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La Pasiega
Cave was discovered by H.Obermaier and P. Wernet while
they were realizing one of the excavation campaigns in
the nearby Castillo Cave, in 1911. It is a cavity more
then 400 meters long distributed in four galleries named
A,B,C, and D. These galleries could have function as 2 or
maybe 3 independents groups during the palaeolithic, with
their corresponding entries. This is one of the reasons
why the documented evidences present different features
in each of the galleries described 300 figures of
animals, besides other 300 signs and nonfigurative
evidences have been documented in total. In the gallery A we find horses, bisons,
aurochs deers, hinds , reindeers and goats. Deep
inside, in a narrow gallery several quadrilateral signs have been represented. The more employed
technique in this group is the red paint, but engraving
and black paint has been used also. This gallery group
was almost all of it made in the Solutrean and more
sporadically in the initial Magdalenien. Some of its
figures have their parallels in Covalanas and Arenaza caves.
On its part, gallery B presents a wider
space that has been being decorated with different
thematic and technique groups, and in the ancient IV
style. Situated close to the original entrance and
painted in red or engraved we can find figures of
aurochs, bisons, horses, megaloceros, goats, chamoises,
and claviforms. The representations in this gallery were
made during the first times of the Magdalenien.
Close to one of the primitive entry, in
the gallery C, figures that represent horses, bisons
goats and anthropomorphists have been represented in red,
yellow, violet, black and even engraved traces. From the
signs, we can detach the claviforms painted in red ones.
Given this characteristics the period of decoration can
be limited to the Solutrean and some of the Magdalenien.
Finally, gallery D groups intermediate
sectors between galleries Aand B with gallery C. It is
presented as a zone with less representations, formed by
horses,bisons,deers and quadrangular signs. All the
groups is made with the same painting technique. This
fact situates the parietal evidence in La Pasiega D in a
peruod from the Solutrean to the Magdalenien.
As a general rule, taking La Pasiega
cavern as a group it can be said that it was decorated
from the Solutrean to the Magdalenien, this is from 20000
to 14000 BP, where the oldest documents are the red
painted figures, and some engravings and the modernest
are the bichromy and the black paintings.
This cave is at present being restudied
by members of the Alcalá de Henares University and from
trhe Area of Prehistory of the Historic Sciences
Department of the University of Cantabria leaded by R.
Balbín Berhmann and C.González Sainz.
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