Kapova/Shulgan-Tash Cave, Southern Urals (Russia)

Kapova (or Shulgan-Tash in local Bashkirian language) Cave in the Southern Urals is the largest and most ancient complex of rock painting in Central and Eastern Europe. This Upper Palaeolithic (circa 17,000 to 19,000 years BP) cave art site was discovered in 1959, and is notable for being outside the Franco-Cantabrian province (Bader 1965; Ruiz-Redondo, Yanovskaya and Zhitenev 2020). Kapova cave remained as an ‘island’ for decades, until the discoveries of Upper Palaeolithc (UP) cave art in Igniatievskaya (Petrin 1997) and Serpievskaya 2 (Shirokov and Petrin 2013), both also in the Southern Urals, marked the region as its own UP parietal art province. 

                The anthropomorphic figures (Ruiz-Redondo et al.V.S2020)                         

The cave art features a variety of animal depictions (including woolly mammoths, rhinos, bison, and horses), alongside human-like figures abstract and geometric forms. The Kapova paintings share essential characteristics with their counterparts from SW Europe in terms of their techniques, iconography, graphic conventions and organization inside the cave. Nevertheless, the iconography is not similar to any UP cave site in Western Europe from the same period. In quantitative terms, the high percentage of mammoths and ‘human’ figures (present also in the cave of Igniatievskaya) highlights the originality of the graphic assemblage. The presence of a camel and the unique geometric signs points to a strong influence of a local tradition in the symbolism of Kapova’s painters. There does not seem to be any evidence that the Kapova cave art is a reflection of a migration or fluid relationships between human groups from the Urals and Western Europe.

The paintings feature human-like figures, but no definitively confirmed examples of therianthropic (human-animal hybrid) imagery have been found. While some figures are interpreted as potentially mixed human and animal, a definitive identification of therianthropic figures remains elusive. Research and interpretation of the Kapova Cave art are ongoing, with efforts to catalog and understand the various images and their meanings.  

References

Bader, O. N. (1965). Kapova cave. Moscow: Nauka (In Russian).

Petrin, V. T. (1997). Le Sanctuaire Paléolithique de la Grotte Ignatievskaia a l’Ural du Sud. Liège: ERAUL, 81.

Ruiz-Redondo, A., Yanovskaya, K. & Zhitenev, V.S. The Easternmost European Palaeolithic Artists: Iconography and Graphic Features at Kapova Cave (Southern Urals, Russia). J Paleo Arch 3, 967–988 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41982-020-00065-2

Shirokov, V. N., & Petrin, V. T. (2013). Art of the Ice Age. In Ignatievskaya and Serpievskaya 2 caves in the Southern Urals. Ekaterinburg: Azhur (In Russian).