Hands Stencils in El Castillo Cave (Puente Viesgo, Cantabria, Spain). An Interdisciplinary Study

Abstract

Our Palaeolithic ancestors did not make good representations of themselves on the rocky surfaces of caves and barring certain exceptions – such as the case of La Marche (found on small slabs of stone or plaquettes) or the Cueva de Ambrosio – the few known examples can only be referred to as anthropomorphs. As such, only hand stencils give us a real picture of the people who came before us. Hand stencils and imprints provide us with a large amount of information that allows us to approach not only their physical appearance but also to infer less tangible details, such as the preferential use of one hand over the other (i.e., handedness). Both new and/or mature technologies as well as digital processing of images, computers with the ability to process very high resolution images, and a more extensive knowledge of the Palaeolithic figures all help us to analyse thoroughly the hands in El Castillo cave. The interdisciplinary study presented here contributes many novel developments based on real data, representing a major step forward in knowledge about our predecessors.

Current paleoanthropology and paleoarchaeology in the museums of Poland in the tourism context. Invisible heritage?

“…This occurs primarily when prehistoric artefacts remain at the site of their discovery simply because they cannot be taken anywhere else without being harmed. Such a situation occurs, for example, in the famous caves of El Castillo (Ripoll et al 2021) or Altamira in Spain (Parga Dans and González 2019), where tourists are able to admire spectacular works of both nature (extensive cave chambers, speleothems) and human beings (prehistoric cave art). Another in situ attraction that the visitors can admire is the famous palaeoanthropological site at Laetoli showing the footprints of representatives of the bipedal species Australopithecus afarensis dating back to 3.6 Ma BP, imprinted in hardened pyroclastic sediments in eastern Tanzania (International Union of Geological Sciences 2021, 114, 115).…”

Integration of Remote-Sensing Techniques for the Preventive Conservation of Paleolithic Cave Art in the Karst of the Altamira Cave

“…Recently, remote-sensing techniques have been used for underground cultural heritage sites to improve traditional documentation such as terrestrial photogrammetry [1][2][3][4], to create orthoimages series and virtual reality scenarios [5][6][7][8][9], and in the case of hyperspectral remote-sensing, to recover rock-art paintings invisible to the naked eye or covered by calcite, dirt, or soot [10][11][12][13][14][15][16], which are themselves helpful for understanding the stratigraphy of the rock art panel [17][18][19][20].…”