America's oldest cave paintings found, dating back SIX THOUSAND YEARS

• The faded images in Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau are believed to be the most widespread collection of such art ever found in the U.S.
• Art works feature mythical creatures, heroic ceremonial actions, religious motifs and a selection of birds and reptiles

By Victoria Woollaston
PUBLISHED: 09:16 EST, 18 June 2013 | UPDATED: 12:47 EST, 18 June 2013
Archaeologists have discovered America's oldest cave and rock art that has remained hidden for more than 6,000 years.
The faded images were found in Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau and are believed part of the most widespread collection of such art ever found in the U.S.
Some of the pictures were drawn using shallow lines made with a pointed tool and these show events such as hunting, or depict animals that the Native Americans would have lived with and eaten.
Other images are more elaborate, depicting mythical creatures and representing the Native's spiritual beliefs.

This image shows drawings of canids - wild dog-like creatures that included wolves, foxes and jackals - found in the 60th Unnamed Cave at the site of the Tennessee Cumberland Plateau. Animal images, such as quadrupeds and reptiles, are rare in open air art work but common in dark caves

This cave drawing was found in the open air at Ruby Bluffs and shows 'a probable Mississippian period dancer,' according to a study in archaeology review journal, Antiquity. The image was enhanced, bottom left, using Dstretch - a technology used to accentuate cave pictographs

A total of 21 counties lie along the the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee. It contains 280 caves - 21 of which are described as 'extensive' in size. It also has 164 waterfalls, including 39 over fifty feet and 10 over 100 feet tall

These preserved artworks were found by researchers Jan Simek, Alan Cressler, Nicholas Herrmann and Sarah Sherwood from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee and Mississippi State University.
A study, published in Antiquity, a quarterly review of world archaeology, discusses the most recent discovery of the art in the Cumberland Plateau as well as previous cave art and rock discoveries across the state of Tennessee.
These include the Dunbar Cave and Mud Glyph Cave in Clarksville.

Rock art is commonly thought to have been drawn by Native Americans and other races as part of rituals and ceremonies.

The researchers claim that some of the pictures discovered remain extremely fragile because they were drawn into mud.
Mud was traditionally used by Native Americans in the south east of the country because it was readily available and was seen as an ideal canvas by prehistoric cave artists.
Herrmann said: 'Human images are often shown in activities suggesting heroic or ceremonial action, flying, transforming into animal shapes or reaching through the rock surface.'
According to the study, the researchers documentation of Tennessee rock art sites has led to a number of themes being spotted. 
The most common motif in open air rock art was a human figure or anthropomorph. Open air anthropomorphs were 'simply rendered, but sometimes they show details like eyes or horns and often have large hands with exaggerated fingers.'
Anthropomorphs are also depicted in petroglyphs and are one of the most common elements seen in caves, appearing first during the Archaic period. Woodland period sites also contain human images.

Pictograph of a concentric circle (left). These are thought to represent religious, spiritual motifs or celestial beings. It is shown next to Anthropomorphic rock art - drawings with a 'human form'

The human images from the Mississippian period are the most elaborate and detailed, as seen in the several mud glyphs in the Mud Glyph Cave. The researchers conclude that both open air and cave art sites in Tennessee share a central theme of human imagery.
Circles are also common in open rock art sites, according to the researchers. These include ‘sun’ pictographs and concentric circle petroglyphs which are associated in at least three cases with falling water. Circles can also occur in the open with anthropomorphs.
Circles are frequent in caves, for example at Dunbar Cave, where rayed circles with crosses inside are painted in black alongside concentric circle pictographs and petroglyphs.

Rayed circles with crosses inside found on the wall of the Dunbar Cave in Tennessee. According to the study, rayed circles are a 'classic Mississippian icon'. Circles are common in caves, usually shown as sun pictographs

The rayed circles are a classic Mississippian icons, according to the study.
Other common motifs in both caves and open air sites are grooves and curving lines. In the open air, these are often produced by a pit and groove technique in soft sandstone and are frequently found in sites that also contain representational motifs.
Lines also occur as pictographs in open sites.  The researchers claim that 'Lines and grooves are among the most frequent motifs in petroglyph and mud glyph caves.'
A number of mace images were found in the Mississippian sites in the 11th Unnamed case and and Mud Glyph caves including a bird holding maces in its ‘hands’. Animal images including quadrupeds (four-legged animals) and reptiles are rare in open air contexts. Quadrupeds are less rare in caves, with examples found  from 11th, 12th, 45th, 60th and 61st Unnamed caves in the Cumberland Plateau.
The underground images of quadrupeds often depict dog-like creatures known as canids.

