Mediterranean Basin of the Iberian Peninsula

In the Mediterranean Basin of the Iberian Peninsula our fieldwork focuses on the archaeoacoustic characterisation of sites and landscapes with Levantine rock art. Discovered for academic archaeology in the first decade of the 20th century and inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1998, Levantine rock art is one of the most impressive cultural manifestations of European prehistory. The almost 800 shelters with this type of visual representations are distributed over a mountainous territory of approximately 600 x 250 km located in eastern Spain. The images depict scenes of hunting, food gathering, dances, war conflicts and rituals. They are composed of realistic-stylised human figures and naturalistic representations of animals. Due to a lack of direct dates, the chronocultural affiliation of Levantine art is the subject of intense debates. For some scholars, the images would have been produced by Epipaleolithic/Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, while for other specialists, the authors of this art would be Neolithic agropastoral communities.