Secret Meanings of Ancient Amazon Rock Art Revealed – Newsweek
This recently published Newsweek article highlights the research being undertaken at Serranía de la Lindosa: ‘In collaboration with Indigenous elders and ritual specialists, archaeologists have shed light on the meaning of ancient rock art from the Amazon rainforest in a study.
A trio of researchers has been investigating Indigenous rock art in the Serranía de la Lindosa (La Lindosa for short)—a 12-mile-long sandstone outcrop located in Colombia’s Guaviare department. This area contains tens of thousands of rock art motifs painted with ocher, featuring depictions of humans, animals, plants, mythological creatures and geometric designs’.
‘For most of the past 100 years, inaccessibility and political unrest have limited research activities in the region. Until the 2016 peace agreement between FARC revolutionaries and the Colombian government, conducting research in this remote and hard-to-access region was almost impossible. But in a new paper, published in a special issue of Advances in Rock Art Studies, the researchers discuss findings from six years of field investigations aimed at uncovering the meaning and significance of the artworks.
By combining various strands of evidence—including a range of ethnographic sources and local Indigenous testimonies—the researchers propose in the paper that the rock art is associated with ritual specialists negotiating spiritual realms, as well as the interrelation between the human and supernatural worlds, rather than a literal record of the environment’.
Reference:
Hampson, J., Iriarte, J., & Aceituno, F. J. (2024). ‘A World of Knowledge’: Rock Art, Ritual, and Indigenous Belief at Serranía De La Lindosa in the Colombian Amazon. Arts, 13(4), 135. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13040135