Oops. The article runs off the rails where it reaches the subheading:

Science Doesn't Provide the Answer People Expect

Beyond that point, it starts discussing the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin, NOT Oviedo.

I guess we all mistakes.

“There is a huge number of such faces in swiss mountains. If you see a face it normaly indicates a cave or a shelter of stone age people is beyond. Or one can say safely, where there is an stone age cave there is one or more faces above them.”

OK, that’s the gut feeling dispensed with. Can we now move on to the science please, like having at least a rough idea where each of your habitable caves are in relation to a “face”, whether in Bulgaria or Switzerland, in order to be convinced of a cause-and-effect relationship?

There are other issues to be addressed too, like how do you hew a mountainside when you are still waiting for the Bronze or Iron Age to be invented? Have you tried chipping at rock with soft copper or a brittle flint?

Then there’s the question as to why anyone living in a remote cave in a wild and lawless mountain region would choose to advertise their presence with a giant face (a man-made one especially) that was visible from afar?

Yes, each of the 3 hares seems to have two ears, when it’s really only one each. But the artistic cleverness does not stop there. The three ears form a triangle at the centre of the picture, almost as if that had been the original artist’s aim in the first instance – to create a central focus from 3 identical but unlikely subjects.

Religious symbolism of some kind? Maybe. But note how the whole thing, when mounted in the circle as shown, creates a kind of eye, with the central triangle of ears being its pupil.

Maybe it had religious symbolism, maybe not, possibly having some kind of significance to pre-Christian pagans.

Evil eye? Or simply an up-market wagon wheel, one in which each hare serves as a load-bearing spoke?

Regardless of deeper explanation, all highly tendentious , it’s exceedingly clever – pure artistic genius one might say.

Stumbled acros this site and have been hooked for a while now. Name is Neil, from Ireland.Folklore from western europe is my main interest and relating it to Irish folklore. But there is some fascinating reading here on this site.

The source of the article is given as "Archaeology in Bulgaria" with a link. where we read:

"It is possible that the shrine had an entire gallery of human faces carved out of the rocks but not all of them have been preserved.

The facts that they are located high up on the rocks, and that at least one of them is visible only from a certain angle, are the reasons they, and, respectively, the entire Chalcolithic shrine, have remained unnoticed in modern times, until now"

That ol' eye of faith was certainly working overtime....

Thanks STKOS

Pleased to see that at least one other reader shares my jaundiced view of this so-called "archaeology". It's nothing of the sort, of course, It's an egregious instance of blinkered confirmation bias - seeing only what one wants to see.

I've seen several articles questioning the reason for the "cupmarks" at various petroglyph sites. The cupmarks are not meant as any sort of symbolism, but rather are the mortar portion of a mortar/pestle. (The pestle typically is missing.) There are hundreds of similar stones around the North American plains where natives sat for centuries at various camps grinding maize (and other materials) on similar large stones.

Typically, a group of women would congregate with their pestles and grain at the grindstone in the morning, and gossip while they processed the grain. Notice that most of the cups have a small ledge where one would kneel or sit sideways while grinding away. More mortars mean more women can grind, and of course not all pestles are made the same, which results in slight variations in the cupmarks.

Grain is not the only thing ground in prehistory, of course. Even the neanderthals used oak bark to tan hides, and tree nut hulls are rich sources of tannin, which may account for the black stains. Perhaps the tannin bearing material was charred and later fragmented to facilitate easier grinding. Tannin stains can last seemingly forever. Of course, someone could have come along give or take a 1000 years, and burned pine resin in the cups as well for whatever reason.

How do professional archaeologists set about establishing rigorously that features alleged to be face-like have been carved by ancient folk, as distinct from natural processes? There isn't the possibility in this instance of finding cast-off tools, given these are said to have been stone, not metal, and one would have thought a stone used to chip away rock would look much like any other bit of rock. Proof positive, or nearly so, would come from finding a face that had TWO very similar size eyes that were symmetrically located either side of a nose, and thus unlikely to be an accident of nature, but we're told the 'faces' are all profiles, needing only one "eye", with greater risk one is dealing with pareidolia, read fanciful interpretation. Maybe I'm missing something...

beware (or caution) vampire