Archaeology & History

Giants, snakes and monsters among trove of ancient rock engravings

By T.K. Randall
June 6, 2024 ·  1 comment

Some of the engravings are enormous. Image Credit: CC BY Philip Riris et al. Discovered along the Venezuela/Columbia border, the site, which is thought to contain as many as 10,000 engravings, is one of the most significant discoveries of its kind in years.

So far, only a fraction of the engravings thought to be contained within the area - which covers some one-thousand square miles - have actually been discovered.

The engravings themselves feature a wide range of things from animals (such as monkeys, vultures, crocodiles and dogs) to geometric shapes and other strange, unidentified patterns.

Perhaps most notable, however, are engravings of enormous snakes, giant centipedes and even human-like figures measuring in excess of 10 meters in height.The snake engravings are particularly intriguing, with one measuring a whopping 43 meters long.

Such depictions of serpents suggest that the people who created them held a similar reverence for serpents as other cultures across the world.

Snakes have been a major part of belief systems and faiths for millennia, with depictions of them being found everywhere from ancient Egypt to Aboriginal Australia.

"Our field research in Colombia and Venezuela is, for the very first time, revealing a previously largely unknown and unrecorded ancient culture in this remote part of South America," said project co-leader Dr Philip Riris of Bournemouth University.

"We hope that this will allow the modern world to appreciate the long-lost artistic and other achievements of the people who lived there many centuries before European colonization."

Source: Independent | Comments (1)

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