Loltun Cave

Loltun Cave is a cave in the Yucatán, approximately 7 km (4.3 mi) south of Oxkutzcab. The cave contains paintings attributed to the Maya civilization from the Late Preclassic Era or even older. The name is Mayan for "Flower Stone" ("Lol-Tun").[1]

History

This cave is about two kilometers in length. Inside Loltún there is evidence that confirms human occupation such as recovered bones of mammoth, bison, cats, and deer remains from the pleistocene. On the walls you can observe natural formations and paintings, hand painted with representations of the technique of negative human faces painted on the walls, sculptural representations, representations of animals and some geometric shapes. Tools were also recovered.

cave paintings from Lol-Tun, Yucatán

The prehispanic Maya also used the cave as shelter and used to extract the clay to make their tools. The tour offers visits to the galleries and natural formations known locally as the room of musical columns, a vault known as the cathedral, jaltunes, Grand Canyon, corn cob, the infant, black hand paintings, the room of stalactites and trenches. The Huechil cavity was excavated where they found remains of extinct fauna such as mammoth bones and vegetation different from today. The occupation in Loltún goes back more than 10,000 years and served as a hiding place during the caste war.

Lol-Tun, Yucatán

Location

It is located 110 kilometers southwest of Mérida. It is 7 km south of the town of Oxkutzcab.

gollark: You should consider it. It's quite cool.
gollark: Consider GPT-3, however.
gollark: And deconstructing it probably would have been better, yes, but for whatever reason I didn't.
gollark: It's osmarks, sorry.
gollark: I got banned on the July server by the automoderator after trying to use an artillery thing to get rid of a very annoying globally-playing music system. I'd like to be unbanned.

See also

References
  1. "MayanRoutes.com". Retrieved 2007-05-01.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.