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Archaeologists have discovered one of the world’s largest collections of ancient art depicting giants and monsters walking the Earth.
A British-led team has discovered more than 1,000 prehistoric carvings in a remote part of South America, including the world’s largest prehistoric rock painting, but archaeologists believe the pieces found so far are just the “tip of a vast ancient art iceberg” with many more waiting to be discovered.
The 1,000 square mile area (smaller than the English county of Dorset) is thought to contain perhaps around 10,000 ancient carvings. The largest found so far is a carving of a giant snake measuring 140 feet (43 meters) in length. Other carvings depict giant centipedes and life-size animals, as well as a gigantic human-like figure measuring 33 feet (10 meters) in height.
The carvings, found along the Colombian-Venezuelan border, depict everything from stingrays and vultures to monkeys and crocodiles, dogs and jaguars to turtles and frogs.
There are also a number of geometric sculptures (mainly concentric circles, grid patterns, and triangles with dots) that represent as yet unidentified objects.
It is one of the largest concentrations of rock art in the world, rivalling those found in the Dordogne in France, the Alps in Northern Italy, Western Australia and South Africa.
But what’s most unusual about these carvings is the unique monumental nature of some of them: Of the 1,000 found so far, around 60 are over 10 metres in size. Besides the 43-metre serpent, they include two 10-metre-tall human-like figures (which may be spirits, gods or shamans), an 11-metre-long centipede and a gigantic insect (probably a butterfly) measuring around 4 metres high.
“Our field work in Colombia and Venezuela has revealed for the first time a previously little-known and poorly documented ancient culture in this remote part of South America,” said project leader Dr Philip Lillis, from Bournemouth University’s School of Archaeology and Anthropology. “We hope this will enable the modern world to appreciate the long-lost art and other achievements of the people who lived there centuries before European colonisation,” he added.
This giant snake (seven in number, measuring 16-43 metres in length) is particularly significant as it may be part of a wider global tradition of “giant snakes”.
Academic research published by numerous scholars over the years suggests that unlike most other animal-related religious belief systems, snake worship, known to anthropologists as serpent worship, was once a major global phenomenon. Snake worship has appeared, and in some cases still appears, in the religious systems and mythologies of nearly every region of the world, from prehistoric Europe and ancient Egypt to Aboriginal Australians and ancient America.
Ancient Greek mythology is rich in supernatural serpent monsters and other serpent-related creatures, as are the mythologies of the ancient Middle East, Europe, Mexico, Africa, China, Japan and India.
Snakes have often been associated with creation, immortality, and the healing of illnesses for humankind and certain tribes. Depending on the culture, snakes can be viewed as good or bad (or both), and sometimes even as symbols of royalty.
The unusually wide global distribution of snake myths and religious iconography suggests that the snake phenomenon is extremely ancient and that humans around the world have felt a special need to appease and worship snakes, probably for tens of thousands of years, arguably because snakes have posed (and continue to pose) a greater threat to humans than any other animal (except disease-carrying insects).
Even today, about 20,000 people die each year from snakebites (100 are killed each year by lions and 500 from encounters with crocodiles), and about 400,000 people are poisoned by snakebites each year, even if they don’t die.
In ancient times, when humans lived much closer to the natural environment (and continued to hunt and gather in that environment), snakes arguably represented a proportionately greater threat to humanity, a threat that needed to be appeased and therefore worshipped, revered, appeased.
Like the newly discovered examples from Colombia and Venezuela, other ancient cultures often depicted snake gods or spirits as truly gigantic creatures. In California, Ohio, and Peru, there are depictions of truly gigantic snakes writhing through the local landscape. The largest is a massive, 900-year-old, 1,320-foot earthwork representing a giant serpent that can still be seen atop a hill in southern Ohio.
The newly discovered Colombian carvings were created by ancient Native American people and likely date to between 700 and 1000 AD. They are some of the most difficult to access outdoor prehistoric art in the world, as the prehistoric artists who created them often worked high up on near-vertical cliffs, which would have been difficult and dangerous work.
For example, a huge 43-metre long snake is found three-quarters of the way up a 200-metre high cliff, and there is evidence that in ancient times it played an oracular role, meaning that it could “speak” to local residents through shamans and other intermediaries (much like oracles functioned in other parts of the world, such as ancient Greece and ancient Egypt).
The archaeological team has discovered 1,000 carvings so far, spread across 157 settlements along 110 miles of the Orinoco River. The first European explorers to set foot in the region were 16th-century German and English treasure hunters who journeyed in search of the legendary gold of El Dorado. These adventurers (including Britain’s Sir Walter Raleigh) found neither the legendary city nor the gold. But now modern explorers have managed to uncover an archaeological treasure trove: a gigantic work of art that will change the academic world’s understanding of a remarkable, long-lost ancient culture.
“We hope that our research work will help ensure that the great artistic heritage of the Orinoco Valley is preserved and that local indigenous and mixed-race communities are involved in the process,” Lillis said.
A groundbreaking paper dedicated to describing the newly recorded and globally significant Orinoco rock art will be published on Tuesday. It was written by three of the Orinoco Project’s leading archaeologists: Philip Lillis of Bournemouth University, José Ramón Oliver of University College London, and Natalia Losada Mendieta of the University of the Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. It is published in the UK-based academic journal Archaeology. AncientIt will be published online for free.