Animal sculptures carved into rocks along the Orinoco River in South America
Philip Riris et al.
The prehistoric rock carvings of giant snakes along the Orinoco River in South America are some of the largest known rock art in the world, some measuring over 40 metres in length.
The Orinoco is one of the world’s largest rivers, and it flows through Venezuela along the border with Colombia. “There is a fantastic record of rock art along the Orinoco, especially on the Venezuelan side,” he said. Jose Oliver at University College London. “Typically, they are paintings found under rocks.”
He said carvings are common at many open-air sites along the river, but not all of them have been officially recorded.
Oliver and his colleagues have made several visits to the coastal areas on both the Colombian and Venezuelan sides of the river since 2015, trying to get a better picture of the river’s rock carvings.
“It wasn’t hard to find new sites,” a team member said. Philip Lillis Professor at Bournemouth University in the UK. “Every time I turned a corner there was always something new.”
Of the 157 rock art sites the team visited, 13 consisted of carvings over four meters in height. “Anything that size is monumental to us,” Lillis says, “meaning they’re often visible from quite a distance, anywhere from 500 meters to a kilometer away.”
Most of the carvings depict humans, mammals, birds, centipedes, scrolls and geometric shapes, but snakes are one of the largest motifs, the largest measuring 132 feet (42 meters) wide. In indigenous Orinoco mythology, anacondas and boa constrictors are highly revered because they are primordial creator beings, Lillis said.
The prominence of rock art along the river suggests that the ancient carvings may have been territorial markers indicating that a particular group lived there, but not necessarily a warning not to trespass. “The carvings were not exclusionary, but rather may have been an inclusive practice shared between communities,” Lillis says.
Pottery excavated in the area, dated to 2,000 years ago, contains motifs similar to those in the carvings, suggesting that the rock art was created 2,000 years ago as well.
The team hopes to find more of these carvings and glean clues about their origin and purpose — for example, many of them are found close to rock shelters containing burial sites, suggesting a possible connection to ancient funerary practices.
“This is valuable research.” Andres Troncoso “This discovery sheds light on rock art in a little-known part of South America and furthers our knowledge of the region,” said researchers from the University of Chile.
“When Westerners think of rock art, they often think of mammoths, cave lions, and other large mammals that inhabit the Pleistocene cave sites of Western Europe,” he said. Patrick Roberts Commenting on the findings, a researcher from the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology in Germany said: “However, the giant snake carving studied in this paper is one of the largest single rock art in the world, and was found in the heart of a lowland tropical environment.”
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Source: www.newscientist.com
