Has The Mystery Of The 11,000-Year-Old Amazonian Rock Art Been Solved?

Conny Waters - AncientPages.com - Archaeologists working in the Colombian Amazon have been documenting tens of thousands of rock art motifs and collaborating with Indigenous elders and ritual specialists to interpret their meanings. These ochre paintings, found at numerous sites, depict native wildlife such as jaguars and anacondas—animals that play significant roles in creation stories—and scenes of people transforming into animals. Some artworks are estimated to be over 11,000 years old.

Credit: University of Exeter

Researchers from the University of Exeter and partner institutions in South America have expanded their team by involving more local experts to examine these panels and record their interpretations. By integrating Indigenous perspectives with other research sources, they have concluded that the art represents ritual specialists engaging with spiritual realms, body transformations, and the merging of human and non-human worlds. This interpretation contrasts with a literal depiction of the environment or species encountered by ancient peoples.

These findings are detailed in "A World of Knowledge’: Rock Art, Ritual, and Indigenous Belief at Serranía De La Lindosa in the Colombian Amazon," published in a special issue of Advances in Rock Art Studies.

“Indigenous descendants of the original artists have recently explained to us that the rock art motifs here do not simply ‘reflect’ what the artists saw in the ‘real’ world,” says Professor Jamie Hampson, lead author and archaeologist in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, for the University of Exeter, Cornwall.

“They also encode and manifest critical information about how animistic and perspectivistic Indigenous communities constructed, engaged with, and perpetuated their ritualised, socio-cultural worlds. As Ulderico, a Matapí ritual specialist, told us in front of one of the painted panels in September 2022, ‘you have to look at [the motifs] from the shamanic viewpoint’.”

Credit: University of Exeter

Archaeologists at the University of Exeter have studied the demographic shift in South America for six years through the ERC-funded LASTJOURNEY project. Between 2021-23, they and 10 Indigenous elders visited six panels at Cerro Azul in Serranía De La Lindosa. The elders' testimonies, spoken in Spanish or Indigenous languages like Desana, Tukano, and Nukak, were recorded and translated. They focused on therianthropic transformations such as avian/human, sloth/human, lizard/human, and snake/bird/human figures.

See also: Puzzling Extinct Giants Depicted On 12,000-Year-Old Rock Paintings In The Colombian Amazon Rainforest Baffle Scientists

"So here are the animals that are there, they exist in that mountain range that was formerly and still is, but it is in the spiritual world… These are men with two arms, they are giants that exist in that spiritual maloca (house)… there is an animal, a panther lion that has two heads, one head here and the other here, instead of a tail it has a head, they are from the spiritual world," Tukano-speaker Ismael Sierra said pointing to paintings at a site called La Fuga.

Victor Caycedo, a Desana elder, who accompanied the team to the sites in 2022 and 2023, told the researchers that the paintings were themselves created by spirits. Pointing to motifs high up the rock face, he asked rhetorically: “How would you paint up there? How would you do it? They didn’t do it with a ladder…they didn’t do it with some big devices that were put there… Why? Because the natives in the old days lived spiritually… They were a spirit…”

"Animals inhabiting and symbolizing liminal spaces – those who move between earth, water, and sky, such as anacondas, jaguars, bats, and herons – and activities such as fishing were also picked out by the elders as imbued with particular significance, particularly around shamanistic transformation.

Credit: University of Exeter

Indeed, one elder described jaguars as representing shamanic knowledge, as though the animal has become an avatar. They also stressed the importance of preserving the pictures or risk severing the link between Indigenous people and their ancestors and traditions," the researchers write in their press release.

These efforts to include local communities have been supported by the creation of a diploma that will support sustainable cultural heritage tourism in the region.

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“It is the first time that the views of Indigenous elders on their ancestors’ rock art have been fully incorporated into research in this part of the Amazon,” Dr Hampson said. “In so doing, it enables us to not simply look at the art from an outsiders’ perspective and guess; we know why specific motifs were painted, and what they mean. It enables us to understand that this is a sacred, ritualistic art created within the framework of an animistic cosmology in sacred places in the landscape. It also emphasizes how Indigenous belief systems and myths need to be taken seriously.

“I have worked with rock art and Indigenous groups on every continent – and never have we been fortunate enough to have such a direct fit between Indigenous testimony and specific rock art motifs.”

Written by Conny Waters - AncientPages.com Staff Writer