The author of the study claims that this rock art shows birds, thought to be turkeys. The drawings were made using a fine pointed tool and consist of shallow lines. They were found in the 7th Unnamed cave in the Cumberland Plateau and are only a few centimetres long

Only a small number of open air sites contain glyphs that might represent avimorphs, or bird-like creatures, including an pictograph in the Waterfall Shelter in the south Cumberland region that may be a 'stylised winged creature.'
The researchers continue that in contrast, 'birds are among the most frequent depictions in dark zone cave art.
'Frequently, although not exclusively, birds inside caves are depicted in flight,with their wings extended and flight feathers clearly delineated.
'The common presence of birds inside caves, but not in open air sites, is perplexing if birds are creatures associated with the upper or celestial world, as they so often have been interpreted by south-eastern archaeologists.'
According to Discovery News, the authors believe that the art was used as way of mapping the Native American's 'conceptual universe onto the natural world in which they lived'.
Lead author Jan Simek, president emeritus and a distinguished professor of science at the University of Tennessee’s Department of Anthropology said : 'The discoveries tell us that prehistoric peoples in the Cumberland Plateau used this rather distinctive upland environment for a variety of purposes and that religion was part of that broader sense of place.'

This image, enhanced by Dstretch, shows a winged pictograph taken from the Waterfall Shelter in the south Cumberland Plateau. According to the Antiquity report, pictures of avimorphs - bird-like creatures - are rare in open air sites. Iron oxide would have been used to create the red colour of this image

The drawings discovered in Tennessee are believed to represent the Native American's prehistoric world in three dimensions - the upper parts of the art are 'celestial' representing religious beliefs.
The middle sections usually show plants, animals and the world in which they would have live.
Art that sits in the lower parts of the caves and walls represent 'darkness, death and danger'.
For example, the study claims that scorpions are shown as part of the Native American's 'lower world' because they were found deep in the caves and not in the upper 'celestial' areas of the walls.
One image shows 'a black charcoal pictograph from an East Tennessee cave showing a transformational animal with the head, body, and tail of a dog or cat and the curving talons of a bird.
'Transformation is depicted in prehistoric art in both open-air sites and in dark zone caves in Tennessee.'
The Cumberland Plateau stretches across eastern Tennessee from Alabama north into Kentucky, it rises more than 1,000 feet above the Tennessee River Valley and features sandstone and shale dating back 500 million years.
The stretch is made up of two parts - open air rock art that was discovered in the nineteenth century and dark zone cave art first identified in 1979.

This Mississippian petroglyph panel was discovered in the 11th Unnamed Cave in central Cumberland Plateau. The faint scratches in the middle of the image depict a bird holding ceremonial maces - an ornamented staff traditionally made of metal or wood and carried in civic ceremonies. The clearer white image on the left depicts a ceremonial monolithic axe transforming into a human face. A real-life monolithic axe is shown as an inset

A Mississippian period mud glyph warrior, left, was found in the Mud Glyph Cave in the Tennessee River Valley carved into stone. Mud glyphs are images traced into wet mud on cave walls and banks and an artist's impression of what this warrior would look like it shown as an inset.  Mississippian Period mud glyph caves  are elaborate and can include hundreds of images. The right image shows a woodland period petroglyph - an image scratched into the rock of cave walls and ceilings - from 13th Unnamed Cave, also from the Tennessee River Valley

This ceremonial crown mace image - scratched into the surface of the stone - was found near Mound Bottom, a prehistoric Native American complex in Cheatham County, Tennessee. The earliest known ceremonial maces were practical weapons designed to protect the king or leader of a group

They claim there are 71 known prehistoric cave art sites in the greater south-eastern USA.
The study adds: 'Systematic field exploration in Tennessee has located a wealth of new rock art - some deep in caves, some in the open air.
'The authors show that these have a different repertoire and use of colour, and a different distribution in the landscape - the open sites up high and the caves down low.
'The landscape has been reorganised on cosmological terms by the pre-Columbian societies. This research offers an exemplary rationale for reading rock art beyond the image and the site.'
According to Simek, 'Many of the images, like the black charcoal pictograph of a rayed circle from Dunbar Cave in Tennessee, can also be seen on portable religious objects found in temple mounds and other prehistoric religious contexts.'
The study claims that open air rock art in the south-east has two main formats. One group of sites comprises of petroglyphs engraved into sandstone and limestone surfaces and sheer bluff walls. Another group contains painted pictographs positioned on vertical bluff faces.

