Dating the Palaeolithic Cave Art of the Iberian Peninsular by Uranium-Seires

洞穴艺术是为数不多的有关已知的最早艺术家的信仰体系和审美能力的考古信息来源之一，他们是欧洲旧石器时代晚期的狩猎-采集者。它在定义文化群体和传承方面起到了至关重要的作用，近年来已被纳入对气候变化的文化反应的讨论中。虽然它的具体含义可能会一直备受争议，但它无疑是通向文化历史的最亲密的窗口之一。然而，年代上的不确定性严重阻碍了我们对岩石艺术几乎所有方面的理解，特别是它与上更新世不稳定的气候和上旧石器时代记录的其他方面的关系。该项目将通过为旧石器时代洞穴壁画和版画的核心区域之一--伊比利亚半岛--制作最大的辐射测年语料库来纠正这种情况。这些结果将大大提高我们对艺术品的分布和随时间变化的理解，并将其与气候背景联系起来。放射性碳已经被用来为岩石艺术中使用的有机颜料提供日期，但许多结果仍然存在争议。这是因为有机颜料可能会受到洞穴壁上更古老的石灰岩的污染，或者是因为用于制造黑色颜料的木炭本身在制作艺术品时已经很旧了。目前还不能确定这件艺术品是出现在32000年前还是18000年前。此外，放射性碳只能测定碳基颜料的年代，早期岩画中的大多数要么是没有颜料的版画，要么是使用了不适合测定年代的矿物颜料，如红色赭石。然而，这些雕刻和绘画中的一些直接位于类似石笋和钟乳石的碳酸钙沉积物上，或者被碳酸钙沉积物覆盖。这些结壳形成的日期可以通过铀系列测年来确定，这是一种测量铀与其放射性衰变产物钍的比率的技术。因此，可以计算出这项艺术的最小或最大年龄，并通过测量足够多的不同实例，可以建立不同风格发展和传播的年表。这些数据将为我们了解伊比利亚的岩石艺术最早出现的方式和时间，以及它与法国南部和欧洲其他地区类似艺术的关系提供基础。我们将调查岩石艺术的出现和随后的强化是否与旧石器时代晚期发生的快速气候变化有关。海洋沉积物和冰芯揭示了在最后一次冰盛期之前，RAIPD从暖期过渡到冷期的记录。我们将把岩石艺术的频率和日期与这些气候记录进行比较，以检验这样一种假设，即洞穴中艺术表现的加强是对气候变化的社会反应。

Cave art is one of the few sources of archaeological information about the belief systems and aesthetic abilities of the earliest known artists, the hunter-gatherers of the European Upper Palaeolithic. It has been critical in defining cultural groupings and successions, and in recent years has been incorporated into discussions of cultural responses to climate change. While its specific meaning will probably always remain hotly debated, it is undoubtedly one of the most intimate windows to the cultural past. However, chronological uncertainty seriously hampers our understanding of nearly all aspects of rock art, especially its relationship to the unstable climate of the Upper Pleistocene and to the rest of the Upper Palaeolithic record. This project will redress this situation by producing one of the largest corpuses of radiometric dates for one of the core regions of Palaeolithic cave paintings and engravings, the Iberian Peninsula. The results will considerably improve our understanding of the distribution and changes over time of the art and relate this to the climatic background. Radiocarbon has been used to provide dates for the organic pigments used in rock art, but many of the results remain controversial. This is because organic pigments may become contaminated by the much older limestone of the walls of caves, or because the charcoal used to make a black pigment was itself old at the time the art was made. At present it is still not certain if the art appears around 32,000 or 18,000 years ago. Furthermore, radiocarbon can only date carbon based pigments, and the majority of early rock paintings are either engravings with no pigments, or use mineral pigments such as red ochre that is unsuitable for dating. However, some of these engravings and paintings are directly on, or are overlain by, calcium carbonate deposits similar to stalagmites and stalactites. The date at which these crusts formed can be determined by uranium-series dating, a technique that measures the ratio of uranium to its radioactive decay product thorium. Thus a minimum or maximum age can be calculated for the art, and by measuring enough different examples a chronology for the development and spread of different styles can be built up. This data will provide the basis by which we will understand how and when rock art first came about in Iberia, and its relationship to similar art in Southern France and the rest of Europe. We will investigate whether the appearance and subsequent intensification of rock art is related to rapid climatic change that occurs in the Late Upper Palaeolithic. Records of raipd transitions from warm to cold periods in the run up to the last glacial maximum have been revealed by marine sediment and ice cores. We will compare the frequency and date of the rock art to these climatic records to test the hypothesis that the intensification of artistic expression in caves was a social response to a changing climate.