The chronology of hand stencils in European Palaeolithic rock art: implications of new U-series results from El Castillo Cave (Cantabria, Spain)

• Autor(a) principal: García-Diez, Marcos
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Outros Autores: Garrido, Daniel, Hoffmann, Dirk, Pettitt, Paul, Pike, Alistair, Zilhão, João
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/31076
• topic: Archaeology; Art; Caves; History, Ancient; Humans; Radiometric dating; Spain; Hand stencils; Origin of graphic behavior; Uranium series; Palaeolithic rock art; Chronology; Europe; Upper Palaeolithic

The hand stencils of European Paleolithic art tend to be considered of pre-Magdalenian age and scholars have generally assigned them to the Gravettian period. At El Castillo Cave, application of U-series dating to calcite accretions has established a minimum age of 37,290 years for underlying red hand stencils, implying execution in the earlier part of the Aurignacian if not beforehand. Together with the series of red disks, one of which has a minimum age of 40,800 years, these motifs lie at the base of the El Castillo parietal stratigraphy. The similarity in technique and colour support the notion that both kinds of artistic manifestations are synchronic and define an initial, non-figurative phase of European cave art. However, available data indicate that hand stencils continued to be painted subsequently. Currently, the youngest, reliably dated examples fall in the Late Gravettian, approximately 27,000 years ago.