Pit and groove lines found in the Indian Rockhouse section of the central Cumberland Plateau are pictured left, with wavy wavy line mud glyphs from Mud Glyph Cave, right. Ethnographic evidence suggests that these types of rock art were associated with the World Renewal ceremonies that 'restored the world to the way it was meant to be by the spirit people.' The ceremonies were designed to improve happiness, ward off disease and control the weather

This image of a ceremonial monolithic axe was found on a rockshelter in the central Cumberland Plateau. Stone axes, pictured inset, were used in Native American Mississippian cultures. Evidence of monolithic axes are the rarest form of ceremonial celt and were used as a symbol of rank and authority

Cave art sites contain both of these formats, and add a third type, mud glyphs, which at least partly reflect the presence and preservation of plastic mud in caves.
In caves, petroglyphs are the most common art form.
The oldest dated cave art in Tennessee is a charcoal pictograph from 48th Unnamed cave, which has been carbon dated at around 3788–3708 BC.
This age places the pictograph within the Middle Archaic period in Tennessee, a period when people practiced regionally focused foraging similar to the Old World Mesolithic.
Cave art was also produced during the succeeding Woodland period, 1000 BC–AD 900, and it is sometimes associated with human burials during this phase.
Most cave art, however, tends to date to the late prehistoric Mississippian period, AD 900–1600, when chiefdoms based on maize agriculture dominated the south-east.
Pictographs were produced using two colours, red and black. Both colours together are present only in one cave; otherwise, they are mutually exclusive.
Black pictographs were produced inside caves and made mostly of charcoal-based paint.
The red pictographs are made from iron oxide.
The only red pictographs found inside the Tennesee Cumberland caves are red discs that occur in two caves containing human burials.
Black pictographs were found outside caves: one group of complex religious icons marking a rockshelter burial site and another single anthropomorph located next to a waterfall.
The photos for the study were taken by project photographer Alan Cressler.
He told Discovery News: 'Tiny turkey engravings from Tennessee were extremely difficult to photograph, since they are only a few centimeters long and composed of very shallow lines made with a fine pointed too.'
Co-author Sarah Sherwood of The University of the South, said: 'Rock art sites are only one type of specialized activity site we see in the area.
We know that people came to the Plateau to find specific foods, including animals and plants (in fact, certain native plants were domesticated in the area more than 3,000 years ago) and to obtain non-food resources.
Rock art was an integral part of how people conceived and used their landscapes.'

WHAT DO THE TENNESSEE DISCOVERIES TEACH US ABOUT CAVE ART?

According to the study, the researchers' documentation of Tennessee rock art sites has led to a number of themes being spotted. 
The most common motif in open air rock art was a human figure, or anthropomorph. Open air anthropomorphs were 'simply rendered, but sometimes they show details like eyes or horns and often have large hands with exaggerated fingers.'
Anthropomorphs are also depicted in petroglyphs - an image scratched into the rock of cave walls and ceilings - and are one of the most common elements seen in caves, appearing first during the Archaic period. Woodland period sites also contain human images.
The human images from the Mississippian period are the most elaborate and detailed, as seen in the several mud glyphs in the Mud Glyph Cave. The researchers conclude that both open air and cave art sites in Tennessee share a central theme of human imagery.
Circles are also common in open rock art sites, according to the researchers. These include ‘sun’ pictographs and concentric circle petroglyphs which are associated in at least three cases with falling water. Circles can also occur in the open with anthropomorphs.
Circles are frequent in caves, for example at Dunbar Cave, where rayed circles with crosses inside are painted in black alongside concentric circle pictographs and petroglyphs.
The rayed circles are a classic Mississippian icons, according to the study.
Other common motifs in both caves and open air sites are grooves and curving lines. In the open air, these are often produced by a pit and groove technique in soft sandstone and are frequently found in sites that also contain representational motifs.
Lines also occur as pictographs in open sites.  The researchers claim that 'Lines and grooves are among the most frequent motifs in petroglyph and mud glyph caves.'
A number of mace images were found in the Mississippian sites in the 11th Unnamed case and and Mud Glyph caves including a bird holding maces in its ‘hands’. Animal images including quadrupeds (four-legged animals) and reptiles are rare in open air contexts. Quadrupeds are less rare in caves, with examples found  from 11th, 12th, 45th, 60th and 61st Unnamed caves in the Cumberland Plateau.
The underground images of quadrupeds often depict dog-like creatures known as canids.
Only a small number of open air sites contain glyphs that might represent avimorphs, or bird-like creatures, including an pictograph in the Waterfall Shelter in the south Cumberland region that may be a 'stylised winged creature.'
The researchers continue that in contrast, 'birds are among the most frequent depictions in dark zone cave art.
'Frequently, although not exclusively, birds inside caves are depicted in flight,with their wings extended and flight feathers clearly delineated.
'The common presence of birds inside caves, but not in open air sites, is perplexing if birds are creatures associated with the upper or celestial world, as they so often have been interpreted by south-eastern archaeologists.'
The drawings discovered in Tennessee are believed to represent the Native American's prehistoric world in three dimensions - the upper parts of the art are 'celestial' representing religious beliefs.
The middle sections usually show plants, animals and the world in which they would have live.
Art that sits in the lower parts of the caves and walls represent 'darkness, death and danger'.
For example, the study claims that scorpions are shown as part of the Native American's 'lower world' because they were found deep in the caves and not in the upper 'celestial' areas of the walls.