Animal etchings into rocks alongside the Orinoco river in South America
Philip Riris et al.
Prehistoric engravings of big snakes alongside South America’s Orinoco river are among the many largest examples of rock artwork we all know of anyplace on this planet, with some stretching for greater than 40 metres.
The Orinoco is among the world’s largest rivers, flowing via Venezuela and alongside its border with Colombia. “There’s an outstanding record of rock art along the Orinoco, especially on the Venezuelan side,” says José Oliver at College School London. “Usually, they are paintings found in rock shelters.”
Engravings are widespread in lots of open-air websites alongside the river, he says, however not all of them have been formally recorded.
Since 2015, Oliver and his colleagues have taken a number of journeys to areas alongside the Colombian and Venezuelan margins of the river to construct a greater image of its rock engravings.
“It wasn’t difficult to encounter new sites,” says crew member Philip Riris at Bournemouth College within the UK. “Every time you go round a corner, there was always more.”
Of the 157 rock artwork websites that the crew has managed to go to, 13 had been made up of engravings that had been a minimum of 4 metres tall. “Anything that size is monumental in our view,” says Riris. “That means they’re often visible from quite far away, maybe 500 metres to a kilometre.”
Many of the engravings depict folks, mammals, birds, centipedes, scrolls and geometric shapes, however snakes had been among the many largest motifs, with the largest measuring 42 metres throughout. Within the mythology of the Indigenous Orinoco folks, anacondas and boa constrictors are primordial creators, so are held in excessive regard, says Riris.
The prominence of the rock artwork alongside the river means that the traditional carvings might have been a territorial marker to sign {that a} sure group lives there, however not essentially a warning to remain away. “The engravings may not be exclusionary, but rather an inclusionary practice that was shared among the communities,” says Riris.
Ceramics unearthed within the area and dated to 2000 years in the past have related motifs to those on the engravings, which means that the rock artwork was equally created two millennia in the past.
The crew hopes to find much more of those carvings and accumulate clues about their origins and function. For instance, lots of them seem close to rock shelters with burial grounds, which suggests they could be linked to historic funerary practices.
“This is a valuable piece of research,” says Andrés Troncoso on the College of Chile. “It sheds light about the rock art of a non-well-known area of South America, continuing to fill up our knowledge of this region.”
“Euro-American minds often jump to the mammoths, cave lions and large mammals of Pleistocene cave sites in western Europe when they think of rock art,” says Patrick Roberts on the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany. “However, the giant snake engravings studied in the paper are some of the largest single rock art images anywhere in the world and come from the heart of a lowland tropical environment.”
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