Ancient cave drawings have been recently discovered in an Alabama cave.
Experts believe this may be the largest ever found in North America
The following written content from Tom Metcalfe
The carvings, which may show spirits of the dead and are almost invisible, have been revealed by advanced photographic techniques.
Roughly 1,000 years ago, artists working by the light of burning reeds carved figures into the ceiling of a cave in what’s now Alabama, crouching in the narrow space below.
Over the millennium that followed, the carvings became almost invisible to the naked eye, as they got covered by the mud that naturally accumulated on the cave’s walls.
Now, those carvings have been revealed by advanced photography as the largest set of carvings ever found inside a cave in North America, some of them depicting figures almost 7 feet long.
Several of the carvings seem to show people wearing Native American regalia, such as headdresses, and carrying what appear to be rattles. Researchers think they could represent spirits of the dead.
“They are either people dressed in regalia to look like spirits, or they are spirits,” said archaeologist Jan Simek, a professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
And if they were people dressed as spirits, they were for a time considered the spirits themselves.
“The term we like to use is that they were ‘materializing’ those spirits through the costumes that they wore,” he said.
Simek is the lead author of a research paper on the carvings published Tuesday in the journal Antiquity. It describes five of the largest figures found on the cave ceiling by a photographic study that originally aimed to record the cave’s carvings in case they became damaged or invisible.
Four of the figures seem to be people wearing regalia, while the fifth is a coiled snake, possibly a diamondback rattlesnake.
The cave in the northern Alabama countryside (the researchers are keeping its precise location a secret) is the richest prehistoric cave art site in North America, Simek said.
It’s one of thousands of caves within the southern part of the Appalachian Plateau, a huge region of “karst” — heavily eroded limestone — that runs from southern Pennsylvania to Alabama.
Known to science only as the “19th Unnamed Cave,” it extends for miles beneath the surface. Hundreds of carved figures are incised into the ceiling of the “dark zone” filled with stalactites and stalagmites just beyond the light from the entrance.
The team estimates the carvings were made about 1,000 years ago by people who lived during the late Woodland phase of the Native American culture in the region.
Simek said the cave carvings were unlike those found above the ground in the region, which usually depicted other subjects in different styles, often in red paint.
Caves were regarded in many Native American traditions as entrances to an underworld Read more from NBC
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