On a karst plateau on the border of Slovenia and Italy, researchers have found evidence of large-scale Stone Age buildings that once served as hunting traps. The prehistoric hunting facilities were probably built there in the Stone Age to corner herds of wild animals. These could be the westernmost hunting traps of this type and time. What did they look like and how did they work?
In prehistoric Europe, people were still skilled hunters. Among other things, they fed on animals they had killed themselves and developed sophisticated hunting weapons and hunting techniques for this purpose. It is known from bone finds and rock paintings that they also hunted as a team and drove herds of bison, horses, elk and reindeer together. They took advantage of the natural course of rocks and cliffs. It was still unclear whether and when they specifically built traps for this purpose.
A new find by archaeologists now provides information about this. Dimitrij Mlekuž Vrhovnik from the University of Ljubljana and Tomaž Fabec from the Institute for the Protection of Slovenia’s Cultural Heritage used laser scanning to survey the karst landscape in Slovenia and Italy – in the Adriatic hinterland on the Gulf of Trieste – from the air and search for unnatural, man-made structures that could once have been built for hunting.
Monumental hunting facilities
They came across the remains of four monumental complexes, the largest of which stretched over several kilometers. The buildings consisted of massive dry stone walls made of local limestone, which were around 1.50 to 2 meters wide but only around 50 centimeters high. These low walls were hundreds of meters long and ran over the passes and saddles of the hill range. The walls converged in a funnel shape and ended at a natural cliff or artificial pit, as the two researchers report. At the end of the structures there was a stone fence, a ledge of a sinkhole or a rock wall that framed a pit or recessed area of around 25 square meters.
Prehistoric people likely used these walls to guide prey animals in a direction, corner them and either trap or kill them at the edge or pit, archaeologists explain. This allowed hunters to divert individual animals or entire herds from their natural path. These probably included native deer, roe deer, wild boar or other hoofed animals.
Similar buildings existed in the Neolithic period in Southwest Asia, the Middle East, Arabia and North Africa, as the team reports with reference to previous studies. The remains of the stone walls in the barren desert landscape can often still be clearly seen on aerial photographs and satellite images. This shows that the use of such systems was once widespread. The hunting traps now discovered on the Adriatic could be among the westernmost of all prehistoric hunting complexes of this type. Until now, such hunting facilities were only known from dry areas, where gazelles, saiga and other wild animals were hunted. The walls now discovered in southern Europe, on the other hand, are now overgrown and originally stood in a rather damp landscape that was flooded at times and significantly changed by erosion.
Stone Age walls
But when exactly were these hunting traps built? To find out, the researchers partially excavated the systems. They found charcoal fragments, a flint blade and fired clay. These relics date from more recent periods, from the Late Bronze Age to the Roman period, as radiocarbon dating has revealed. However, based on the sediments and sites, Vrhovnik and Fabec suspect that these materials were only deposited there long after the hunting traps were no longer used and had already been eroded and reclaimed by nature. The archaeologists suspect that the traps themselves were probably built and used much earlier – in the Neolithic or Mesolithic period, similar to the stone buildings in the dry regions of the world.
The size of the facilities and their placement in the landscape suggest that large-scale communal hunting strategies also existed in prehistoric Europe. Back then, a single person would have needed around 5,000 hours to build the complex walls in strategic locations. This suggests that the Stone Age hunters coordinated well during the strenuous construction and worked as a team in order to later hunt together and thus ensure their survival, according to the researchers.
Source: Dimitrij Mlekuž Vrhovnik (University of Ljubljana) et al.; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, doi: 10.1073/pnas.2511908122