The Deer Cave ( - literally: Grotto of the stags) is a natural cave at the Salento coast near the town of Porto Badisco, around south of Otranto in Apulia, Italy. Unknown before 1970, it came to immediate international attention after the discovery of its impressive, innovative and enigmatic complex galleries of prehistoric parietal wall paintings.
This complex of caves was discovered during an ongoing routine exploration of the local territory on February 1, 1970 by a team of speleologists of the Salento Speleological Group "Pasquale de Laurentiis" from Maglie. It was initially named Cave of Aeneas (Grotta di Enea) in reference to Virgil's Aeneid in which the Trojan hero Aeneas first landed in Italy precisely in Porto Badisco. The current name alludes to the omnipresence and significance of deer depictions among the cave's galleries. The location was soon closed to the public in order to not to disrupt the original environmental conditions essential for the conservation of the paintings. Access to the cave remains restricted to authorized personnel and researchers only.
Overview
The Grotta dei Cervi, the Grotta Romanelli and the Grotta delle Veneri are all located in the coastal Karst formations on the Salento peninsula in southern Apulia. Deemed to constitute a notable local cultural continuity of Paleolithic and Neolithic human occupation, the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities of Apulia formally submitted for the induction into the World Heritage List in 2006 and has received UNESCO's official notice and recognition as Karstic caves in prehistoric Apulia.
Grotta dei Cervi is situated on the flank of a small valley opening to Porto Badisco. Exploration of the site is incomplete, however there are two entries and three main corridors (halls, galleries) with a combined length of more than . Hundreds of paintings and an estimated 3000 individual pictograms, executed in black (bat guano) and red (ochre) paint, are concentrated in groups in three galleries over a total distance of along the "wavy, milk colored" limestone walls.
The first corridor is about long and splits into two branches. At the northern end of one of these two human skeletons with heads missing were found. The second corridor is rich in paintings and can be accessed by a tunnel passage via the first corridor. This corridor widens towards the end with access to two successive rooms. In the middle of the corridor a pond has formed fed by dripping water. The section was used as deposit or storage site for bat guano, collected exclusively from inside the cave complex. The third corridor is also around long and its interior is accessible via the second hall through a very low opening.
Two novel species of Agromyces bacteria, Agromyces salentinus and Agromyces neolithicus, were identified from soil samples taken from outside and inside the cave, respectively.
3D documentation
In response to the pending problem of public access restriction to the site the Lecce provincial government approved the "Memorandum of Understanding for the creation and processing of three-dimensional virtual image reconstruction of the prehistoric paintings of the Cave of Porto Badisco and other related activities". A joint team of the National Research Council Canada and the University of Salento was granted access and has produced a 3D documentation of the cave's interior. Two sets of high resolution and detailed three-dimensional acquisitions along with two-dimensional images were captured in 2005 and 2009 respectively. More than 100 gigabytes of data were collected - including 35 GB of data on the 3D structure and 65 digital photographs. A high resolution 3D virtual tour is commercially available on DVD.
Interpretation
Critical statements have amounted to a near total consensus on the high degree of cultural and historical significance and the exceptional artistic quality of the cave's art. However, Paolo Graziosi's work The prehistoric paintings in the caves of Porto Badisco (1980) remains the only scientific on-site documentation of the paintings. Only very few conclusive interpretations that substantiate claims of historical significance are publicly available. Galleries and blogs of the cave's images where amateurs engage in informal interpretation can be found on the internet. One of the most famous commented pictographs is the "dancing God", or possibly a dancing sorcerer.
Publications
Maria Laura Leone's line of interpretation of the cave's artwork (with reference to Paolo Graziosi's 1980 monograph) in her 2009 publication: The Phosphenic Deer Cave of Badisco - Art and Myth of the Shadows in Depth (abridged version): Direct Link