Province of Cádiz (Andalusia, Spain)

Our fieldwork in the province of Cádiz aims to investigate how the acoustics of caves and shelters with Paleolithic and post-Paleolithic art influenced the production and use of rock art. This area has one of the largest concentrations of rock art in southern Spain, with more than 250 sites located in areas close to the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. During the Upper Palaeolithic —and especially in the Solutrean period— local prehistoric artists represented mainly naturalistic figures of horses, in addition to images of deer and negative hand stencils. In the post-Palaeolithic period, it is possible to observe a wide variety of anthropomorphic, zoomorphic and abstract motifs associated with both the Laguna de la Janda rock art tradition and the classic Schematic Art of the Iberian Peninsula. Among the figures of post-Paleolithic chronology, it is worth mentioning the representation of birds such as ducks, rave, cranes and wild geese, animals that are generally underrepresented in European rock art.