Cathole Cave

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CONTENTS

• Summary
• Oldest Stone Age Art in Britain
• Location and Layout
• Excavation and Archaeology
• Early Humans in Wales
• Rock Art at Cathole Cave
• Artifacts
• References

Summary

Cathole Cave in Wales is one of the northernmost paleolithic caves in Europe. Occupied by modern humans from about 30,000 BC, it is famous for a rare piece of British prehistoric art, namely an engraved drawing of a reindeer, which has been directly dated to at least 12,500 BC.

The cave has been excavated on numerous occasions from 1864 onwards, and has yielded archaeological finds of stone tools and animal bones from the Paleolithic, as well as the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods, and later.

Oldest Stone Age Art in Britain

In 2010, a reindeer engraving found at Cathole Cave was radiocarbon dated to 12,505 BC, making it the oldest art in Britain.

This superceded the animal engravings at Creswell Crags, England, which had been directly dated to about 12,000 BC, less than a decade earlier.

Location and Layout

Cathole Cave is located on the eastern side of a dry narrow limestone gorge (now known as the Parc le Breos Cwm valley), within the Parc le Breos, on the Gower Peninsula in South Wales.

It is set in a limestone cliff, near the top of the gorge, some 15 metres above the valley floor.

The cave itself is a triangular fissure which goes back into the hillside and narrows as it goes.

There are two entrances, with a rocky platform outside the wider of the two.

The main entrance of the cave opens into a main gallery which leads to two further chambers: a northwestern chamber which leads to a second, now blocked, cave entrance, before circling and either heading south back to the main entrance, or northeast to the second chamber.

This second northeastern chamber leads to a deeper but mostly inaccessible area.

Excavation and Archaeology

The earliest recorded excavation at Cathole Cave was performed by Colonel E.R. Wood. This took place in the main gallery and yielded a large assemblage of animal bones.

The second excavation occurred almost a century later in 1958. This was led by archaeologist Charles McBurney of Cambridge University and focused on the area around the main entrance, from where a variety of artifacts were recovered from the Stone Age and Bronze Age.

A 1968 investigation conducted by John Campbell corroborated the presence of Mesolithic artifacts at the cave.

In 1984 archaeologist Aldhouse-Green discovered the earliest finds in the cave: namely, two tanged projectile points dating to Gravettian culture around 26,000 BC, some 5,000 years after the burial of the Red Lady of Paviland (31,000 BC), a Cro-Magnon female discovered in a cave some 12 kilometres to the west.

The most dramatic find - the reindeer engraving - was made in September 2010, during a 2010 archaeological dig conducted by members of the Clifton Antiquarian Club.

This followed a largely unsuccessful excavation in search of cave art, which took place 3 years earlier.

A final excavation took place in 2012. This was conducted by Cadw, the Welsh Government's historic environment service.

Soon after, in response to damage caused by vandals, a grille was then installed, preventing access to the heart of the cave, in order to protect the archaeology of this important site.

Early Humans in Wales

Evidence of Stone Age culture in Wales, is nothing like as plentiful as that of Continental Europe.

The earliest known Welsh hominins were Neanderthals, who arrived about 230,000 years ago.

But it wasn't until 31,000 BC - the date of the Red Lady of Paviland, mentioned above - that modern Homo sapiens are known to have arrived in Wales, roughly 23,000 years after their arrival at Mandrin Cave in France.

In any event, the modern hunter-gatherers who occupied Cathole Cave at this time are known to have relied on traditional lithic technologies (flint tools), and operated in mobile social units which were noted for such cultural and symbolic behavious as burials and cave art.

Rock Art at Cathole Cave

In September 2010, a rock engraving of a reindeer was discovered in Cathole Cave, by Dr George Nash from Bristol University.

The engraving, which measures roughly 15 x 11 cm, was found towards the rear of the cave on a small vertical niche. It was incised onto the rock with a sharp-pointed tool, probably an awl or burin-like flint tool.

The animal's elongated body, shown side-on, is covered with vertical and oblique lines and, overall, shares several stylistic similarities with a number of contemporary reindeer engravings across Northwest Europe.

The drawing was engraved on a speleothem, and its left-hand side (muzzle and antlers) is partly covered by a flowstone calcite deposit.

In April 2011, scientists at the NERC-Open University Uranium-series Facility, took dating samples from the surface of the flowstone, in order to analyse it using U/Th dating methods.

One sample yielded a minimum date of 10,572 years BC; another sample produced a minimum date of 12,505 years BC.

Artifacts

The cave also yielded a variety of stone tools, most of which were unearthed in an unidentified layer of sediment, roughly 60 cms deep, which covered the bedrock floor of the cave.

Magdalenian tools included flint blades (Cheddar points), smaller bladelets (Cresswell points), scrapers, burins, flint and bone awls; and a bone needle.

Due to the scarcity of flint in Wales, the flint found in the cave would probably have been sourced from other areas, such as southern or eastern England, either in the form of finished tools or unworked cores.

Mesolithic and Neolithic tools were also found, as well as metal artifacts (bronze axes) and ancient pottery from the Bronze Age.

Among the faunal remains, researchers found the bones of mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, red and giant deer, red fox, Arctic fox, brown bear, reindeer and tundra vole, all on the same level as Upper Paleolithic tools.

References

(1) Green, S. & E. Walker. (1991) Ice Age Hunters (NMW Cardiff).
(2) Nash, G. (2019) ‘Animal Magic: The discovery of Upper Palaeolithic Parietal art in Cathole Cave, Gower Peninsula, South Wales,’ in Wild things: Recent advances in Palaeolithic and Mesolithic research. Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 133–143.
(3) Nash, G. et al. (2012) 'A discovery of possible Upper Palaeolithic parietal art in Cathole Cave, Gower Peninsula, South Wales', in Proceedings of Bristol University Spelaeological Society. 25 (3), 327-336.
(4) Pollard, Joshua (2001). "Wales' Hidden History, Hunter-Gatherer Communities in Wales: The Neolithic". In Morgan, Prys; Aldhouse-Green, Stephen. History of Wales, 25,000 BC AD 2000. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus Publishing. pp. 17–25. ISBN 0-7524-1983-8
(5) Whittle, Alasdair; Wysocki, Michael (1998). "Parc le Breos Cwm Transepted Long Cairn, Gower, West Glamorgan: Date, Contents, and Context". Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society. London: The Prehistoric Society. 64: 139–182. ISSN 0079-497X.