Conny Waters – AncientPages.com – Archaeologists working within the Colombian Amazon have been documenting tens of hundreds of rock artwork motifs and collaborating with Indigenous elders and ritual specialists to interpret their meanings. These ochre work, discovered at quite a few websites, depict native wildlife equivalent to jaguars and anacondas—animals that play vital roles in creation tales—and scenes of individuals remodeling into animals. Some artworks are estimated to be over 11,000 years outdated.
Credit score: College of Exeter
Researchers from the College of Exeter and companion establishments in South America have expanded their group by involving extra native consultants to look at these panels and file their interpretations. By integrating Indigenous views with different analysis sources, they’ve concluded that the artwork represents ritual specialists participating with non secular realms, physique transformations, and the merging of human and non-human worlds. This interpretation contrasts with a literal depiction of the setting or species encountered by historic peoples.
These findings are detailed in “A World of Information’: Rock Artwork, Ritual, and Indigenous Perception at Serranía De La Lindosa within the Colombian Amazon,” revealed in a particular concern of Advances in Rock Artwork Research.
“Indigenous descendants of the unique artists have just lately defined to us that the rock artwork motifs right here don’t merely ‘replicate’ what the artists noticed within the ‘actual’ world,” says Professor Jamie Hampson, lead creator and archaeologist within the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, for the College of Exeter, Cornwall.
“In addition they encode and manifest important details about how animistic and perspectivistic Indigenous communities constructed, engaged with, and perpetuated their ritualised, socio-cultural worlds. As Ulderico, a Matapí ritual specialist, advised us in entrance of one of many painted panels in September 2022, ‘it’s important to have a look at [the motifs] from the shamanic viewpoint’.”
Credit score: College of Exeter
Archaeologists on the College of Exeter have studied the demographic shift in South America for six years by the ERC-funded LASTJOURNEY mission. 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, had been recorded and translated. They targeted on therianthropic transformations equivalent to avian/human, sloth/human, lizard/human, and snake/hen/human figures.
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“So listed here are the animals which might be there, they exist in that mountain vary that was previously and nonetheless is, however it’s within the non secular world… These are males with two arms, they’re giants that exist in that non secular maloca (home)… there may be an animal, a panther lion that has two heads, one head right here and the opposite right here, as a substitute of a tail it has a head, they’re from the non secular world,” Tukano-speaker Ismael Sierra mentioned pointing to work at a website known as La Fuga.
Victor Caycedo, a Desana elder, who accompanied the group to the websites in 2022 and 2023, advised the researchers that the work had been themselves created by spirits. Pointing to motifs excessive up the rock face, he requested 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 huge units that had been put there… Why? As a result of the natives within the outdated days lived spiritually… They had been a spirit…”
“Animals inhabiting and symbolizing liminal areas – those that transfer between earth, water, and sky, equivalent to anacondas, jaguars, bats, and herons – and actions equivalent to fishing had been additionally picked out by the elders as imbued with explicit significance, significantly round shamanistic transformation.
Credit score: College of Exeter
Certainly, one elder described jaguars as representing shamanic data, as if the animal has grow to be an avatar. In addition they burdened the significance of preserving the photographs or danger severing the hyperlink between Indigenous individuals and their ancestors and traditions,” the researchers write of their press release.
These efforts to incorporate native communities have been supported by the creation of a diploma that may help sustainable cultural heritage tourism within the area.
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“It’s the first time that the views of Indigenous elders on their ancestors’ rock artwork have been totally included into analysis on this a part of the Amazon,” Dr Hampson mentioned. “In so doing, it permits us to not merely have a look at the artwork from an outsiders’ perspective and guess; we all know why particular motifs had been painted, and what they imply. It permits us to know that this can be a sacred, ritualistic artwork created throughout the framework of an animistic cosmology in sacred locations within the panorama. It additionally emphasizes how Indigenous perception methods and myths have to be taken severely.
“I’ve labored with rock artwork and Indigenous teams on each continent – and by no means have we been lucky sufficient to have such a direct match between Indigenous testimony and particular rock artwork motifs.”
Written by Conny Waters – AncientPages.com Employees Author
