Dec 7, 2023 06:02 PM
https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-...index.html
INTRO: Ancient humans painted scenes in Indonesian caves more than 45,000 years ago, but their art is disappearing rapidly. Researchers are trying to discover what’s causing the damage and how to stop it — before the murals are gone forever.
On the southwestern peninsula of Sulawesi in Indonesia, a vast series of karst mountains rise like great knobby boulders from the flat floodplain. Beneath the lush tropical vegetation that blankets the spires, there are hundreds of caves, crevices and rock shelters — carved over millennia by water seeping through the porous limestone. For tens of thousands of years, these eroded cavities provided shelter for the region’s ancient residents, who left behind a pictorial record of their time there. On the walls, archaeologists have found painted hand stencils, stick-figure people and ochre-coloured depictions of warty pigs and miniature buffalo.
Rustan Lebe, an archaeologist at the Cultural Preservation Office, an Indonesian government agency in Makassar, has been systematically documenting the caves scattered across the regencies of Maros and Pangkep — and the artwork inside them — since 2016. Some sites are deep in the tropical wilderness; others sit behind houses and are used by villagers as grain stores and temples; many are located on land where companies are mining marble and limestone for cement. Lebe’s database currently records 654 caves, and he estimates that he and his team have so far explored less than half of the karst hills.
According to Lebe, a staggering 65% of sites contain cave images, some of which were drawn more than 45,000 years ago — making them some of the oldest pictures in the world. But as fast as Lebe is finding the cave paintings, he is seeing others vanish before his eyes.
"Our big problem now is the peeling of the surface of the rock," he says. Panels of images that have survived since the middle of the last ice age are flaking off the cave walls at an alarming rate. The hard, crusted surface of the cave walls, on which the ancient people painted, is breaking off from the powdery white limestone underneath in a process called exfoliation.
Archaeologists working in the caves have speculated on the causes. Perhaps it's the pollution from nearby cars and trucks, the heavy-breathing visitors who change the caves' microclimate or the changing weather patterns ushered in by climate change. But researchers also wonder whether local industry is at fault, particularly the dust and vibrations produced by mining companies that blast open the karst cliffs, digging for limestone.
Researchers are now racing to decipher which factors are causing the rock art to flake away. In September, I joined Lebe on a trip while he investigated the deterioration. This quest to understand the risks to the cave has forged unlikely alliances between government archaeologists, local and international scientists, mining-company executives and investors from as far away as Norway. All are seeking to halt the damage to the artwork before the paintings are lost for good.
With several factors probably implicated in the rock art’s demise, scientists are only beginning to understand the complex processes at play. Work so far is “the tip of probably quite a terrifying iceberg”, says Jillian Huntley, an archaeologist at Griffith University’s Gold Coast campus in Southport, Australia. “There’s an urgency to funding more research in this space,” she says... (MORE - details)
INTRO: Ancient humans painted scenes in Indonesian caves more than 45,000 years ago, but their art is disappearing rapidly. Researchers are trying to discover what’s causing the damage and how to stop it — before the murals are gone forever.
On the southwestern peninsula of Sulawesi in Indonesia, a vast series of karst mountains rise like great knobby boulders from the flat floodplain. Beneath the lush tropical vegetation that blankets the spires, there are hundreds of caves, crevices and rock shelters — carved over millennia by water seeping through the porous limestone. For tens of thousands of years, these eroded cavities provided shelter for the region’s ancient residents, who left behind a pictorial record of their time there. On the walls, archaeologists have found painted hand stencils, stick-figure people and ochre-coloured depictions of warty pigs and miniature buffalo.
Rustan Lebe, an archaeologist at the Cultural Preservation Office, an Indonesian government agency in Makassar, has been systematically documenting the caves scattered across the regencies of Maros and Pangkep — and the artwork inside them — since 2016. Some sites are deep in the tropical wilderness; others sit behind houses and are used by villagers as grain stores and temples; many are located on land where companies are mining marble and limestone for cement. Lebe’s database currently records 654 caves, and he estimates that he and his team have so far explored less than half of the karst hills.
According to Lebe, a staggering 65% of sites contain cave images, some of which were drawn more than 45,000 years ago — making them some of the oldest pictures in the world. But as fast as Lebe is finding the cave paintings, he is seeing others vanish before his eyes.
"Our big problem now is the peeling of the surface of the rock," he says. Panels of images that have survived since the middle of the last ice age are flaking off the cave walls at an alarming rate. The hard, crusted surface of the cave walls, on which the ancient people painted, is breaking off from the powdery white limestone underneath in a process called exfoliation.
Archaeologists working in the caves have speculated on the causes. Perhaps it's the pollution from nearby cars and trucks, the heavy-breathing visitors who change the caves' microclimate or the changing weather patterns ushered in by climate change. But researchers also wonder whether local industry is at fault, particularly the dust and vibrations produced by mining companies that blast open the karst cliffs, digging for limestone.
Researchers are now racing to decipher which factors are causing the rock art to flake away. In September, I joined Lebe on a trip while he investigated the deterioration. This quest to understand the risks to the cave has forged unlikely alliances between government archaeologists, local and international scientists, mining-company executives and investors from as far away as Norway. All are seeking to halt the damage to the artwork before the paintings are lost for good.
With several factors probably implicated in the rock art’s demise, scientists are only beginning to understand the complex processes at play. Work so far is “the tip of probably quite a terrifying iceberg”, says Jillian Huntley, an archaeologist at Griffith University’s Gold Coast campus in Southport, Australia. “There’s an urgency to funding more research in this space,” she says... (MORE - details)