Portugal discovers its first cave painting of a woman in labor

Brian Bujalance Lisbon, 19 Mar “A special painting”. A group of archaeologists have discovered in one of the caves of the Sierra de São Mamede Natural Park, next to the Spanish-Portuguese border, the first cave painting of a woman in labor found in Portugal. “This is the first time that a figure of a woman having her child has been discovered in Portugal, hence the importance it has for us,” says the archaeologist and professor at the University of Évora Jorge de Oliveira in an interview with Efe. The Portuguese cave of the Owl's Nest (Ninho do Bufo), where the discovery took place, was discovered by chance 20 years ago in broad daylight, when a young woman who had an accident found a shelter inside, but it wasn't until last year that research began. Although it is full of “very symbolic” paintings, this one is the most prominent because it has the “best reading”: “It is anthropomorphic, that is, it has the figuration of a human being, in this case a woman” who is having a child. “It is a schematic painting in which the head, arms, trunk, legs open and in the middle of the legs there is a human figure of a young man who comes upside down as usual, with little arms, but the rest is inside the figure,” adds Oliveira. According to research, all the cave paintings in this cave are included in the schematic cycle of the peninsula, in the cultural spectrum between Neolithic and Middle Chalcolithic, between 5,000 and 6,000 years BC. UNIQUE AND CURIOUS The painting is located in the “darkest and most remote” area of the cave, which has made it difficult to find it. As a curiosity, the archaeologist highlights its environment of “symbolic religiosity” and points out that the only time of the year when natural light hits it directly is on the summer solstice. In addition, there are signs that indicate that it has been touched by the human hand. “I suppose that some woman who was pregnant could go there and touch the figure, because she is showing signs that someone has touched her, but hasn't torn her apart. There is symbolically a direct human contact”, he says. Next to the image of the woman in labor, there are derivatives difficult to interpret: “They are red dots of footprints, but we don't know what they mean”. A BORDER FULL OF ART Only in the Sierra de São Mamede, located on the border between Valencia de Alcántara (Spain) and Marvão (Portugal), there are more than 50 caves with cave paintings of the so-called schematic style. “The entire mountain range, both the Portuguese and the Spanish parts, is full of schematic paintings,” explains the professor at the University of Évora, but only in the south-facing areas. The pictorial manifestations have a very regular stylistic and chromatic grammar, mostly red or orange, very rarely white and occasionally black. The archaeological wealth of the region has led both municipalities to plan the international route of cave paintings, “unique in the world”, explains the deputy mayor of Marvão, Luis Costa, to Efe. The main fear, Oliveira explains, is that someone destroys the caves: “I want to divulge, but we have to be careful”, he warns about this project still in an embryonic state. A JEWEL OF THE IBERIAN PENINSULA The images of women in labor, in schematic style, are part of the ancestral tradition of representations of pregnant women and more sporadically in childbirth, explain de Oliveira and the anthropologist Maria Filomena. The “unique” find for Portugal is part of a well-known tradition of schematic representations of women in labor present in other caves of the Iberian Peninsula. Highlights in Andalusia (southern Spain) are those found in Las Peñas de Cabrera, in Casabermeja, and the Cave of El Laurel II, in Jerez de la Frontera, while in Castile-La Mancha (center) it is located in Perla Escrita, in the Sierra de Madrona, near Ciudad Real. Differences from those found in Portugal are the positions of women and the phases of labor, focusing on dilation and expulsion. CHIEF bbo/sea/cgg/pi (photo)