When Father Alberto Maria de Agostini set off from Italy on his South American travels, with the aim of transporting his faith to isolated communities there, the thought of bringing to light one of the continent’s most ancient archaeological treasures was probably the last thing on his mind.
Based in Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia, de Agostini was an explorer and cartographer, as well as a Catholic missionary priest, and was the first person to reach several mountain peaks and glaciers – usually wearing his cassock.
It was during his explorations, in the rugged landscape of Rio Pinturas canyon, in the Argentinian province of Santa Cruz, that de Agostini stumbled across perfectly preserved paintings made by Indigenous people in the walls of the canyon between 7,300BC and 700AD.
Cueva de las Manos takes its name from its hundreds of stencilled outlines of hands on the walls of the cave, in shades of black, white, red and ochre, but spread around the rocky hall and surrounding cliffs there are also depictions of humans, guanacos (a camelid native to South America), rheas (a flightless native bird), the sun, as well as geometric shapes, zigzag patterns, red dots, and dynamic and natural representations of hunting scenes.
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Though the cave was known about locally for many generations, de Agostini was the first to bring it to the attention of the academic community, writing about it in 1941. It was then investigated by an expedition of the La Plata Museum in 1949, but it was not until 1964 that substantial and careful research began, led by Argentinian surveyor and archaeologist Carlos Gradin. The study was to last 30 years and it was this work that helped to identify the different stylistic sequences of the cave, the first beginning as early as the 10thmillennium BP.
The hunting scenes depict a variety of techniques, including the use of the bola, a throwing weapon with weights on the ends of cords, designed to capture animals by entangling the legs. In one panel, a crack in the rock is used to represent a ravine that the hunters chase the animals into. Guanacos were the main source of food.
Of the 800+ negative handprints that the cave is most famous for, only 31 are of right hands and one has six fingers. Many of the rest are of a size that resemble those of a 13-year-old boy, suggesting that this may have been an initiation ceremony or rite of passage. The liquid pigment is thought to have been blown through a hollow bone or reed around a hand placed on the rockface. This may be why most of the handprints are of left hands, as the artist would have held the pipe with their right.
Materials used to make the pigments included iron oxides for red and purple, kaolin for white, natrojarosite for yellow and manganese oxide for black – which were ground and mixed with some sort of binder to create the paint. The area’s dry climate helped to preserve the art over the centuries.
Debate is ongoing as to the purpose of the art. It may have had a religious, ceremonial or prehistoric shamanic purpose, or the handprints could be indicative of the human desire to be remembered, a powerful message to the future. The art might also have served as a boundary between peoples. Whatever the purpose, the fact that many people gathered in one place to make the art shows they were important culturally to those who took part.
Cueva do las Manos, last inhabited around AD 700 (possibly by ancestors of the first Tehuelche people of Patagonia), is considered one of the most important sites to represent the earliest hunter-gatherer groups in South America during the Early Holocene. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999.
