Celebrating the discovery of one of the world’s largest collections of prehistoric rock art
Dubbed the ‘Sistine Chapel of the ancients’, the artwork is thought to date back around 12 500 years and clearly portrays both Ice Age animals that are now extinct, such as the mastodons, horses, camelids and a giant sloth, as well as a huge array of fish, turtles, lizards, porcupines, monkeys, birds, bats, among many others. Other paintings show scenes of people dancing, performing rituals and holding hands together. Originally unearthed in 2019, the discovery was kept secret until December 2020, when it featured in the documentary series ‘Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon’ on Channel 4, a major British public broadcaster. The ERC grantee in the LASTJOURNEY (The End of the Journey: The Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene Colonisation of South America) project is José Iriarte, professor of Archaeology at the University of Exeter, who is a world expert on the Amazon and its pre-Columbian history. His team also included his valuable Colombian colleagues, Javier Aceituno and Gaspar Morcote-Rios. In total, Iriarte has been funded through three ERC projects, PAST, FUTURES and LASTJOURNEY, the latter being his current grant that will run until September 2024. For more information, please see: https://www.exeter.ac.uk/research/news/articles/newlydiscoveredamazonrock.html “For Amazonian people, non-humans like animals and plants have souls, and they communicate and engage with people through rituals and shamanic practices. These earliest Amazonian artists’ expressions likely represent the origins of this distinct relationship.” - José Iriarte, ERC grantee If you are interested in having your project featured in ‘Project of the Month’ in an upcoming issue, please send us an email to editorial@cordis.europa.eu and tell us why!
Keywords
LASTJOURNEY, Amazon, prehistoric, art, European Research Council, ERC, PAST, FUTURES