Specialists from the Faculty of Science examined the first rock engraving in the Czech Republic

Australian and Czech researchers have discovered what appears to be the first rock engraving from the Early Stone Age in the caves of the Moravian Karst. The research team included Miroslav Králík from the Institute of Anthropology and Antonín Přichystal from the Department of Geological Sciences at the Faculty of Science, Masaryk University.

Rock art from the Early Stone Age, or Paleolithic period, ranks alongside female figurines (so-called Venuses) as part of humanity’s fundamental heritage. Drawings or engravings of hunted game, which was the focus of attention for hunters at the end of the last Ice Age, have been preserved primarily in certain Spanish and French caves such as Altamira and Lascaux, which are inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. This art on cave walls was created by people of the Magdalenian culture, who also lived in the caves of the Moravian and Bohemian Karst roughly 15,000 years ago. That is why our researchers have been trying for decades to discover analogous artistic expressions in Moravian and Czech caves.

To date, the only examples of such portable art found in our country have been engravings on flat boulders or bones. These include simple engravings, such as those from Býčí skála, as well as true masterpieces on bones depicting grazing horses or a bison fight from the Pekárna Cave near the village of Ochoz. From the Bohemian Karst, the most famous example is probably a slate plate with an engraving of an ibex from Děravá Cave on Kotýz near Tmaň. It can be assumed that wall engravings or paintings may have existed in the caves of the Moravian Karst as well, since other aspects of the Magdalenian culture are similar to those in Western Europe. Their absence is likely due to the fact that the nature of the entrance areas did not allow for their preservation. This is ultimately evidenced by the replicas of two drawings from Altamira made on the ceiling of Pekárna Cave several years ago, which are now virtually indistinguishable.

Nevertheless, evidence of a wall engraving in the Moravian Karst has been found. Earlier this year, the Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology, a leading European journal, published an article by a group of Australian and Czech researchers describing a limestone fragment from the Švédův stůl cave covered with a network of grooves, from which a horse’s head emerges in two places. The limestone fragment was found in an excavation pit back in 2019 during a survey of the slope in front of the cave by a team led by Petr Škrdla from the Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Acad Sci Brno. It was only later in the laboratory, after thorough washing and cleaning, that it became clear this was a potentially interesting piece of limestone.

An extensive discussion has unfolded regarding the network of grooves on the stone. Thanks to collaboration with Ladislav Nejman of the Australian National University in Canberra, the fragment was sent for evaluation to Australian expert Michelle C. Langley of the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution. She confirmed that the fragment indeed features two engravings of horse heads.

Miroslav Králík and Antonín Přichystal elaborated on the part of the research in which they participated: “Since this was not a foreign boulder brought in from elsewhere, our task was to prove that it is indeed a fragment of local limestone from the ceiling or wall of the cave, and, based on the nature of its edges and the karstification of its individual surfaces, to explain its original integration into the cave wall. The cave is formed in the so-called Vilémovice limestones of Devonian age. Using a non-destructive X-ray fluorescence method (analysis conducted by Karel Slavíček of the Institute of Geological Sciences), the contents of major and certain trace elements were determined in the grooved limestone, and for comparison, in another fragment from the excavated test pit and a fragment taken from the cave’s entrance wall. All three showed a high calcium-to-magnesium ratio and a high strontium content, both parameters characteristic of Vilémovice limestones. The nature of the stone’s various surfaces also indicates its origin in the wall or ceiling of the cave, and some of the grooves of the examined engravings clearly continued beyond the preserved fragment. Our stone was therefore unambiguously part of a larger composition.”

According to scientists, it is therefore reasonable to assume that the engravings on the fragment were created while it was still part of the cave wall, making it the first evidence of Paleolithic parietal (wall) art in the Czech Republic, even though its size places it more firmly within the category of portable art known from pebbles, stone “slabs,” and bones.