Stunning rock art on the Chilean coast has revealed how ancient hunter gatherers in the area used harpoons and rafts to hunt marine animals.
The cave paintings date back to 1,500-years ago, and depict the slaughter of a variety of creatures, including whales, sea lions, swordfish and sharks.
The pictographs, painted in iron-oxide, comprise of hundreds of hunting scenes and portray a complex marine hunter-gatherer society.
Archaeological evidence suggests that the society living in El Médano – a valley in between the ocean and the desert – specialised in hunting marine creatures.
Their sophisticated fishing and hunting technology included fish-hooks made from shell, bone, cactus spines and copper, and rafts made of sea lion skin.
Izcuña hunting scenes. The most commonly painted motif are large fish silhouettes, while other common motifs include hunting scenes with rafts and weapons. The ancient cave paintings date back to 1,500-years ago, and depict hunting scenes painted in iron-oxide
The paintings were discovered at a new site in El Médano, on the Atacama Desert coast in northern Chile, with the findings published in the journal Antiquity.
‘I think the most significant discovery is the relationship between these human groups and these marine animals, understanding how they were captured and technical developments,’ Benjamín Ballester, a researcher with the Prehistoric Ethnology Team at the University Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris and the lead author of the study, told the MailOnline.
Rock art was first found in El Médano in 1918, and for thousands of years only the local Paposo people knew of it.
‘In hunting scenes, prey is always represented as oversized (averaging 3.9 times bigger) compared to rafts and their crew,’ Benjamín Ballester, the lead author of the study, wrote. ‘This style intentionally places the prey as the protagonist, as evidenced by the detailed, meticulous depictions of the anatomy and physiology of the animals’
The cave paintings depicting hunting scenes are located at a newly discovered site called Izcuña, a few miles north of El Médano, Chile
The latest study focuses on a newly discovered sit called Izcuña, a few miles north of El Médano.
The pre-hispanic inhabitants of this coastline used strokes of intense red colour to create images of whales, swordfish, marlin, squid, sea lion, turtles and sharks.
While some are hunting scenes, others depict rafts with seafarers and harpoon lines.
According to the researchers, the paintings are based on the everyday experiences of those inhabitants.
Archaeological evidence suggests that the society living in El Médano at the time specialised in marine resource exploitation, and its sophisticated fishing and hunting technology.
This allowed the inhabitants of this area to be productive, creating permanent residential camps located near water springs and on natural jetties, from which small groups could explore large territories.
According to the researchers behind the study, the paintings are based on the everyday experiences of those inhabitants. Archaeological evidence suggests that the society living in El Médano at the time specialised in marine resource exploitation
Around 45 miles (75 km) north of Taltal, the El Médano ravine is home to one of the most remarkable rock art deposits in the South American Pacific watershed
According to the researchers, 328 paintings were found in the Izcuña ravine on 24 blocks of rock.
Although dense fog (called camanchaca) has bought moisture which has faded some of the paintings, enough of it has been preserved to date it in comparison to other El Médino art.
The most commonly painted motif are large fish silhouettes, while other common motifs include hunting scenes with rafts and weapons.
Archaeological remains related to hunting activities: A–B) complete harpoon; C–D) rolled harpoon lines ; E) composite oar fragment – arrows indicate billet position; F) oar fragments; G) float outline from a raft made of sea lion skin; H) detail of the cactus spine and cotton zig-zag seam; I) float fragment with a spine seam from a raft made of sea lion skin
While terrestrial animals such as turtles were represented in the paintings, marine animals were rarely shown.
‘In hunting scenes, prey is always represented as oversized (averaging 3.9 times bigger) compared to rafts and their crew,’ Ballester wrote in his study.
‘This style intentionally places the prey as the protagonist, as evidenced by the detailed, meticulous depictions of the anatomy and physiology of the animals.
‘This is contrasted by the simple, undetailed human drawings created using lineal strokes.
Sea lion skin raft with two seafarers, illustrated by Alcides D’Orbigny in Cobija, 1830. The rafts comprised two large cylindrical floating sections made of sea lion skin, which when tied together measured almost 3 metres (9.8 feet) in length
‘Detail here is limited to the occasional seafarer’s headdress, represented by two lateral protuberances.’
During previous excavations, archaeologists found makeshift harpoons dating back to 7,000 years ago.
‘The rock art offers clues concerning hunting strategies, such as labour organisation, hunting roles, the number of harpoon lines involved in the hunt, animal movement during the chase, the position of attack and the perspectives of painters,’ Ballester wrote.
General view of the coastal mountain range (Left) and the Izcuña ravine (Right) where the rock art was found, in El Médano on the Atacama Desert coast of Chile
‘They also contain a huge corpus of information concerning the cultural knowledge of animal anatomy, physiology and behaviour—essentially, their interspecies relationships.
‘For unknown reasons, the pictographs usually represent successfully accomplished hunting scenes, once the animal is harpooned.
‘Thus, they most often represent success in the hunt, rather than the process of hunting.’
WHAT IS EL MEDANO’S ROCK ART HISTORY?
The discovery of Rock Art in El Médano was first recorded in April 1918.
Augusto Capdeville, a custome official and expert in Taltal archaeology, recorded a set of painted rocks in El Médano ravine, located five miles north from Paposo, a small fishing town on the Atacama Desert coast.
Along with a detailed map of the site, he recounted the presence of fishing nets, rafts, ‘llamas or guanaco herd’, as well as ‘Indians pointing with arrows to guanacos, some of them kneeling, and others throwing harpoons to big fishes (swordfishes), maybe whales, and others from the boats, picking with lines the fishes.’
The Izcuña, El Médano (Chile) cave paintings depicting hunting scenes date back to 1,500-years ago
The site was rediscovered in 1973, a local mining prospector had known of its existence and revealed it to a geologist , who notified archaeologist Hans Niemeyer.
It was his work that determines the place of El Médano-style paintings in Atacama Desert prehistory and Chilean archaeology.
Apparently, Niemeyer was not aware that Capdeville had previously visited the site and recorded the paintings at El Médano.
Research on the El Médano paintings has since taken place, including interpretive, symbolic and archaeology of art approaches (comparing local and coastal rock art to other styles in the Atacama Desert).
Almost 100 years after Capdeville’s recordings, researchers have discovered at least four new ravines with similar paintings, located close to El Médano.