An
exceptional milestone in European Palaeolithic rock art
Date: March 11, 2019
Source: University of Barcelona
It is not
very common to find representations of scenes instead of individual figures in
Palaeolithic art, but it is even harder for these figures to be birds instead
of mammals such as goats, deer or horses. So far, historians have only found three
scenes of Palaeolithic art featuring humans and birds in Europe.
Now, an
article published in the journal L'Anthropologie tells how University
of Barcelona researchers found -in the site of Hort de la Bequera (Margalef de
Montsant, Priorat)-, an artistic piece from 12,500 years ago in which humans
and birds try to interact in a pictorial scene with exceptional traits: figures
seem to star a narration on hunting and motherhood. Regarding the Catalan
context in particular, this is an important finding regarding the few pieces of
Palaeolithic art in Catalonia and it places this territory within the stream of
artistic production of the upper Palaeolithic in the Mediterranean.
The piece
they found is a 30-centimeter long limestone which shows two human figures and
two birds, which the researchers identified as cranes. Since they found the
piece in 2011, they underwent all cleaning, restoration and 3D copying
procedures to study it in detail. Those figures were engraved in the stone
board with a flint tool so that they created an organized composition compared
to the other pieces of the same period.
No comments:
Post a Comment