A Stonehenge-era chalk drum is the “most important piece of prehistoric art to be found in Britain in the last 100 years,” according to the British Museum. The 5,000-year-old drum, discovered within an ancient children’s burial site, is going on display for the first time. It will be unveiled, six years after its discovery, as part of the “World of Stonehenge” exhibition at the British Museum.
The drum was found on a country estate near the village of Burton Agnes in East Yorkshire, England in 2015 when a routine excavation had to be carried out so the owners could erect a structure. During the routine excavation, a team of archaeologists with the independent company Allen Archaeology found an ancient burial site. Within the burial site were the remains of three children, aged 3 to 12, whose bones had been intertwined for millennia.
“They were cuddling,” according to Mark Allen, the founder of Allen Archaeology. The drum was placed above the head of the eldest child, along with a chalk ball and a polished bone pin. Archeologists do not believe the drum was used as a musical instrument despite the name. It was more likely a piece of sculptural art, a talisman, or, perhaps, a toy for the children. The grave is a rare find, because ancient people in Neolithic Britain would usually leave bodies for cremation or to be eaten by crows.
And the drum is so significant because it is “one of the most elaborately decorated objects of this period found anywhere in Britain and Ireland,” the British Museum said. The carvings on the drum, which show spirals and triangles, feature a “butterfly” motif. They are artistically similar to other objects found at Neolithic sites in Scotland and Ireland, Wilkin said, suggesting that prehistoric communities were in communication with each other despite significant geographical distances.
“This drum is particularly intriguing, because it basically encompasses a sort of artistic language that we see throughout the British Isles at this time, and we’re talking 5,000 years ago,” project curator Jennifer Wexler said. The discovery comes more than 100 years since the unearthing of the Folkton Drums. Three similar chalk drums were found in the village of Folkton – around 15 miles from Burton Agnes – in 1889. “We’ve been waiting for over 100 years for another one of these amazing objects to come up, and for it to come up with children – again – is astonishing,” Wilkin said.
One of my favorite things is to look at old dinosaur art from the 19th Century, like these from “Earth Before the Deluge” from 1879.
Nowadays, despite the fact there are thousands of species of dinosaur, there are only six or seven “superstar” species used in every movie. Velociraptor is the latest addition to the list, since Jurassic Park and the Raptor Red books (you will not find a velociraptor in any movie prior to 1993), but if you asked someone from the 19th Century what the top dinosaurs were, the ones that drew crowds and were most associated with the concept, they’d probably say Iguanadon, Megalosaurus, Mosasaurus, Hyleosaurus, Icthyosaurus, and, as the 19th century started to end, Diplodocus (only the last one is all that well known to casual dinosaur fans). That’s because those dinosaurs were the earliest used to describe the concept.
“In a cave you are as if in a womb, safe in the darkness of the earth’s belly. And it was almost certainly in caves that the very first magical rites were conducted, with initiates emerging into the light of dawn or beneath the panoply of stars, having undergone various ordeals and preparations for their next phase of life.”
-Philip Carr-Gomm, The Book of English Magic (2010)
Image: Mariano, Hands at the Cuevas de las ManosuponRío Pinturas, near the town of Perito Moreno in Santa Cruz Province,Argentina.
Dancing girl of Mohenjo-daro, Indus Valley Civilisation, city of Mohenjo-daro (modern-day Pakistan) c. 2300–1750 BCE, bronze ,made in lost-wax casting method, 10.5 × 5 cm, National Museum, New Delhi, Delhi, India.
Matarranya is a district named after the river that crosses it. Its capital city is Vall-de-roures, but Calaceit is considered its cultural capital city. Besides these two, none of the other towns in Matarranya have more than a few hundred inhabitants.
Its landscape consists of hills, often covered in olive tree fields and sheep flocks. The river Matarranya, though quite small, flows through the rocks and in Besseit even has created a beautiful canyon, known as Estrets del Parrissal.
Some caves with prehistoric rock art are located in Matarranya, all of which are protected as part of UNESCO’s World Heritage Site “rock art of the Iberian Mediterranean basin”. In fact, the first prehistoric rock art found in the Mediterranean basin was the cave called Roca dels Moros, in Cretes, Matarranya, discovered in 1903 by the archaeologist from Calaceit Joan Cabré. Other discoveries followed, such as Els Gascons or La Fenellassa caves. Some of the cave’s art was removed from the walls and taken to museums to preserve them.
Prehistoric large cup and ring petroglyph at ‘Laxe das Rodas’, Galicia, Spain.
Cup and ring marks or cup marks are a form of prehistoric art found mainly in Atlantic and Mediterranean Europe. They consist of a concave depression, no more than a few centimetres across, pecked into a rock surface and often surrounded by concentric circles also etched into the stone. Sometimes a linear channel called a gutter leads out from the middle. The decoration occurs as a petroglyph on natural boulders and outcrops and also as an element of megalithic art on purposely worked megaliths, and on some stone circles and passage graves.-wikipedia.com
