Florentine archaeologist Paolo Graziosi, among the foremost experts in studies of prehistoric art, could not guess what awaited him in Calabria. In the rugged lands of Papasidero, within the Pollino National Park, a ravine was found. Vegetation had invaded the Romito cave, which had been buried by millennia of oblivion. The cavity opened into a narrow, dark tunnel of mainly limestone formation.
A very ancient cave
Since its discovery in 1961, the cave, renamed “Romito cave,” has been the subject of an archaeological excavation campaign. It has revealed its unsuspected historical and artistic value. The site, in fact, allowed the discovery of prehistoric art artifacts dating from the Paleolithic onward. The impressive amount of evidence found in Papasidero belongs to a period between twenty-three thousand and ten thousand years ago. There are numerous traces of burials, both human and animal. Outside the cave scholars found a number of rock carvings, including a depiction of two bovids of the Bos primigenius.
The excavations, initially conducted by Paolo Graziosi (1961-1968) and now coordinated by the University of Florence, have revealed the temporal continuity of the Romito cave settlements1. Both inside and outside the cavity, the discovery of seven burials from the Upper Paleolithic period took place. They housed nine Cro-Magnon individuals, an ancient form of Homo sapiens. In the stratigraphic levels closest to the surface, however, archaeologists identified a substantial deposit of obsidian, used by Neolithic humans to make weapons and tools.
The ritual burials of the Romito cave
Burials seem to be marked by a well-defined ritual: in pairs or singly, bodies were laid in a bed of red ochre. A leather cover, ornamented with thousands of sea shells and deer teeth, adorned the remains. Inside the pit, moreover, grave goods and offerings, such as arrowheads or bone bracelets, were often placed.
In at least one of the burials, dating to about 16,000 years ago, the bones of the deceased are not in anatomical continuity with each other. The burial probably belongs to a long time after the death. Even more exceptional is the finding of couple burials, consisting of a man and a woman2, probably spouses. It is unclear if the two bodies were buried together or reunited only after death, at different times. In any case, this could figure a continuity of fertility beyond life, guaranteed by Mother Earth. On the inner edge of the cavity, scholars have also found a mass grave, which nevertheless holds numerous animal bones, particularly deer, perhaps sacrificed for ritual purposes.
The engraving of the Bos primigenius
Outside the cave, on the adjacent smooth boulders, we can observe rock carvings. Of extraordinary importance is the depiction of two bovids, belonging to the species Bos taurus primigenius (the aurochs), now extinct. These are the same type of bulls of the Lascaux paintings in France. At Papasidero, the engraved figure of a bovid is clearly visible, although it may be originally coloured. Another specimen of Bos primigenius is glimpsed close to the hind legs of the first, but the silhouette is barely sketched here.
The presence of cave paintings with bovids, in Papasidero as in Lascaux, is not surprising. In fact, Cro-Magnon men knew neither agriculture nor animal husbandry. Hunting the Bos primigenius constituted a fundamental source of livelihood for them. Hence, it is likely that the ancient inhabitants of the Romito cave considered it sacred. The symbolic association between the bull and life, between the Bos and fertility, is common to most primordial cultures until the late Neolithic period. Examples include the menhirs of pre-Nuragic Sardinia.
The non-figurative engravings
Not far from the depiction of Bos primigenius, visitors can observe a repeatedly engraved stone surface. The stonework does not appear to be figurative: rather, it consists of random grooves, propagating in all directions. To explain the phenomenon, archaeologists have proposed several hypotheses. The first is that the surface was originally painted: the grooves are just what remains of a cave painting, which ten thousand years ago showed a real subject. Alternatively, it is possible that the engravings represented a counting system, or something similar, unknown to us. However, the most plausible hypothesis is that the boulder was a sacrificial altar. The random grooves, in fact, could be due to the use of a cutting tool, such as a stone knife. This could be consistent with the presence of an animal burial pit at the archaeological site of Romito, supporting the idea that sacrificial rites occurred there.
The interior of the Romito cave
The Romito cave is about twenty metres deep and thirty-four metres long. A narrow corridor leads to a large chamber, the naturalistic beauty of which leaves even the most wary visitor breathless. The interior of the chamber has, in both winter and summer, a temperature difference of about 13 degrees from the outside. This has favoured the emergence of impressive limestone formations such as stalactites and stalagmites.
Was the Romito cave a sacred place of antiquity?
The presence of an altar, ritual burials and, last but not least, the depiction of a kind of bull-god, would suggest the hypothesis that propitiatory and sacrificial rites took place in Papasidero. The naturalistic beauty of the cave supposedly dazzled Cro-Magnon men, so much so that they chose it as a “sanctuary” of antiquity. The killing of animals, as evidenced by the presence of a mass grave inside the cavity and a stone altar, probably had propitiatory purposes for the success of the hunting. The figure of Bos primigenius assumes, in this sense, the value of a primordial simulacrum, endowed with extra-empirical efficacy on the survival of the early community.
The rituals of those primordial men even transcended the limits of death. A complex rite of passage returned Cro-Magnon man to that which had generated him, from the ground to the ground, this was the great circle of life.
Samuele Corrente Naso
Notes
- https://www.museofiorentinopreistoria.it/it/ricerche-e-scavi/scavi-in-corso. Article to this link. ↩︎
- https://www.grottaromito.com/it ↩︎
