sevinc shirinli

This work examines animals’ representations of the post-Palaeolithic rock art that can be found on walls of caves and shelters located in the Italian peninsula, along the Apennine ridge, and in the main islands. The rare represented animals are Neolithic cervids in hunting scenes and very schematic figures of quadrupeds, few birds and fishes, datable between Chalcolithic and Bronze Age. Representations of anthropomorphic and abstract figures are dominant. Images of horses and
riders, dogs and cervids, depicted more realistically and in motion, can be surely related to the Iron Age. After an analysis of evidence identified from Liguria to Sicily and the islands, attention is directed to the opposition of this lack of images in rock art, which are often located in places with a high symbolic and sacral value in addition to their function of controlling routes and territories, to the abundant frequency of domestic and wild animals’ remains observable in several cave and outdoor
sites surely related to cults and ritual offers. The sacred significance of deers, bulls (represented with protomes), canids, horses, can be observed too: as their presence in many mythologies and in Christian symbologies demonstrate, their symbolic meaning has been perpetuated until historical periods

Animal depictions in the Paleolithic art of Central Europe are a widespread phenomenon. Unlike other regions of Europe, very few examples of parietal art are known, most of which are debatable. Instead, there is a long continuity of portable art, beginning with the ivory figures of the Swabian Aurignacian cave sites, and followed by the figures of ivory and burnt clay in the open-air sites of the Pavlovian. With the Magdalenian, major changes are apparent. Animals were depicted on a wide range of media using different raw materials. In contrast to the three-dimensional statuettes from the previous techno-complexes, in the Magdalenian engravings on slate plates dominate, most of which come from the open-air sites of Gönnersdorf and Andernach (Germany). While great herbivores and carnivores are the dominant themes in the Aurignacian and Pavlovian, in the Magdalenian horses and mammoths are the most frequently depicted species. A comparison with the faunal material of some of the sites where the portable art originates shows that it was not the animals that were used for daily survival that were represented in the art, therefore the species that are represented in the art must have been selected for other reasons.