The First Signs by Genevieve von Petzinger

Author:Genevieve von Petzinger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

What struck me when I saw these signs at Riparo di Za Minica, as well as at six other caves, was how very much they looked like two groups of lines and open angles—also deeply incised—I’d seen the previous year just outside the entrance to Venta de la Perra, in northern Spain. While not an exact match, the amount this site has in common with those in Sicily in terms of theme, technique, and image location is a bit uncanny. Stranger still is the fact that Venta de la Perra is one of only two sites in Western Europe to have this type of engraved grouping at the cave threshold (the other is La Viña, farther west, in the province of Asturias), and both sites date to at least the Gravettian (22,000 to 28,000 years ago) if not earlier. Yet all Sicilian art is thought to be from the end of the Ice Age. Grotta Romanelli—the mainland site with similar animals to Addaura’s—also has a lot in common with many other Sicilian sites. Not only does it date to the same era (around 12,000 years ago), but it has the same type of engraved signs. Several pebbles excavated from the floor layer were incised with stacked and overlapping open angles or ladder-like patterns, and an abstract configuration made up of stacked rows of vertical and angled lines was found on a wall near the entrance.2 But from there, the trail runs cold until we get to northern Spain.

Is it possible that there’s a connection between these two regions, when almost 1,500 miles and at least 10,000 years separate them? It could be that some of the people living in Spain moved southward over time and eventually settled in Sicily and other parts of Italy, taking their signs with them. Alternatively, there may have been a widespread tradition of using abstract configurations as some sort of identity or ownership mark to let others know if a cave was “taken.” But with exterior stone and cave entrances being the most likely to degrade over time, further examples located between these two points may have since vanished. Or they might only be related in the sense of having been produced by the same activity; some researchers have suggested these markings may just be the result of people sharpening their stone tools by running them up and down the walls. To my mind, a lot of the abstract groupings look a bit too organized to have just been the end product of people sharpening tools; but without more data, it’s hard to make an educated guess. The patterns of other signs in different regions are clearer, and I have at least some insight into what may have been happening there.

Animal and human imagery are both categorized as figurative art—art based on objects or entities found in the real world, where the images are considered to be representational, at least to some degree, of how these things really look. By contrast, the signs are usually

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