Archaeologists find trove of prehistoric art in Catalonian cave

Arguably, archaeological discovery is a matter of observation and luck. Israel famously has no prehistoric cave art at all, or if it does, it hasn't been found.

In comparison, in Southeast Asia we find offerings starting around 55,000 years ago. Across the Mediterranean in southern Europe, we find spectacularly beautiful scenes starting about 35,000 years ago, if we ignore the dots, lines and hashtag marks in caves attributed to Neanderthals about 65,000 years ago.

France and Spain in particular are littered with paleo-art, but their distribution is highly uneven. Altogether more than 300 caves with parietal art are known in Spain; more than half the ancient artworks are located in the Iberian Peninsula.

But only two Palaeolithic cave art figures had ever been reported from Catalonia, a province on the bucolic Mediterranean coast. Why? Didn't prehistoric people like the paradisical environment?

Maybe they did. Arguably the lacunae was an artifact of our failing to find the ancient wonders, though not only was prehistoric Catalonia short of art, it's short of "mobile art" (figurines and engraved tools), say Josep Maria Vergès Bosch and Míriam Salas-Altès of the Catalonia Institute of Human Paleoecology and University Rovira i Virgili. Yet despite that lack, they have just reported in the Journal of Antiquity a vast collection of engraved images found in 2019 at Cova de la Font Major, a cave system a day trip away from Barcelona.

How now black cow

Of the 280 motifs found on the engravings so far, the archaeologists count 55 zoomorphic figures, accompanied by a range of non-figurative geometric forms.

The two Catalonian artworks known before were a black-outlined bovid on the wall of the Cova del Tendo that may have been as old as 40,000 years, but sadly it is no more. It was stolen shortly after its discovery, the archaeologists say. The second is an incomplete drawing of what may have been a deer, an animal that the prehistoric peoples dearly loved to eat. That one was in Cova de la Taverna and not everyone agrees it's even a painting.

As for engraved tools, like wall art, they aren't entirely absent from Catalonia: the team notes bone tools carved with geometric forms including spearpoints, harpoons and rods. Figurines are much later, starting about 12,000 years ago.

And now we have at least 280 more engravings to admire in the inland Cova de la Font Major. The cave mouth had collapsed possibly about 2,000 years ago and the cavern remained unexplored until 1853. Surveying it would wait until 1956. The next year the local authority opened the cave's main gallery to the public and the team notes with dismay that the construction had not been done by archaeologists, so ancient deposits at the cave entrance were destroyed. Multitudes of visitors to the cave didn't help matters. In 1993 the cave was converted into a museum.

Yet the cave art was only "discovered fortuitously" in 2019 when the first excavation commenced, and distinguished between graffiti by latter-day vandals and engravings by ancient artists. "During a visit to a sector of the cave known as the Gatoneres de Cal Palletes, one of the authors observed that, among the numerous modern engravings and graffiti covering large portions of the walls, several engravings displayed Palaeolithic characteristics," they wrote.

They add that the discovery was "unexpected" since the cave had been open since 1957 but it gets even better – the Gatoneres de Cal Palletes segments with the ancient art "were part of the so-called Adventure Route, a tourist attraction initiated in 1993; it was assumed that any prehistoric representations would have already been discovered."

Moreover, the cave walls were not like smooth canvases; they were terrible for art, they add, even if tourist vandals were evidently undismayed by the unfriendly geology.

"For more than six decades, thousands of visitors passed directly in front of the engraved surfaces, and in some cases inscribed names and dates over them, without the Palaeolithic origin of the figures being recognized," they write. We tourists are a useless bunch.

And now here we are: Cova de la Font Major sports the biggest collection known in prehistoric Catalonia. The archaeologists add that the original collection was apparently larger but not all has survived.

In their summation, the archaeologists stress that the very recent discovery of a parietal assemblage of this magnitude in a cave that had been visited for decades suggests a methodology problem.

A rare bear

The engravings begin about in marl layers about 250 meters into the cave. A lot of art has been reported from black depths of caves, leading to a host of theories about who paints in the dark – presumably with the help of torches – and why. So what did they incise on the walls?

Local animals that have since gone extinct: horses, aurochs, goats, deer. There is one picture interpreted as a bear, which is rare in known prehistoric cave art. The team adds that a lot of the images have become too eroded to identify. Some of the depicted animals appear to be pregnant.

When were these images made? Dating is still in process but the team distinguished several phases of occupation.

The earliest phase of residence and usage was 40,000 to 26,000 years ago. The cave was also in use from the eighth century B.C.E. to the second century B.C.E. The latest phase was the Bronze Age about 2,700 to 4,200 years ago, from which time the team also found human bones and a host of artifacts, including a compete dagger, a broken one, an axe and some jewelry.

They also found evidence of ritual in the form of hundreds of ceramic vessels, possibly gifts or offerings to the deities, jewelry, and some remains of agricultural produce and domestic animals.

The discovery of Roman tegulae may attest to even later use of the cave system – it was then that the main cave mouth collapsed, the team believes.

The team also notes graffiti on one cave wall dating to the year 1199 and more graffiti from 1884. But the long story short is that the dating is being examined closely. Given the many and myriad uses of the cave and ignorance of its history, it sounds practically miraculous that any of the 280 engravings survived at all.