the Ardèche gorge in France. The accumulated marks of activity, both human and geological, are presented in the film through aesthetics of layering associated with ideas of deep time. This concept, in the simplest sense, designates geologic time, mapped out for human understanding by the stratification and transformation of matter. The primary fascination of Chauvet lies in the dazzling cave paintings discovered there in 1994, some of which have been dated at 32,000 years old. Yet even this length of time is barely a scratch in the wider span of earth time, which renders any distinction between ‘prehistory’ and ‘history’, or between the definition of ‘art’ and that...

Upper Palaeolithic Installation Art: Topography, Distortion, Animation and Participation in the Production and Experience of Cantabrian Cave Art

The physical nature of cave walls and its impact on Upper Palaeolithic image making and viewing has frequently been invoked in explanations about the function of cave art. The morphological features (convexities, concavities, cracks and ridges) are frequently incorporated into the representations of prey animals that dominate the art, and several studies have attempted to document the relationship between the cave wall and the art in a quantitative manner. One of the effects of such incorporation is that undulating walls will distort the appearance of images as viewers change their viewing position. Was this distortion deliberate or accidental? Until now, the phenomenon has not been investigated quantitatively. We address this here, analysing 54 Late Upper Palaeolithic animal images deriving from three Cantabrian caves, Covalanas, El Pendo and El Castillo. We introduce a novel use for photogrammetry and 3D modelling through documenting the morphology of these caves’ walls and establishing the specific relationship between the walls and the art created on them. Our observations suggest that Palaeolithic artists deliberately placed images on very specific topographies. The restricted nature of these choice decisions and the fact that the resulting distortions could have been avoided but were not suggest that the interaction between viewer, art and wall was integral to the way cave art functioned.

Response to White et al.’s reply: ‘Still no archaeological evidence that Neanderthals created Iberian cave art’ [J. Hum. Evol. (2020) 102640

Response to White et al.’s reply: ‘Still no archaeological evidence that Neanderthals created Iberian cave art’ [J. Hum. Evol. (2020) 102640

Survival, Social Cohesion and Rock Art: The Painted Hands of Western Arnhem Land, Australia

This paper explores the complex story of a particular style of rock art in western Arnhem Land known as ‘Painted Hands’. Using new evidence from recent fieldwork, we present a definition for their style, distribution and place in the stylistic chronologies of this region. We argue these motifs played an important cultural role in Aboriginal society during the period of European settlement in the region. We explore the complex messages embedded in the design features of the Painted Hands, arguing that they are more than simply hand stencils or markers of individuality. We suggest that these figures represent stylized and intensely encoded motifs with the power to communicate a high level of personal, clan and ceremonial identity at a time when all aspects of Aboriginal cultural identity were under threat.

Deep-Learning-Based Active Hyperspectral Imaging Classification Method Illuminated by the Supercontinuum Laser

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) technology is able to provide fine spectral and spatial information of objects. It has the ability to discriminate materials and thereby has been used in a wide range of areas. However, traditional HSI strongly depends on the sunlight and hence is restricted to daytime. In this paper, a visible/near-infrared active HSI classification method illuminated by a visible/near-infrared supercontinuum laser is developed for spectra detection and objects imaging in the dark. Besides, a deep-learning-based classifier, hybrid DenseNet, is created to learn the feature representations of spectral and spatial information parallelly from active HSI data and is used for the active HSI classification. By applying the method to a selection of objects in the dark successfully, we demonstrate that with the active HSI classification method, it is possible to detect objects of interest in practical applications. Correct active HSI classification of different objects further supports the viability of the method for camouflage detection, biomedical alteration detection, cave painting mapping and so on.

Dating without dates: Stylistic and thematic chronologies in the Paleolithic painted caves of Les Bernoux and Saint-Front (Dordogne, France)

Establishing the precise chronological age of prehistoric rock art sites is often difficult, especially with regard to the sites of the Early Upper Paleolithic in Europe. Among 106 sites of this period identified in scientific literature, only 11 have been directly dated with the C14 method. At many caves, there are no means of direct dating of the figures themselves or their contexts.Such was the difficulty analyzing the caves Les Bernoux and Saint-Front (Dordogne). Thus, we used a different methodological process: their thematic and stylistic comparisons with figures from clearly-calibrated sites (caves). In this article, we expose the method we follow, using relevé and statistical data, as well as the results we obtain comparing formal attributes of figures with ones from other paleolithic caves.

