Engravings from the Upper Palaeolithic in the Catalan Pre-Pyrenees

Some archaeologists have identified the first platelet with engravings from the Upper Palaeolithic found in the Pre-Pyrenees of Catalonia.

The plaque, which has engravings on both sides, was found in a cave known as Cova Gran de Santa Linya. And it is estimated to be 14,000 years old, which places it at the end of the Upper Paleolithic

The research has been carried out by the team of the Center for Archaeological Heritage Studies (CEPArq) of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), which investigates the rock shelter of the Cova Gran de Santa Linya (in Avellanes-Santa Linya, province of Lleida). .

The authors of the study have examined the nature of the engravings on both sides. On the obverse, a bucardo appears standing up, represented by means of a visual trick; and on the reverse, the first “logo” of the Cova Gran, with the Sant Miquel stream at its feet. The platelet adds to the limited set of unique pieces from the Upper Palaeolithic in Catalonia and contributes to reflection on the existence of a “new style” developed by the first hunter-gatherer populations in the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula.

“This artistic representation identifies a new unique element that is added to the rich and extensive archaeological record that research on this site has been providing in the last twenty years, key in the current development of archeology in Catalonia,” says Rafael Mora, director of the CEPArq and professor of the Department of Prehistory of the UAB.

Image of the plaque and graphic illustration of the engravings identified on both sides. (Photo: CEPArq / UAB)

The discovery of the plaque has been made in the same sector of the excavation where the partial skeleton of Homo sapiens Linya, the woman from La Noguera, was found, but at a level of occupation that occurred a few centuries earlier. The fact of having been found within an archaeological context in which carbon dated using the carbon 14 technique was recovered has allowed its dating. This precise dating of 14,000 years will make it possible to evaluate these engravings and compare them with other platelets from other sites whose exact dating is unknown or fixed in broader time ranges.

The platelet was made on a marl-calcareous rock, a material that does not appear in the Cova Gran, so it had to be transported to the refuge. In dimensions of 11 centimeters long by 8 wide, the research team identified the combination of a set of intentional strokes made up of multiple thin and thick lines, probably made with one or more flint instruments.

Its restoration and subsequent study, a task for which Rafael Martínez Valle, specialist researcher in Prehistoric Art at the Valencian Institute of Conservation, Restoration and Research of Cultural Assets of the Generalitat Valenciana (IVCR+i), has allowed reconstruct the compositions that appear on both sides, which are surprising for their simplicity and schematics.

Key elements in the life of the past

The engravings reproduce figures with a high symbolic content for the first settlers of the northeast of the peninsula. «We found elements and visual resources with which to narrate stories or specify spaces that denote that the person or people who executed them were intelligent and technically skilled, and that by combining few lines they were capable of generating visualizations with a high empathic content that we have been able to decode thousands years later”, highlights Jorge Martínez-Moreno, a researcher at CEPArq-UAB who has participated in his study.

Side A shows numerous lines distributed over the surface of the support, which has made it difficult to read the composition it contains. After a detailed 3D scan together with other visual techniques to unravel the development, direction and thickness of the grooves, a first figure is recognized, from what looks like a small face in profile on which an imposing antler sits. Starting from the head, a thick line designs the lines of the back and belly, to which several appendages are attached that correspond to the extremities. This arrangement suggests an animal at rest. The large horns that it exhibits identify a male bucardo or herc, the Pyrenean goat that became extinct in 2000.

In addition, it has been possible to determine that taking advantage of some grooves of this composition, new lines were drawn that make up another figure that is superimposed on the previous one. This design, recognized from a minimal face on which the antlers are, is connected with a vertical back line that represents the animal standing on stylized hind limbs. The composition suggests an attempt to capture the same animal in a sitting position of rest.

The engravings on side B lean towards one of the edges of the support, with a large void deliberately left. Starting from a few grooves, a large concave line that is closed at its base by two broken parallel lines configure what the researchers consider to be the first representation of the landscape of the Cova Gran, which combines the silhouette of the vault of the shelter and the bed of the Torrent of Sant Miquel at your feet.

From the schematic figures, intentionally reduced to simple strokes, surprising messages derive, according to the research team. On the one hand, the visual “trick” used in the drawing of the bucardo, by superimposing two figures, expresses a movement captured with great skill and great singularity, very rarely used in stone engravings. On the other hand, the representation of the Cova Gran itself, by combining a curve and two broken lines, recreates an important landscape for these people with an economy of strokes that recalls the design of a current logo.

Reclaiming an unknown and non-obvious art

Furniture art is a key material record for the study of the symbolic, communicative and cognitive capacities of human groups of the past. In Catalonia, these manifestations, known since the beginning of the last century by the Sant Gregori plaque, represent a limited set of unique pieces, which in recent years have been recovered from the findings in Hort de la Boquera, Cova dels Fems and especially in Molí del Salt, deposits that are located in Tarragona and attributed to the end of the Palaeolithic. This scant set of evidence makes it difficult to advance in the interpretation of the meaning of these artistic representations. The platelet from Cova de Gran de Santa Linya contributes interesting reflections to this discussion for researchers.

The engravings of all these plaques constitute a «new art», which breaks with the detailed naturalistic figurations of a high realism, authentic masterpieces that we have in mind when referring to «cave art». This “new style”, structured by an iconography in which deformed figures are designed to make them practically unrecognizable, defines a common figurative trend in the aforementioned Tarragona sites and suggests a profound remodeling of the worldview of the hunter-gatherers of the past.

In recent years, the CEPArq-UAB team has detected in the Cova Gran other indicators related to this process of formal simplification or schematization in the abstract engraved lines. These graphic codes, scattered along the walls of the shelter, define a communication channel whose meaning is currently unknown and were made thousands of years later by the herding communities that inhabited the enclave.

For the CEPArq and IVCR+i researchers, interpreting the engravings preserved in the platelet recovered in the Cova Gran has been a great challenge. «His study and that of other similar representations opens new ways to explore a little-known ancestral artistic tradition that seems very rich to us. Pablo Picasso, the great visionary of the new art of the 20th century, affirmed that it had taken him a lifetime to learn to paint like a child. This assertion underlines that these apparently simple prehistoric spellings are impregnated with an air of modernity present in our daily lives, which can be traced in the discourse of contemporary art and is consolidated in the language of comics”, concludes Jorge Martínez-Moreno.

The finding highlights the central role provided by the material record recovered in the Cova Gran de Santa Linya in the investigation of the oldest phases of human settlement in northeastern Iberia.

The research that the CEPARQ-UAB team is carrying out at the Cova Gran de Santa Linya has the support of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, the Archeology and Paleontology Service and the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya, the IEI (Institut d’Estudis Ilerdencs) of the Diputación de Lleida, the City Council of Les Avellanes i Santa Linya and the Societat de Munts, as well as with the additional collaboration of the CENIEH, the IPHES and the IVCR+i. (Source: UAB)