Archaeologists have discovered one of the world’s largest collections of ancient art, depicting giants and monsters walking the earth.
In a remote area of South America, a British research team has discovered more than a thousand prehistoric carvings, including the world’s largest examples of prehistoric rock art. However, the archaeologists believe that the examples found so far are just the “tip of a huge ancient artistic iceberg” – and that many more await discovery.
It is likely that the thousand-square-mile area (smaller than the English county of Dorset) could contain as many as 10,000 ancient carvings. The largest discovered so far is a 43-meter-long carving of a giant snake. Others portray giant centipedes, larger-than-life animals – and immense, 10-meter-tall humanoid figures.
The carvings – discovered along the Colombia-Venezuela border – depict everything from stingrays and vultures to monkeys and crocodiles, from dogs and jaguars to turtles and frogs.
There are also a large number of geometric carvings (mainly concentric circles, grid patterns and dot-filled triangles), representing as yet unidentified objects.
It is one of the largest concentrations of rock art in the world, rivaling in volume with others such as the French Dordogne, the northern Italian Alpine region, Western Australia and South Africa.
But by far the most unusual aspect of the carvings is the unique monumental character of some of them. About 60 of the 1,000 specimens discovered so far have dimensions of more than 10 meters. In addition to the 43-meter-long snake, there are two 10-meter-tall humanoid figures (which could be spirits, or gods, or possibly shamans), an 11-meter-long centipede, and what is probably a quadruped. meter tall giant insect (possibly a butterfly).
“Our field research in Colombia and Venezuela reveals, for the very first time, a previously largely unknown and unrecorded ancient culture in this remote part of South America,” said one of the project leaders, Dr. Philip Riris from the Department of Archeology at the University of Bournemouth. and anthropology. “We hope this will enable the modern world to appreciate the long-lost artistic and other achievements of the people who lived there many centuries before European colonization,” he added.
The giant snakes (seven of them, ranging from 16 to 43 meters in length) are particularly important because they may be part of a much broader global ‘mega snake tradition’.
Academic research published over the years by numerous scholars suggests that, unlike most other animal-related religious belief systems, snake worship, known to anthropologists as ophiolatry, was once a major global phenomenon. It appeared (and in some cases still exists) in religious systems and mythologies in virtually every part of the world – from prehistoric Europe and ancient Egypt to Aboriginal Australia and ancient America.
Classical Greek mythology was rich in supernatural snake monsters and other snake-related creatures, as was ancient mythology from the Middle East, Europe, Mexico, Africa, China, Japan and India.
Snakes were often associated with the creation of humanity or certain tribes; with immortality; and in curing diseases. Depending on the culture, they can be seen as benevolent or evil (or both) – and have sometimes even been seen as royal symbols.
The unusually wide global spread of snake mythology and religious iconography suggests that the phenomenon is extremely ancient – and that people around the world may have felt compelled to specifically appease and venerate snakes for tens of thousands of years. That’s almost certainly because snakes were (and still are) a greater threat to humans than any other animal (aside from disease-carrying insects).
About 20,000 people still die each year from venomous snakebites (compared to only 100 per year from lion attacks and 500 per year from crocodile encounters). In addition, another 400,000 people are bitten and poisoned by snakes every year, even if they do not die.
In ancient times, when humans lived much closer to the natural environment (and continually hunted and gathered in that environment), snakes almost certainly posed, proportionately, an even greater threat to humanity – a threat that needed to be appeased and therefore worshiped and revered . and reassured.
As with the newly discovered Colombian and Venezuelan examples, other ancient cultures often depicted snake gods or spirits as truly monumental gigantic beings. In California, Ohio, Peru and elsewhere there are images of truly gigantic snakes wriggling through the local landscape. The largest, a huge 900-year-old, 411-foot-long earthwork depicting a giant snake, can still be seen on a hilltop in southern Ohio.
The newly discovered Colombian carvings were made by ancient Indians – probably between about 700 and 1000 AD. They are among the most difficult to access examples of prehistoric outdoor art in the world. That’s because the prehistoric artists who engraved them often did so high up on almost vertical rock walls. It would have been challenging, difficult and dangerous work.
For example, the 43-meter-long giant snake is three-quarters of the way up a 200-meter-high cliff. There is evidence that in ancient times it functioned as an oracle – allowing the serpent to ‘speak’ to local people through a shaman or other intermediary (much as oracles worked in other parts of the world, including ancient Greece and ancient Greece). Egypt).
The thousand carvings discovered so far by the archaeological team are located in 157 clusters along a 180-kilometer stretch of the Orinoco River. The first European explorers to penetrate the region were 16th-century German and English treasure hunters, looking for the legendary gold of El Dorado. Those adventurers (including the English Sir Walter Raleigh) never found the legendary city or the gold. But now modern explorers have managed to discover an archaeological treasure trove: gigantic works of art that will help change academia’s understanding of a remarkable, long-lost ancient culture.
“We hope that our research work will help protect the extraordinary artistic heritage of the Orinoco Valley, and involve local indigenous and mixed communities in that process,” said Riris.
A groundbreaking article dedicated to describing the newly recorded and globally important rock art of Orinoco will be published on Tuesday, written by the three key archaeologists on the Orinoco project: Philip Riris of Bournemouth University, Jose Ramon Oliver of University College London and Natalia Lozada Mendieta of the University of the Andes in Bogota, Colombia. Published by the Scientific British Archaeological Journal Antiquityit will be available online for free.