Maltravieso. A hands sanctuary in Extremadura

Abstract

The project of investigation carried out in the cave of Maltravieso has not only yielded a notable increase in the inventory of artistic depictions -hands, zoomorphs and ideomorphs- that are known in the cave, but has also produced some new information with regard to the chronological framework of the production of the various depictions, their phases'of execution, the techniques used in creating the figures, and the typology of the motifs. Another important contribution of our work has been the observation that mutilations of these hands do not exist. The supposed amputations, which have been commented on widely in the traditional literature, are nothing of the kind-they are simply an obscuring of the little finger, with the same pigment as was used to make the hand stencil.