An astonishing variety of rock art motifs in galleries in present-day Serrania De La Lindosa, Colombia, record the history of otherworldly beliefs of Amazonian indigenous peoples.

Colombian and British researchers, with the help of indigenous elders and ritual experts, finally documented tens of thousands of images at six of these sites after political unrest and geographic inaccessibility blocked access for nearly 100 years.

“I have worked with petroglyphs and indigenous groups on all continents, and we have never been lucky enough to establish such a direct link between indigenous evidence and specific rock art motifs,” says archaeologist Jamie Hampson from the University of Exeter.

The ocher symbols, some estimated to be more than 11,000 years old, include hundreds of human figures as well as an entire ecosystem of different animals, plants and geometric shapes.

Elders and experts discovered that the drawings were not only a record of what the artists observed around them at the time, but also contained records of ritual conversations with other worlds. The paintings depict scenes of humans transforming into animals and even hybrids of plants and humans.

“These are the animals that exist there, they exist in this mountain range that existed before, but they are in the spirit world…” Ismael Sierra, who speaks the Tucano language, talks about the drawings found in a place in Muğla. La Fuga.

“These are two-armed people, these are the giants who exist in this spiritual milk (house) … there is an animal, the lion-panther, which, instead of a tail, has two heads, one with its head here and the other here. it has one head, they they are from the spiritual world.”

Many Amazonian cultures have forest spirits who protect wildlife.

“The successful introduction of game and hunting requires an agreement with these spirits,” Hampson and colleagues explain in their paper.

To bridge the gap between human and non-human worlds, humans painted the animal they wanted on the stone wall with red pigment and other symbols representing other desires, such as fertility.

The team explains that some animals represent humans. For example, jaguars are considered avatars of shamans, as well as “intermediaries between the three cosmic worlds, between life and death, between the human world and the world of ancestral spirits, between nature and culture.” In Desana, at least one of the languages ​​spoken in the region, the word “ye” means both jaguar and shaman.

“[Співпраця зі старійшинами корінних народів] It does not allow us to just look at art from the outside and make predictions; Hampson says we know why some motifs were drawn and what they mean. “It gives us the opportunity to understand that this is a sacred, ritual art created in sacred places in the landscape, within an animistic cosmology.”

The disconnection of indigenous art from media all over the world puts historical records in danger of extinction. Documenting art and connecting its stories to existing cultures not only serves an anthropological purpose, but also helps descendants of indigenous peoples preserve their heritage.

Elderly Tukano Ismael fears for the future of the paintings as he was forced to leave the area due to humanitarian conflicts.

“Who will support it? [картини]?” Ismail asks. “It is the spirit that cares about you… No one believes it, but there are spirits here… We believe because my father was one of them. [ритуальних спеціалістів]here interacting with these characters.” This research was published in the journal Advances in Rock Art Studies.