The enigmatic meaning of the engravings on the giant rocks of the current border between Colombia and Venezuela

A group of researchers from Colombia and the United Kingdom documented the largest rock art in the world in an area near the Orinoco River.

The giant drawings made on rock, “among the most enigmatic in the world” according to the archaeological team, show big snakes -boas and anacondas- up to 40 meters in length and other animals or geometric figures.

“They are several times larger than an adult human in several dimensions and are distributed along the Orinoco River at a point that was a area of ​​intense contact and interaction between different ethnic and linguistic groups in the past“Philip Riris, professor of archaeological and paleoenvironmental modeling at Bournemouth University (United Kingdom), explained to BBC Mundo.

The place is located around an area called Rápidos de Atures, on both sides of the Orinoco, on the border between Colombia and Venezuela.

The ecosystem in that area of ​​the Orinoco is savanna, extensive plains, with abrupt granite elevations called inselbergs or “island mountains” Although they are difficult to climb and dangerous, it is not impossible to do so.

“They are black, very, very black, but that is not the natural color of the rock, but rather a bacterial stain,” said the expert.

He added that it doesn’t take much effort to scrape off the top layer and find the natural color of the rock, which is white or a very light gray, which is why inhabitants of centuries ago could create the drawings by carving with a stone.

“Although the engravings are very large, they are actually not very deep, they can be one or two millimeters at most,” he added.

According to Riris, the drawings from the Venezuelan side have already been extensively studied, but “very little archaeological work has been done on the Colombian side of the Orinoco.”

“This is unique on a global scale, there is nothing like this“, he pointed.

The research team believes that these drawings are pre-Columbian – from between the year 1000 and 1500 – and that they served as border or delimitation for indigenous peoples that they lived there.

The drawings on the large rocks “are quite regularly spaced, occurring at some regular intervals moving upstream or downstream as preferred, and in particular the monumental panels having snakes are repeated with a relatively limited number of different motifs,” Riris stated.

“We think they were pointing out some aspect of territoriality or social identity, or both. There is an aspect of territoriality that is: ‘This is our territory.’ warning sign“said the archaeologist.

“But also, if you know what the snake means or if the snake or the motifs have meaning for you, then it is a sign that you are among friends“.

Riris explained that giant snakes appear in various indigenous myths from northern South America and often represent creative deities.

“When the world was created and it was all water, snakes were the first to emerge. By traveling through the rivers, they also created them, metaphorically speaking,” he explained.

“Because of the shapes of canoes and because canoes also navigate rivers, snakes are sometimes metaphorically called canoes, so that they are containers of people, and because they are containers of people, they also have a association with the female reproductive aspect, because women contain people in pregnancy,” he added.

The researcher maintained that, between the year 1000 and the arrival of Christopher Columbus In America, the Middle Orinoco area was populated in a way that is described as “intense” and that is why there are a large number of archaeological sites around.

“Rock art like this, material that deliberately communicates identity or signals territoriality, does not arise in a vacuum. It has to be in response to something.. “When there is a relatively densely populated landscape, you would expect rock art like this to appear,” he explained.

Researchers believe that more monumental rock art sites will be found along the Orinoco River and its tributaries in the future.

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