The engravings are on rock faces along the Orinoco river in Venezuela and Colombia, with the imagery depicting snakes, human figures and giant centipedes.
The monumental engravings are across steep rock faces. (Image Credit: UCL).
New Delhi: An international team of archaeologists have uncovered a series of monumental engravings along the Orinoco river in Venezuela and Colombia, believed to be the largest prehistoric rock art in the world. The engravings depict a range of imagery including a monumental snake, a giant tropical centipede, humans, cattle, geometric figures, reptiles and something that resembles a flying bat, or a diving pterodactyl.
Terrifying. (Image Credit: Antiquity).
Some of the engravings extend for tens of metres along the rock faces, with the largest one measuring 40 metres in length. The engravings are believed to mark locations of prehistoric indigenous tribes. Some of the sites were already known, but the team discovered many more and mapped 14 of them. Local guides and drones were used to identify the sites. Such engravings are difficult to date, but pottery found in the area suggests that the sites are at least 2,000 years old, and possibly much more.
Purpose of the engravings
A paper describing the findings has been published in Antiquity. Coauthor of the paper, José Oliver says, “The engravings are mainly concentrated along a stretch of the Orinoco River called the Atures Rapids, which would have been an important prehistoric trade and travel route. We think that the engravings are meant to be seen specifically from the Orinoco because most travel at the time would have been on the river. The Orinoco is generally quite navigable up to this point and so it would have been a natural stopping point. The archaeology tells us that it was it was a diverse environment and there was a lot of trade and interaction. This means it would have been a key point of contact, and so making your mark could have been all the more important because of that – marking out your local identity and letting visitors know that you are here.”
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Source link : https://www.news9live.com/science/worlds-largest-prehistoric-rock-art-discovered-in-south-america-2565263
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Publish date : 2024-06-05 10:05:27
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