Art in Endoscopy: "Prehistoric cave art".

This image was observed after a macroscopically complete endoscopic mucosal resection of a rectal adenoma. Before resection the submucosa was injected with indigo carmine, resulting in a beautiful blue background with the unaffected red vessels looking remarkably like a prehistoric cave painting.

Hidden images in Atxurra Cave (Northern Spain): A new proposal for visibility analyses of Palaeolithic rock art in subterranean environments

Visibility has been the subject of study in Palaeolithic rock art research ever since the discovery of Altamira Cave in 1879. Nevertheless, until now, the different approaches have been based on subjective assessments, due to computational limitations for a more objective methodology. Nowadays, cutting-edge technologies such as GIS allow us to address spatial studies in caves and overcome their geomorphologically complex and closed characteristics. Here we describe an innovative methodology that uses computing tools available to any researcher to study the viewsheds of the graphic units in decorated caves. We have tested its validity on the recently discovered rock art ensemble of Atxurra Cave, in Northern Spain. We demonstrate that this technology (GIS), widely used in other fields of archaeology, especially in outdoor studies, is also useable in caverns, taking into account the complex morphologies -ceilings and diverse floor-levels, for example. These programmes have also allowed us to consider the lighting systems used by the prehistoric groups inside the cave, as well as various data previously estimated by other authors, such as the height of individuals during the European LUP. The dynamism of these tools −2.5D-, as well as the advancement of new 3D GIS technologies, will allow in the future remarkable progress in these types of structural studies for a better understanding of Palaeolithic cave art phenomena.

El Castillo cave (Cantabria, Spain): Archeozoological comparison between the Mousterian occupation level (unit 20) and the “Aurignacien de transition de type El Castillo” (unit 18)

In Spain, the site of El Castillo is part of the emblematic cave system of Cantabria, famous for its cave art. They are registered as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO since 2008. This archaeological site is also important due its stratigraphic sequence, which spans several prehistoric occupation units and in particular the techno-complexes of the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition. These constitute the subject of this article. We carried out an archaeozoological / taphonomical analysis on the faunal skeletal remains of unit 20 (Mousterian) and unit 18 (Aurignacien de transition de type El Castillo), in order to study the evolution of subsistence strategies of the human populations between the end of the Middle Palaeolithic and the start of the Upper Palaeolithic, in the Iberian Peninsula.This research demonstrates that units 20 and 18 reflect differences in species acquisition. The humans of unit 18 targeted red deer specifically, whilst the Mousterian are less speciality and hunted red deer, horses, and bovines (auroch or bison). Level 18 shows a specialisation in deer acquisition, but it is worth noting that it is also the most important animal in level 20. Its prevalence in level 20 only appears lower because other species are present in greater proportions (horse, Bos/Bison).

Physicochemical investigation of prehistoric rock art pigments in Tewet Cave, Sangkulirang-Mangkalihat Site, East Kalimantan-Indonesia

Three color samples (red, brick-red, and purple) hand stencils in Tewet Cave at the Sangkulirang-Mangkalihat site, East Kalimantan, Indonesia, were thoroughly investigated using several advanced characterizations to identify physicochemical characteristics present in the pigments. The XRD techniques investigated the minerals of the sample pigments, whereas the local geometries and electronic structure information were obtained using XANES. Synchrotron radiation was used to provide high-resolution data for both characterizations with a minimum sample. Further physicochemical characterizations were performed on XRF (the chemical compositions), FTIR (the bonding and functional groups), and SEM (morphology). The results showed that all three samples contained hematite, which serves as the pigments while gypsum and calcite are observed in the rock base of the paintings. Our analyses show that the tint discrepancy is due to the octahedral geometry distortion of Fe2O3. The distortion of Fe3+ coordination in iron oxide causes an energy shift between t2g and eg, therefore, produce different hues. Besides, the different crystallinity of the hematite within the samples give a role to color changes of iron oxide. The purple sample has the highest geometry distortion among other samples with the highest hematite content and highest crystallinity, followed by brick red and red samples. These differences might be due to the discrepancies in the thermal treatment to, either deliberately or unintentionally, prepare the pigments. More distorted geometry and higher crystallinity are produced through the thermal treatment at higher temperatures or longer time. Our investigation may provide more in-depth insight into understanding the chemistry and engineering behind the pigment preparation.

