Camp site reveals 15,800-year-old engravings of fish trapping

The Ice Age camp site of Gönnersdorf on the banks of the Rhine has revealed a groundbreaking discovery that sheds new light on early fishing practices. New imaging methods have allowed researchers to see intricate engravings of fish on ancient schist plaquettes, accompanied by grid-like patterns that are interpreted as depictions of fishing nets or traps.

Led by Monrepos, a department of the Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie, and Durham University, this research not only deepens our understanding of Paleolithic diets but also suggests that fishing may have held symbolic significance within the Late Upper Paleolithic period (ca 20,000–14,500 years ago).

The work is published in the journal PLOS ONE.

These findings expand the known repertoire of Ice Age art and offer remarkable insights into the symbolic and social practices of early hunter-gatherer societies.

The Ice Age camp site of Gönnersdorf on the bank of the Rhine contains some of Europe’s richest ancient artistic treasures—hundreds of small, flat plaquettes of schist with engraved images of prey animals, including wild horses, woolly rhinos, reindeer and mammoth which were critical to the survival of the Late Upper Paleolithic group of humans who occupied the camp 15,800 years ago.

In addition to these highly detailed images, several hundred engravings of highly stylized human females have made the site world-famous. It has now also yielded the earliest known evidence about our ancestors’ methods of fishing.

An interdisciplinary collaboration between Durham University’s Departments of Archaeology and Psychology and the MONREPOS Archaeological Research Center and Museum for Human Behavioral Evolution (a department of the Leibniz Zentrum für Archäologie (LEIZA) in Germany), have been researching the uses and function of art on the Gönnersdorf plaquettes in the daily lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers.

The research team combines expertise from archaeology and visual psychology, utilizing advanced imaging techniques, particularly Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), to explore the often-overlooked influence of human’s visual abilities in the nature and use of art in household environments of long ago.

Through studying the nature of the cut-marks forming the engravings, the research is beginning to identify individual artists and their particular “styles.”

In addition, the shapes of the plaquettes and the patterns of natural ridges and cracks in their surfaces may have influenced what would be depicted and where through a process called pareidolia—where the brain interprets natural shapes such as those of the plaquettes as meaningful things, much as we often see faces in clouds.

A surprising bonus to the research was the discovery for the first time of several intricate scenes of fish covered with grid-like patterns, which are best interpreted as representations of fishing nets or traps. Although it is known that fish formed part of the diet of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers at the time, until now, no evidence existed as to how fish were caught.

The Gönnersdorf images constitute the earliest known depictions of net or trap fishing in European prehistory, and serve to remind us that technologies that only rarely survive in the archaeological record may have much older roots than commonly assumed.

The engravings also reveal that fishing had been integrated into symbolic and social practices, expanding the known repertoire of depictions in Ice Age art and revealing that practices, as well as animals, were artistic themes.