Aerial photograph of monumental Cerro Pintado petroglyphs with enhanced image overlay, 2017. Photo: Philip Riris/file photo.
With the headline âColombian and British scientists find the largest rock carvings in the world in the Orinoco basin,â the Spanish newspaper El PaĂs published an article this Wednesday reviewing a study carried out by scientists from various nations on the Uruana Hill in Atures municipality in the state of Amazonas, Venezuela. The scientists were studying immense petroglyphs carved by Indigenous peoples thousands of years ago. Although the Spanish newspaper claims that the aforementioned scientists âdiscoveredâ the immense petroglyphs, the reality is that they have long been known of and reviewed by Venezuelan publications.
The El PaĂs article states that âa series of monumental engravings carved thousands of years ago to represent snakes, giant centipedes, and human figures shed new clues about the human groups that inhabited what is now the border between Colombia and Venezuela thousands of years ago. The discovery, made in an area known as the Atures Rapids, in the Middle Orinoco, the region where the bed of the third-largest river in the world separates both countries, includes at least 14 new sites with rock engravings; their size, between 25 and 40 meters long, makes them the largest recorded in the world.
âThe region where the majority of engravings are found, some discovered since 2015 , constituted a key commercial and transit route⌠The discovery, made by a multidisciplinary team made up of the Universidad de los Andes [of BogotĂĄ, Colombia], the University of Bournemouth, and University College London [both in the UK], increases understanding of the environment in which human groups lived in South America thousands of years ago.”
Although the article clearly implies that it is a new discovery, the image with which the article opens shows a sector of the Uruana hill in the state of Amazonas which has been studied for years by scholars, scientists, and inhabitants of the sector.
The El PaĂs article is based on a paper published in the scientific journal Antiquity of the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, with the title âMonumental snake engravings of the Orinoco Riverâ and carried out by Philip Riris (principal investigator, Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom), JosĂŠ RamĂłn Oliver (University College London), and Natalia Lozada Mendieta (Universidad de Los Andes, BogotĂĄ).
It is noteworthy that the three scientists did not claim in the paper that they had discovered the petroglyphs and engravings. On the contrary, they cited several previous publications, some from 1975 (Sujo Volsky, J.: âThe study of rock art in Venezuelaâ) where the existence of the petroglyphs is reviewed. The scientists point out that they reviewed scholarly publications “on the rock art of the Orinoco from reports, theses, books, and articles.â
On the other hand, the scientific paper does point out the application of new methodologies and technologies to make an âinventory of 157 rock art locations in the Middle and Upper Orinoco,â as follows:
âWe made full records of each site using DSLR cameras and metric scales, as well as aerial drones when necessary due to the exceptional size of some of the artworks. Coordinates were recorded on portable GPS units. In addition, we compile literature on Orinoco rock art from reports, theses, books and articles. Site locations were estimated from published descriptions and maps to produce a complete site inventory, resulting in a sample of 157 rock art locations in the Middle and Upper Orinoco. We classify 13 of them as âmonumental,â defined here as a prominent location in the landscape and at least twice as large as an adult human (>4 m) in vertical and/or horizontal dimensions.
In addition, in the paper published in Antiquity, the authors thank Venezuela’s Institute of Cultural Heritage (IPC) and the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research (IVIC) for their cooperation in the research.
Scientists never claimed to have discovered the petroglyphs, but Spain’s El PaĂs newspaper claimed that they had, although their are reams of evidence indicating that they did not.
A publication of the Ministry for Culture (Venezuela), the âCatalogue of Venezuelan Cultural Heritageâ printed in 2006 by the Cultural Heritage Institute (an entity attached to the aforementioned ministry) had already reported on these petroglyphs, including a photo of a part of the immense snake and the centipede that appear on the cover of the El PaĂs article.
This is how it appears in the volume dedicated to the Atures Municipality of the Amazonas State, on pages 80 and 81. The book can be downloaded as a PDF by clicking here.
In the following image, one can compare, side by side, the image published by El PaĂs de EspaĂąa (left) and the image published by the Cultural Heritage Catalog in 2006 (right), in particular, the part where there is a drawing similar that appears to represent a centipede
There are many anthropological and archaeological treasures that exist in Venezuela, and without a doubt, Venezuelans appreciate and undertake their study and the cooperation necessary for their preservation.
In fact, on a positive note, the scientists’ article published in the journal Antiquity has a Creative Commons Attribution license, which allows âunrestricted reuse, distribution and reproduction in any medium, as long as the original work is properly cited.â That is, any Venezuelan scholar or scholars from another country can use and cite the article and are only obliged to provide credit to its authors.
What is really worrisome is that some media outlets tried to soil the reputation and work carried out by scientists and Venezuelan institutions and wrongly claim that a scientific study âdiscoveredâ treasures that, in reality, have been widely known for years.
History repeats itself
It is not the first time that it has been claimed that Venezuelan petroglyphs were supposedly discovered by foreign scientists.
In 2017, a wave of publications on the Internet reported that these same scientists had supposedly discovered the engravings in the state of Amazonas. Media such as El Impulso headlined: â The largest petroglyphs in the world are found in Venezuela.â A similar headline was issued by Agora Magazine, Revista SIC, 2001, and Confirmado that same year: â The largest petroglyphs in the world are discovered in Venezuela.â The CarabobeĂąa News Agency (ACN) repeated the same El Impulso headline in 2021. In all cases, it was the same news, the same place, and the same scientists.
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On that occasion, the publications were based on a scientific article published on the Phys.org website entitled âVenezuelan rock art mapped in unprecedented detail.â The article notes that âresearchers from University College London have mapped rock carvings located in western Venezuela in unprecedented detail, including some of the largest recorded in the world.â Again, nowhere do the researchers claim to be the discoverers of the petroglyphs, but it seems that the need of some media to use sensational headlines and attack the self-esteem of Venezuelans led them to make issue claims.
Dr. Philip Riris, one of the researchers, was even interviewed in 2017 by the British newspaper Daily Mail, but that article never speaks about âdiscoveries,â but rather that the petroglyphs are revealed âin unprecedented detail.â
We hope certain media are able to demonstrate a higher degree of professionalism in the treatment of news about Venezuela.
(Alba Ciudad) by Luigino Bracci
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/JRE/SL
Luigino Bracci
He is passionate about computer science since he was about 14 years old, at that age âa man gave me a small computer that he had bought in the eighties, of those that were connected to a television and had to be programmed to work (a Sinclair ZX81 ), and I really liked it.â On his political inclination, his parents were a great influence. âThey were people of very humble origins, both emigrants, dissatisfied with injustice and inequality. But they were not militants of the left. I had many other influences, classmates in HS whose parents were on the left, as well as several teachers who were trained in the Pedagogical and gave us classes at a time as conflictive as it was the presidency of CAP and the military insurrection of ChĂĄvez â He enrolled in the UCV and in 2006 he graduated in Computing, a career that he complements with popular communication in the digital field.