Satire and The Cambridge Introduction to Satire

Satire and The Cambridge Introduction to Satire

U-series dating at Nerja cave reveal open system. Questioning the Neanderthal origin of Spanish rock art

U/Th data obtained on CaCO3 layers covering rock art at Nerja Cave (Spain) evidence erroneous ages and an inverse relation between uranium concentration and apparent ages. This open system behavior could be due to a mechanism causing uranium mobility, resulting in apparent ages being too old with respect to their real age. This article also questions recently published U/Th data on samples from Ardales, Maltravieso and La Pasiega caves (Spain) where a few U/Th ages older than 40 ka BP, suggested that cave art could be attributed to Middle Palaeolithic population (Hoffmann et al., 2018). For these caves, U/Th data also display an inverse relation between U content and ages, indicating possible uranium mobility and erroneous ages.

IMEJAN ZOOMORPHIC DALAM LUKISAN GUA PRASEJARAH, GUA KAIN HITAM (PAINTED CAVE) NIAH, SARAWAK

This article debates the zoomorphic images or images of animals that have been produced on prehistoric cave walls. Kain Hitam Cave or known as Painted Cave, located within the Niah Cave complex, is a cave that believed have been inhabited by Neolithic peoples. Inside the cave, there were a variety of artifacts including boat-shaped coffins, jewelry made of shells, bones, and ceramics. Inside the cave, there is also a cave painting that is produced on the wall using hematite material mixed with a mixture of plant material. The main focus of this article is to record all the animal images found inside the cave wall. This research also attempted to document images digitally. The researchers produced a re-image using Adobe Photoshop's digital software. The results of this research are to collect a more organized and detailed collection of images.

Comparative Study Between Ammonium Phosphate and Ethyl Silicate Towards Conservation of Prehistoric Paintings in the Magura Cave (Bulgaria)

This study aimed at evaluating the effectiveness and the compatibility of two alternative treatments, in view of their possible use for conservation of prehistoric paintings in the Magura cave (Bulgaria). The paintings are made of bat guano applied over limestone; therefore, two sets of laboratory specimens were considered: stone specimens and stone specimens covered with a layer of sterilized bat guano. The two investigated treatments were a commercial product based on ethyl silicate (“ES”) and a solution of diammonium hydrogen phosphate (“DAP”), aimed at forming calcium phosphates. The results of the study indicated that both treatments were able to increase the mechanical properties of stone, the increase being higher for “DAP”. Both consolidants caused acceptable color changes, but the “ES” treatment significantly decreased stone wettability, water absorption, and water vapor permeability, while the “DAP” treatment slightly affected those properties. In the stone + guano specimens, the presence of the guano layer affected the penetration of the consolidants, thus partly reducing their effectiveness. Compared to the stone samples, the guano layer experienced a more intense color change, alongside visible cracking. However, the adopted methodology to replicate the cave paintings was not completely successful, as the so-deposited guano layer was very prone to detachment when dry, unlike cave paintings. Future work will be dedicated to assessing the consolidant performance onto samples that resemble even more closely the conditions of the cave paintings, by improving the methodology for the guano layer deposition and by contaminating specimens with soluble salts before consolidant application.

Twin-chain polymer hydrogels based on poly(vinyl alcohol) as new advanced tool for the cleaning of modern and contemporary art

Conservation of our cultural heritage is fundamental for conveying to future generations our culture, traditions, and ways of thinking and behaving. Cleaning art, in particular modern/contemporary paintings, with traditional tools could be risky and impractical, particularly on large collections of important works to be transferred to future generations. We report on advanced cleaning systems, based on twin-chain polymer networks made of poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) chains, semiinterpenetrated (semi-IPN) with PVA of lower molecular weight (L-PVA). Interpenetrating L-PVA causes a change from gels with oriented channels to sponge-like semi-IPNs with disordered interconnected pores, conferring different gel (and solvent) dynamics. These features grant residue-free, time efficient cleaning capacity and effective dirt capture, defeating risks for the artifact, making possible a safer treatment of important collections, unconceivable with conventional methods. We report as an example the conservation of Jackson Pollock's masterpieces, cleaned in a controlled way, safety and selectivity with unprecedented performance.