Addaura caves
| Addaura caves
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 View of Addaura |
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| Location: | Monte Pellegrino , Sicily , Italy | |
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Geographic location: |
38 ° 11 '11.1 " N , 13 ° 21' 11" E | |
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The Addaura Caves ( Italian Grotte dell'Addaura ) are three caves on the northeast flank of Monte Pellegrino , four kilometers from the core of the Sicilian city of Palermo . The rock carvings found there 70 meters above sea level are attributed to the Epipalaeolithic . Finds of tools could prove the use of the caves for the Paleolithic . The finds were brought to the Museo Archeologico di Palermo , their dating is 16.060–15.007 cal. BP . The bone finds, which are the oldest in Sicily and which have been dated so far, allowed the evidence that the inhabitants did not eat marine animals, but primarily hunted mammals such as red deer .
Even before the Second World War , paleontologists were able to determine the skeleton of a dwarf elephant . When the Allies used the caves as an explosives depot in 1943, there was an explosion, as a result of which the rock carvings were exposed. They were examined by Jole Bovio Marconi, who published her results from 1945 onwards. She was superintendent at the local archaeological museum from 1939 to 1963. Altogether there were engravings of 17 people and 15 animals, mostly bovids .
Occasionally the images were viewed as scenes, and the excavator saw them as acrobats. G. Bolzoni interpreted them in 1985 as executions or victims, as young men who were depicted tied up in one scene, and in the other, their corpses were depicted as they were being transported away. This interpretation goes back to Alberto Carlo Blanc and Ginetta Chiappella, who saw a ritual execution in the scene. In 2005 Jean Guilaine was considerably more reserved, who also considered initiation rituals, as Franco Mezzena had already done, and estimated the scene to be between 12,000 and 14,000 years old.
The Parco Archeologico dell 'Addaura was established around the caves . The caves were accessible until 1997, but they were closed that year because of the fragility of the ceiling and the poor protection of the objects in the caves. At least until 2008 no measures were taken to secure the caves.
literature
- Marcello A. Mannino, Rosaria Di Salvo, Vittoria Schimmenti, Carolina Di Patti, Alessandro Incarbona, Luca Sineo, Michael P. Richards: Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer subsistence in Mediterranean coastal environments: an isotopic study of the diets of the earliest directly-dated humans from Sicily , in: Journal of Archaeological Science 38.11 (November 2011) 3094-3100.
- Salvatore Spoto: Sicilia Antica , Rome 2002, p. 22 f.
- Herbert Kühn : A new cave with ice age images: Addaura near Palermo , in: Kosmos 8 (August 1954) 379–382.
Web links
- Il monte sacro: alla ri-scoperta delle Grotte dell'Adaura (Italian, offline)
- Illustration of the rock carvings
Remarks
- ^ Jole Bovio Marconi: Relazione preliminare sugli scavi nelle Grotte dell'Addaura, Notes degli Scavi, V-VI , in: Rivista di scienze preistoriche dell'Istituto italiano di preistoria e protostoria, 160-167 (1941-45) 55-64.
- ↑ G. Bolzoni: Nuove osservazioni sulle incisioni della grotta Addaura del Monte Pellegrino (Palermo) , in: Atti della Società Toscana di Scienze Naturali Residente in Pisa 92 (1985) 321-329.
- ↑ Jean Guilaine: À propos de la scène d'Adaura , in: Jean-Pierre Albert, Béatrix Midant-Reynes (ed.): Le sacrifice humain en Égypte ancienne et ailleurs , Paris 2005, pp. 248-255.
- ↑ Riaprite le Grotte dell 'Addaura , in La Repubblica, March 5th of 2008.