I was browsing in my local branch of Waterstone's last week when my eye was caught by Tim Birkhead's latest book, Birds and Us. He's an excellent writer but I don't usually buy his books as soon as they come out, not least because my daughters complain that there's nothing left for them to get for me on my birthday or at Christmas. However, one glance at the opening chapter and I knew I had to buy the book without waiting.
The subject of that chapter was El Tajo de las Figuras, a small rock shelter (it can hardly be called a cave) a few kilometres east of Benalup. Despite being more open to the elements than most 'cave' paintings sites, the inner walls are decorated with hundreds of images dating back 8,000 years. The Neolithic artists who decorated caves rarely bothered with birds concentrating instead on humans and the large game animals like bison, deer, horses etc that they hunted. So it's quite remarkable that so many images here are thought to represent birds - more than all the other European cave art sites combined. I knew nothing of this when Liz and I visited the site back in 2005 so I was taken aback by the volume and number of paintings crammed into a relatively small space. I took some indifferent photos of the paintings with my small and by today's standards primitive digital camera . To my irritation all of my photos proved to be indifferent and the worst of all were of the birds, most didn't come out at all. I promised myself that I'd come back the following year to obtain better images but I have never found the place open since! Birkhead himself apparently had to have permission from the Junta de Andalucia when he visited the site in 2017 with two local archaeologists.
Birkhead's book gives details of how they were revealed to the wider world by oologist, pioneer bird photographer and inventor Willoughby Verner in 1901. Local people, of course, had long known about this Neolithic Sistine Chapel as it was Verner's guide who told him about them. It was Verner, though, who publicised the existence of the site which resulted in great interest from archaeologists.
Birkhead goes on to write that "There are no fewer than 208 birds on the walls of the cave. Some 150 have been identified as comprising at least sixteen different species". After a quick bit of Googling, I managed to find a 2018 paper written by the two archaeologists from whom Birkhead appears to have obtained his figures (see www.researchgate.net/publication/330685602_Prehistoric_Bird_Watching_in_Southern_Iberia_The_Rock_Art_of_Tajo_de_las_Figuras_Reconsidered?fbclid=IwAR06b5wv0Yi-PP3jgJe-IqgdI3H0rlELnuG1Aqytj8PYjauVbFhmft7x-Do).
The figure of 208 is, it seems, a little optimistic as this includes 44 'possible' birds but even so this represents a remarkably high percentage of all the bird images ever found in Neolithic cave art. Of the remainder 150 are described as 'securely identified' and a further 14 as 'unidentified'. The species list is interesting - Great Bustard (35), Little Bustard (7), Purple Swamphen (3), Purple Heron (15), Cattle Egret (3), Common Crane (17), Flamingo (11), Spoonbill (2), Glossy Ibis (5), Avocet (2), Black-winged Stilt (2), Marsh Harrier (1) and Ruppell's Vulture (1) plus gull sp (24), coot sp (16) and duck/goose sp (6). Some of these identifications such as Flamingo seem reasonable but others strike me as highly conjectural (particularly Ruppell's Vulture!).
Oddly enough, from photographs of the illustrations I've seen elsewhere there's a reasonable case to suggest that one of the species shown is Bald Ibis which they don't list. The table listing these birds in the paper also has a column for 'Habitats' which indicates that of the bustards is "flooded lowland" ...! I was amused to find Birkhead suggesting, as I have done somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that the paintings were a proto-field guide for nascent hunters.
The figure of 208 is, it seems, a little optimistic as this includes 44 'possible' birds but even so this represents a remarkably high percentage of all the bird images ever found in Neolithic cave art. Of the remainder 150 are described as 'securely identified' and a further 14 as 'unidentified'. The species list is interesting - Great Bustard (35), Little Bustard (7), Purple Swamphen (3), Purple Heron (15), Cattle Egret (3), Common Crane (17), Flamingo (11), Spoonbill (2), Glossy Ibis (5), Avocet (2), Black-winged Stilt (2), Marsh Harrier (1) and Ruppell's Vulture (1) plus gull sp (24), coot sp (16) and duck/goose sp (6). Some of these identifications such as Flamingo seem reasonable but others strike me as highly conjectural (particularly Ruppell's Vulture!).
Oddly enough, from photographs of the illustrations I've seen elsewhere there's a reasonable case to suggest that one of the species shown is Bald Ibis which they don't list. The table listing these birds in the paper also has a column for 'Habitats' which indicates that of the bustards is "flooded lowland" ...! I was amused to find Birkhead suggesting, as I have done somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that the paintings were a proto-field guide for nascent hunters.
As indicated above, this treasure is strangely neglected and rarely open to the public but if you're in the area look out for a small wooden kiosk half hidden in bushes north of the road that passes the Embalse de Celemin (see map). Nip in if it’s open as you may not get another chance. Hopefully, when Birkhead’s book appears in a Spanish edition (as most of them do) then it will generate sufficient interest this site for it to be open to the public more often.
RSS Feed
