Prehistoric Bird Watching in Southern Iberia? The Rock Art of Tajo de las Figuras Reconsidered

ABSTRACT

This paper studies the relationship between humans and birds in the recent prehistory of the Southern Iberian Peninsula. With its high number of bird, mammal, and anthropomorphic paintings, a small rock shelter –Tajo de las Figuras– provides an excellent case study to address this topic. The cave is situated in an ecosystem that, as we will argue, favoured human-bird interactions and enabled prehistoric groups to engage with a diverse and rich bird community at particular times of the year. Even though the recorded depictions can generally be integrated into the wider ‘Schematic’ style regime characterising the recent prehistory of the region, they exhibit some outstanding features including a highly distinct naturalism. This naturalism enables us to identify the represented birds, not only at the family but also at the species level. Our contribution describes these pictorial data and contextualises them with the ecology, archaeology, and archaeozoology of the area. We intend to show that the singularity of the image-corpus registered at Tajo de las Figuras mirrors the unique conditions of human-bird interactions at the time. We suggest that the significance of the images derives from the special location of the cave in the wider landscape encouraging early practices of bird watching.

KEYWORDS:

• Human-bird interaction
• rock art
• lagoon environment
• recent prehistory
• Iberian Peninsula
• Straits of Gibraltar
• bird watching

Acknowledgements

We thank ornithologist José Antonio Cabral Herrera for his collaboration in the identification of the bird representations, and Carmen Fernández Martín her help with the initial English translation of the manuscript. Four anonymous reviewers provided helpful comments. We are indebted to Catrin Kost and Shumon Hussain for their extensive editorial assistance and for streamlining the text prior to publication. All remaining errors and shortcomings remain our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

María Lazarich http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5502-1819

Antonio Ramos-Gil http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8528-0504

Notes on contributors

Dr. María Lazarich Senior Lecturer of the Prehistory Area, University of Cadiz. Department of History, Geography and Philosophy. Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. Principal researcher of the Andalusian Plan of Investigation, Development and Innovation Group (PAIDI) HUM 812 University of Cádiz: ‘Prehistory, Archaeology, Anthropology and Cultural landscape’. Lines of research: Rock painting; Funerary Customs of the Recent Prehistory, Ceramic Ethnoarchaeology.

Dr. Antonio Ramos Gil has a triple university education and his corresponding professional experience: Technical training (Naval Technical Engineer), economic training (MBA), and is a Dr. in Arts and Humanities, (Prehistory, History and Archaeology). Member of the Research Group of the University of Cádiz HUM 812: Prehistory, Archaeology, Anthropology and Cultural landscape, since 2006.

Juan Luis González-Pérez Environmental technician. Environment and Water of Andalusian consultant. Expert in scientific photography. Member of the Research Group of the University of Cádiz HUM 812: Prehistory, Archaeology, Anthropology and Cultural landscape, since 2010.

Notes

1 See http://www.dstretch.com/RA2005YDS/JonHarmanRA2005YDS.html. DStretch is a tool for rock art researchers who want to improve the images of pictographs. It is a plugin for ImageJ. ImageJ is an image processing and analysis programme written in Java. It must be installed first before you can use DStretch. https://imagej.nih.gov/ij/index.html.