The Cueva del Castillo contains both a decorated cave and an archaeological site, within the complex of the Caves of Monte Castillo, in Puente Viesgo, Cantabria,

Spain Spain, or the Kingdom of Spain, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe with territories in North Africa. Featuring the Punta de Tarifa, southernmost point of continental Europe, it is the largest country in Southern Eur ...

. The archaeological

stratigraphy Stratigraphy is a branch of geology concerned with the study of rock layers (strata) and layering (stratification). It is primarily used in the study of sedimentary and layered volcanic rocks. Stratigraphy has three related subfields: lithost ...

has been divided into around 19 layers, depending on the source they slightly deviate from each other, however the overall sequence is consistent, beginning in the Proto-Aurignacian, and ending in the

Bronze Age The Bronze Age () was a historical period characterised principally by the use of bronze tools and the development of complex urban societies, as well as the adoption of writing in some areas. The Bronze Age is the middle principal period of ...

. El Castillo was discovered in 1903 by Hermilio Alcalde del Río, a Spanish archaeologist, who was one of the pioneers in the study of the earliest cave paintings of Cantabria. The entrance to the cave was smaller in the past and has been enlarged as a result of archaeological excavations. Alcalde del Río found an extensive sequence of images executed in charcoal and red

ochre Ochre ( ; , ), iron ochre, or ocher in American English, is a natural clay earth pigment, a mixture of ferric oxide and varying amounts of clay and sand. It ranges in colour from yellow to deep orange or brown. It is also the name of the colou ...

on the walls and ceilings of multiple caverns.. The authors of the first monograph (H. Alcalde del Rio, H. Breuil, L. Sierra, ''Les cavernes de la région cantabrique (Espagne)'', Monaco, 1911) catalogued about 200 motifs. In 2012, uranium-thorium datings on discs of the cave have given dates older than 40,000 years.. "We present uranium-series disequilibrium dates of calcite deposits overlying or underlying art found in 11 caves, including the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage sites of Altamira, El Castillo, and Tito Bustillo, Spain. The results demonstrate that the tradition of decorating caves extends back at least to the Early Aurignacian period, with minimum ages of 40.8 thousand years for a red disk, 37.3 thousand years for a hand stencil, and 35.6 thousand years for a claviform-like symbol. These minimum ages reveal either that cave art was a part of the cultural repertoire of the first anatomically modern humans in Europe or that perhaps Neanderthals also engaged in painting caves." The El Castillo red stippled disk (sample O-83) was dated to ( 95% CI, corrected). Table 1: Ages are corrected for detritus by using an assumed ²³²Th/²³⁸U activity of and ²³⁰Th/²³⁸U and ²³⁴U/²³⁸U at equilibrium. See also: This could be consistent with the tradition of cave painting originating in the Proto-Aurignacian, with the first arrival of anatomically modern humans in Europe. These results are still subject to debates. A 2013 study of finger length ratios in

Upper Paleolithic The Upper Paleolithic (or Upper Palaeolithic) is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. Very broadly, it dates to between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago (the beginning of the Holocene), according to some theories ...

hand stencils found in France and Spain determined that the majority were of female hands, overturning the previous widely held belief that this art form was primarily a male activity. Numerous attempts have been made to determine an individual's sex based on the Manning index. According to this study, the ratio between the length of the index finger and the ring finger indicates a difference between the two sexes (approximately 1 for women and 0.9 for men). This ratio, calculated on current populations, has been applied to Palaeolithic negative handprints. However, the validity of anthropological methods is now debated by many researchers , which means that this type of approach must be treated with caution. In their complete study of the cave (2003-2023), Marc & Marie-Christine Groenen have identified 2,698 motifs and archaeological evidence, among them 541 figurative motifs (475 animals, 3 composite animals, 21 humans, 1 composite human, 1 imaginary creature, 40 projectiles), 924 non figurative motifs (834 elementary tracings, 90 complex tracings), 884 marks, 84 handprints, 118 archaeological evidence and 17 lithophones.

References

External links

Caves of Cantabria - Spanish Government Council of Culture, Tourism and Sport

Video: Paleolithic Cave Arts in Northern Spain: El Castillo Cave
{{Navbox prehistoric caves C Show caves in Spain Caves containing pictograms in Spain Lower Paleolithic Bronze Age Spain Aurignacian