An Antiquity account describes animal figures and abstract marks found in 2019 at Cova de la Font Major, adding to northeastern Iberia’s previously sparse record of Paleolithic art.
An account in the journal Antiquity describes 280 Paleolithic engravings discovered during a 2019 excavation at Cova de la Font Major in Catalonia, including animal figures and abstract marks. The Paleolithic was the early part of the Stone Age.
Paleolithic rock art had been considered scarce in northeastern Iberia compared with the neighboring Franco-Cantabrian region. The researchers say the cave’s motifs differ from those of that region and help them characterize a distinct Mediterranean graphic tradition.
The engravings occupy small galleries and include animals and groups of abstract marks. One composition contains hundreds of loop-shaped cuts. The artists appear to have used the uneven rock itself: boundaries between rock types form ground lines for figures, while a fissure serves as the water surface in a scene of drinking deer.
The amount of art could also suggest, without providing a population estimate, that the region had a larger Paleolithic population than previously thought, ARTnews said.
The cave’s entrance was cleared for visitors in 1957, and the cave became a museum in 1993. In 2011, researchers confirmed that part of the entrance destroyed in 1957 had survived, leading to the site’s inclusion in a research project in 2018. During the following year’s excavation, a study author noticed figures among the graffiti that appeared to be Paleolithic.
Study co-author Josep Maria Vergès of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution said thousands of visitors had passed the engraved surfaces for more than six decades without recognizing their age. Some had written names and dates over the figures.
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