Submitted by coldrum --
A University of Central Arkansas professor said Thursday that he has discovered an ancient rock painting at an Inca burial site in the Peruvian Andes and believes the work could be anywhere from 500 to 2,000 years old.
Tens of thousands of tourists each year pass the nearly 50-foot rock at Machu Picchu, a site scientists have studied for nearly a century. But apparently no one has paid attention to the barely visible painting, said Reinaldo "Dito" Morales Jr., assistant professor of art history.
Morales, 45, first saw the rock art in 2000 when he was a graduate student. At the time, he said, "I figured [that] this place is so famous, surely everyone knows about it."
But after he later obtained funding to return to Peru in December 2008, he began digging into the area's art history.
"I've been scouring every journal, book, any kind of publication that discusses Machu Picchu or the rock art there" and haven't found even a mention of this work, he said.
The black painting - likely done with charcoal or the mineral manganese - is partly obscured by a calcium deposit, which Morales said could take hundreds of years or longer to form. No one really knows what the painting depicts or who created it.
But when a drawing of it is su- perimposed upon a photograph Morales took, the painting appears to be "some kind of animal imagery," said James Farmer, an associate professor and chairman of the art history department at Virginia Commonwealth University, where Morales did his doctoral dissertation.
Farmer, who has traveled to Peru since the discovery and saw the drawing, said, "Someone probably has seen this [painting in the past], but ... what is significant ... is that no one has ever really paid much attention to it if, in fact, they had seen it. ... Apparently, [Morales is] the first modern person who certainly noticed it and brought it to the attention of anybody.
"It's very easy to miss," Farmer said. "Even knowing where it was, I had to go up there and look for it. It doesn't jump out at you. It's hard to locate, and it's hard to see."
Art historians already knew of engravings at Machu Picchu. But Morales said, "This is the very first painting ever documented at Machu Picchu."
Morales said he's convinced the image is not of Incan origin "because Incan art is typically dominated by rectilinear geometric patterns, whereas this painting is primarily curvilinear." Farmer said the painting "stylistically looks rather similar to other rock-art traditions ... that we know are much earlier.
For more, see the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.
Something is not right. This message is just to keep things from messing up down the road