An engraved object recently found at the site of Moli del Salt in Spain and dated to the end of the Upper Paleolithic, about 13,800 years ago, may show a hunter-gatherer campsite, according to a paper published this week in the journal PLoS ONE.
Photograph of the engraved schist slab from Moli del Salt. Image credit: Manuel Vaquero / Marcos Garcia-Diez.
The Paleolithic art object in question is an engraved schist slab found at the rockshelter site of Moli del Salt in Northeastern Iberia during the 2013 field season.
The slab is roughly 18 cm wide, 8.5 cm high, and 3.6 cm thick. “It displays seven semicircular motifs,” said the authors of the study, Dr Manuel Vaquero of the Rovira and Virgili University and Dr Marcos García-Diez of the University of the Basque Country.
Because of its shape and proportions, the scientists interpreted these motifs as huts.
“The size of the graphic units varies between 4.3 and 2 cm in width and between 2.2 and 1.4 cm in height,” they said.
“We hypothesize that the seven semicircular motifs in the Moli del Salt engraving represent dwellings or huts.”
“In addition, the close formal, metric, and technical linkages among these motifs, as well as their distribution in the graphic field, indicate their compositional association and their execution in a short time.”
Photograph of the engraved side with close-ups of the seven semicircular motifs. Image credit: Manuel Vaquero / Marcos Garcia-Diez.
This Paleolithic engraving from northeastern Spain brings us the first representation of a human social group, according to Dr Vaquero.
The archaeological context of the Moli del Salt site reinforces this interpretation of the engraving.
“In front of the rockshelter, there is a plain descending smoothly to the river, which is located 100 m south of the site. This setting has been documented for some open-air Magdalenian sites interpreted as campsites and is characterized by well-defined clusters of remains corresponding to domestic areas,” Dr Vaquero and Dr Garca-Diez said.
“In the plain in front of the Moli del Salt rockshelter, surface archeological remains are abundant and thousands of artifacts have been recovered over the years. Most of them exhibit a fresh appearance, indicating that they were not displaced from the rockshelter but correspond to in situ archeological deposits below the current surface.”
“Moreover, they exhibit the same technological and typological characteristics than the lithic assemblages from the rockshelter.”
Digital reconstruction of the Moli del Salt campsite. Image credit: Luis Alberto Marcos.
“This suggests that alongside the rockshelter, there was also an open-air settlement in the plain next to the river.”
“It seems likely, therefore, that the engraving represents a reality that was in front of the artist’s eyes at the moment of the depiction.”
The Moli del Salt slab is now housed in the Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Tarragona, Spain.
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Garcia-Diez M. & Vaquero M. 2015. Looking at the Camp: Paleolithic Depiction of a Hunter-Gatherer Campsite. PLoS ONE 10 (12): e0143002; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0143002
