America's oldest cave paintings found, dating back SIX THOUSAND YEARS Read more

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America's oldest cave paintings found, dating back SIX THOUSAND YEARS

By Victoria Woollaston

PUBLISHED: 09:16 EST, 18 June 2013

Archaeologists have discovered America's oldest cave and rock art that has remained hidden for more than 6,000 years.

The faded images were found in Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau and are believed part of the most widespread collection of such art ever found in the U.S.

Some of the pictures were drawn using shallow lines made with a pointed tool and these show events such as hunting, or depict animals that the Native Americans would have lived with and eaten.

Other images are more elaborate, depicting mythical creatures and representing the Native's spiritual beliefs.

This image shows drawings of canids - wild dog-like creatures that included wolves, foxes and jackals - found in the 60th Unnamed Cave at the site of the Tennessee Cumberland Plateau. Animal images, such as quadrupeds and reptiles, are rare in open air art work but common in dark caves


This cave drawing was found in the open air at Ruby Bluffs and shows 'a probable Mississippian period dancer,' according to a study in archaeology review journal, Antiquity. The image was enhanced, bottom left, using Dstretch - a technology used to accentuate cave pictographs

These preserved artworks were found by researchers Jan Simek, Alan Cressler, Nicholas Herrmann and Sarah Sherwood from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee and Mississippi State University.

A study, published in Antiquity, a quarterly review of world archaeology, discusses the most recent discovery of the art in the Cumberland Plateau as well as previous cave art and rock discoveries across the state of Tennessee.

These include the Dunbar Cave and Mud Glyph Cave in Clarksville.

America's oldest cave paintings found, dating back SIX THOUSAND YEARS

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Pictograph of a concentric circle (left). These are thought to represent religious, spiritual motifs or celestial beings. It is shown next to Anthropomorphic rock art - drawings with a 'human form'


Rayed circles with crosses inside found on the wall of the Dunbar Cave in Tennessee. According to the study, rayed circles are a 'classic Mississippian icon'. Circles are common in caves, usually shown as sun pictographs


The author of the study claims that this rock art shows birds, thought to be turkeys. The drawings were made using a fine pointed tool and consist of shallow lines. They were found in the 7th Unnamed cave in the Cumberland Plateau and are only a few centimetres long


This image, enhanced by Dstretch, shows a winged pictograph taken from the Waterfall Shelter in the south Cumberland Plateau. According to the Antiquity report, pictures of avimorphs - bird-like creatures - are rare in open air sites. Iron oxide would have been used to create the red colour of this image

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This Mississippian petroglyph panel was discovered in the 11th Unnamed Cave in central Cumberland Plateau. The faint scratches in the middle of the image depict a bird holding ceremonial maces - an ornamented staff traditionally made of metal or wood and carried in civic ceremonies. The clearer white image on the left depicts a ceremonial monolithic axe transforming into a human face. A real-life monolithic axe is shown as an inset


A Mississippian period mud glyph warrior, left, was found in the Mud Glyph Cave in the Tennessee River Valley carved into stone. Mud glyphs are images traced into wet mud on cave walls and banks and an artist's impression of what this warrior would look like it shown as an inset.  Mississippian Period mud glyph caves  are elaborate and can include hundreds of images. The right image shows a woodland period petroglyph - an image scratched into the rock of cave walls and ceilings - from 13th Unnamed Cave, also from the Tennessee River Valley


This ceremonial crown mace image - scratched into the surface of the stone - was found near Mound Bottom, a prehistoric Native American complex in Cheatham County, Tennessee. The earliest known ceremonial maces were practical weapons designed to protect the king or leader of a group

They claim there are 71 known prehistoric cave art sites in the greater south-eastern USA.

The study adds: 'Systematic field exploration in Tennessee has located a wealth of new rock art - some deep in caves, some in the open air.

'The authors show that these have a different repertoire and use of colour, and a different distribution in the landscape - the open sites up high and the caves down low.

'The landscape has been reorganised on cosmological terms by the pre-Columbian societies. This research offers an exemplary rationale for reading rock art beyond the image and the site.'

According to Simek, 'Many of the images, like the black charcoal pictograph of a rayed circle from Dunbar Cave in Tennessee, can also be seen on portable religious objects found in temple mounds and other prehistoric religious contexts.'

The study claims that open air rock art in the south-east has two main formats. One group of sites comprises of petroglyphs engraved into sandstone and limestone surfaces and sheer bluff walls. Another group contains painted pictographs positioned on vertical bluff faces.

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Pit and groove lines found in the Indian Rockhouse section of the central Cumberland Plateau are pictured left, with wavy wavy line mud glyphs from Mud Glyph Cave, right. Ethnographic evidence suggests that these types of rock art were associated with the World Renewal ceremonies that 'restored the world to the way it was meant to be by the spirit people.' The ceremonies were designed to improve happiness, ward off disease and control the weather


This image of a ceremonial monolithic axe was found on a rockshelter in the central Cumberland Plateau. Stone axes, pictured inset, were used in Native American Mississippian cultures. Evidence of monolithic axes are the rarest form of ceremonial celt and were used as a symbol of rank and authority



America's oldest cave paintings found, dating back SIX THOUSAND YEARS