Ice Age horse engraving found in Moravian Karst cave challenges view of early European art
Czech scientists have announced an extraordinary discovery in the Moravian Karst in South Moravia. Inside one of the region’s caves, they found a rare engraving of a horse — an image created around 15,000 years ago, at the very end of the last Ice Age, when people still lived in and around caves.
An international team of archaeologists, led by researchers from the Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, uncovered the engraving in the Švédův stůl Cave. The image belongs to so-called Magdalenian art, a cultural tradition best known from large-scale cave paintings in Western Europe.
Until now, this type of figurative cave art had never been documented on the territory of Czechia. The discovery has been reported by the prestigious Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology.
The engraving depicts the head and neck of a horse and can only be seen under a scanner, says one of the authors of the study, archaeologist Petr Škrdla from the Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences.
“It is an engraving of a horse, or possibly several horses. We discovered it while re-examining a spoil heap left behind by earlier excavations in the Švédův stůl Cave. The engraving is on a fragment of limestone that probably fell from the cave wall a very long time ago — the fracture surfaces are smooth and clearly weathered.”
Laboratory analyses confirmed that the stone originates directly from the limestone massif of the Švédův stůl Cave and that the engravings were made using stone tools characteristic of the Magdalenian culture.
Researchers also observed that the horse motif appears on two adjacent surfaces of the block and is partly crossed by additional engraved lines. This kind of deliberate reworking is well known from Magdalenian art in Western Europe and is often interpreted as symbolic or ritual behaviour.
The prominence of the horse motif reflects its importance to the people who lived in the region at the time, says Mr. Škrdla.
“The horse was one of the main animals people hunted, so it must have held a special status in their culture. That is also reflected in Magdalenian art, where horses are depicted very frequently.”
The engraving dates to a period when small groups of hunter-gatherers lived in and around the caves of the Moravian Karst at the end of the last Ice Age.
“These were hunters of reindeer and horses. Alongside them lived woolly rhinoceroses, hyenas, bears, foxes, and other animals. The caves were used not only for shelter, but very likely also for ritual activities, including engravings and other forms of art,” Škrdla says.
Švédův stůl Cave lies near the village of Ochoz u Brna and has a long history of archaeological research. A Neanderthal jaw was discovered there about a hundred years ago, and large-scale excavations in the 1950s removed hundreds of cubic meters of material from the cave.
Archaeologists later returned to this discarded debris as part of a revision excavation, and it was among this material that the prehistoric horse engraving was identified.
