An archaeological team in Venezuela has discovered 20 rock paintings dating back thousands of years in Canaima National Park, in the southeast of the country.
Although archaeologists have found similar rock art elsewhere in South America, the newly discovered art represents “a new culture previously unknown.” José Miguel Perez-Gómezan archaeologist and researcher at Simón Bolívar University in Caracas who leads the team, told Live Science in an email.
Some of these designs, which researchers call “pictographs,” are drawn in red and show geometric motifs such as lines of dots, rows of Xs, star-shaped patterns, and straight lines connected to form a variety of designs. There are also simple images of leaves and stick figure drawings of people. Additionally, some images, called petroglyphs, are carved into the rock and also show a variety of geometric motifs.
It’s unclear why people created this art. “It’s almost impossible to get into the minds of people who lived so many (thousands of) years ago,” Pérez-Gómez said, but “these signs definitely had a ritual meaning.” The different images could be related to birth, illness, the renewal of nature or good hunting, for example. The places where the rock art was created “most likely had a meaning and an importance within the landscape, just as churches have a meaning for people today,” Pérez-Gómez added.
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While it is not known exactly how old the rock art is, similar rock art in Brazil has been dated to around 4,000 years ago. However, Pérez-Gómez believes the examples in Venezuela may be older.
Canaima National Park is a huge park, about the size of Belgium, that includes forests and mountainous terrain. One of its most famous features is Angel Falls, the highest waterfall on land in the worldThe park may have been the “ground zero” where this mysterious culture first developed, Pérez-Gómez said, before later spreading to places as far away as the Amazon, the Guyanas and even southern Colombia, where rock art similar to examples recently discovered in Venezuela can be found.
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The remains of ceramics and stone tools were also found at the 20 rock art sites and may have been used by the people who created the rock art, but more research needs to be done to say for sure, Pérez-Gómez said. In addition, more rock art sites will likely be found in Canaima National Park as research continues, he noted.
The research was presented at the prehistoric archaeology congress “New Worlds New Ideas”, held from 26 to 29 June in Valcamonica, Italy. A paper discussing one of the rock art was published in November 2023 in the journal Rock Art Research.
