Elements of the prehistoric illumination system in Ardales Cave.

Abstract

The Ardales Cave is located in a mountain area near the village of Ardales about 50 km North of Malaga. It was Henri Breuil who recognized first its rock art in 1918. Ardales cave is outstanding in Southern Spain for its numerous examples of paintings and engravings from the Upper Palaeolithic. To date 1010 pictorial artefacts from 252 panels have been described. They probably represent three chronological phases from the Gravettian, the Solutrean and the Magdalenian. Apart from the rock art an important number of non-pictorial artefacts have been conserved. These are stone and bone tools placed near the panels, paste of red and yellow pigment, stone containers used as pigment palettes and stone lamps used for artifical lightning. The talk will present latest results of the spatial distribution of the non-pictorial artefacts and their possible relation to human movement in the cave and to the position of the rock art panels.