{"it":{"id":"SAM-ING","kind":"site","sub":"Americas","name":"Ingá Stone (Pedra do Ingá / Itacoatiara do Ingá)","place":"Brazil","lat":-7.325,"lon":-35.586,"date":"undated petroglyphs; no direct date for the engravings (IPHAN nomination)","mat":"gneiss","nfacts":4,"tags":["Americas"],"sum":"In a seasonal river in Paraíba, northeast Brazil, a rock wall about 24 m long and 3.5 m high at its highest is covered in carved symbols; some Brazilian authors give about 50 m long.","why":"One of Brazil's most important rock art sites, protected since 1944 but still unexplained.","src":[450],"nsrc":2,"yt":"What would you need to read them?","rel":["EUR-VIN"],"hook":"Brazil protected the Ingá Stone in 1944, the first rock art site in the country to be listed."},"S":{"450":["Wikipedia: Ingá Stone","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ing%C3%A1_Stone"]},"rec":{"id":"SAM-ING","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"main wall","a":"length / height","v":"46 / 3.8","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Ingá Stone (W18S03)","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Ingá Stone (W18S03)","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ing%C3%A1_Stone&oldid=1362884918","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3655"},{"f":"rock formation","a":"area","v":"~250","u":"m2","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Ingá Stone (W18S03)","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Ingá Stone (W18S03)","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ing%C3%A1_Stone&oldid=1362884918","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3656"},{"f":"site","a":"distance from Joao Pessoa","v":"96","u":"km","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Ingá Stone (W18S03)","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Ingá Stone (W18S03)","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ing%C3%A1_Stone&oldid=1362884918","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3657"},{"f":"glyphs","a":"reading","v":"animals, fruits, Orion/Milky Way (archaeoastronomy hypothesis, Pavia Alemany 1976-86)","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Ingá Stone (W18S03)","yr":"2026","m":"derived","c":"Wikipedia Ingá Stone (W18S03)","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ing%C3%A1_Stone&oldid=1362884918","b":"S","bb":"","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"undeciphered","id":"M3658"}],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[{"a":"largest_block","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"block_mass","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"stone_count","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"slope_face_angle","r":"no published face/slope angle in sources reached (often n/a for non-pyramidal sites)"},{"a":"wall_batter","r":"no published batter survey in free sources"},{"a":"orientation","r":"no published azimuth reached"},{"a":"corner_precision","r":"no published precision survey in free sources"},{"a":"levelness","r":"no published levelling survey in free sources"},{"a":"rock_type","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"geochem_petro","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"quarry_source","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"mortar","r":"dry-stone construction or no binder analysis in free sources"},{"a":"tool_marks","r":"no tool-mark study in free sources reached"},{"a":"dating","r":"no absolute date extracted"},{"a":"coords_elevation","r":"no elevation row yet"},{"a":"volume_labor","r":"no volume/labour estimate in sources opened"},{"a":"construction_phases","r":"no phase sequence in sources opened"},{"a":"lab_date_material","r":"no lab date with dated material in sources opened"},{"a":"hydrology_acoustics","r":"no published hydrology/acoustic measurement in sources opened"},{"a":"magnetic_radiation","r":"no published magnetic/radiation survey found (searched site name + magnetometry/radiation; Wikipedia, Google Scholar snippets)"},{"a":"metals_clamps","r":"no metal/clamp evidence reported in sources opened"},{"a":"excavation_history","r":"no excavation history row yet"},{"a":"artifacts_found","r":"no finds row yet"}],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA060","a":"undeciphered petroglyphs","who":"see anomaly_claims","main":"native petroglyphs (pre-18th c.)","ms":"","st":"no data","n":"undeciphered; no dated or measured anomaly (W18K01)","nl":2}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"undated petroglyphs; attributed to pre-18th c. natives (INTERPRETATION)","dm":"historical/stylistic (INTERPRETATION)","lab":"NO","weak":"no lab date opened","unesco":"","dens":"STUB"},"co":{"lat":"-7.32530","lon":"-35.58570","src":"Wikidata/enwiki (Q3076249)","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"Wikidata/enwiki (Q3076249) vs OSM node 1346338656 (Parque Arqueológico Itacoatiara do Ingá) delta 0.0004 deg","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1346338656"},"src":[{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia Ingá Stone (W18S03)","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ing%C3%A1_Stone&oldid=1362884918"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Ingá Stone","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ing%C3%A1_Stone"},{"id":"VSAM-ING-3","t":"UNESCO World Heritage Centre (tentative list): Itacoatiaras of Ingá River","u":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/6000/"},{"id":"VSAM-ING-4","t":"IPHAN Paraíba: Patrimônio Arqueológico","u":"https://www.gov.br/iphan/pt-br/superintendencias/paraiba/patrimonio-arqueologico"},{"id":null,"t":"Brazil National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN), technical record of the master’s dissertation by Ted Henrique da Silva Cézar, “Sítio Arqueológico Itacoatiaras do Rio Ingá”, defended 1 March 2013 (abstract only)","u":"https://www.gov.br/iphan/pt-br/unidades-especiais/centro-lucio-costa/mestrado-profissional/dissertacoes-1/ficha-tecnica-sitio-arqueologico-itacoatiaras-do-rio-inga-2013"},{"id":null,"t":"Leite Júnior, Antonio Ferreira de Sousa, “Os mitos e as ciências das Itaquatiaras do Ingá”, undergraduate thesis in Religious Studies, Federal University of Paraíba, approved 14 June 2022 (full text read; a review of earlier literature)","u":"https://repositorio.ufpb.br/jspui/bitstream/123456789/31837/1/AFSLJ12092024.pdf"},{"id":null,"t":"Pavía Alemany, Francisco, “La itacoatiara de Ingá. Un registro astronómico”, Huygens no. 53, 2005, Agrupació Astronòmica de la Safor (proponent’s own summary of his 1986 hypothesis)","u":"http://www.astrosafor.net/Huygens/2005/53/Itacoatiara.htm"}],"sum":"# The Ingá Stone: A Riverbed Wall of Signs in Northeast Brazil\n\nOn the upper edge of the Ingá Stone, above the busiest carvings, there is a large circle drawn as a spiral. An engraved line runs through it in the shape of an arrow, and the arrow points west. Brazil's own description of the site, written for UNESCO, picks this figure out by name. It does not say what it means. Nobody can, and that is the condition of the whole rock.\n\n## Where it is and why it matters\n\nThe Itacoatiaras of the Ingá River lie in the rural municipality of Ingá, in the state of Paraíba in northeast Brazil. The word itacoatiara comes from Tupi and means writing or drawing on stone. In Brazil it has become the general word for a rock engraving. The country is dry here. The UNESCO submission places the site in the Depressão Sertaneja, a semi-arid zone of thorny Caatinga scrub, with rain falling between November and April and not much of it. The river is seasonal, and the carved rock sits in its bed.\n\nIPHAN, Brazil's national heritage institute, protected the site on 29 May 1944. It was the first rock art monument protected in Brazil, and the submission says it is still the only one recognised for its artistic content as well as its historical importance. Brazil placed it on its UNESCO Tentative List on 30 January 2015 under criteria (i) and (iii). The archaeologist Gabriela Martin called it, in 2008, the most famous rock engraving in Brazil, and IPHAN's Paraíba office calls it one of the country's most important archaeological sites.\n\n## The rock and its panels\n\nThe protected area covers about 40 hectares of rocky ground along the river. Its heart is a single outcrop, known locally as the Pedra do Ingá. According to the submission, it forms a wall about 24 m long and 3.5 m high at its highest point. Other figures are in circulation. Wikipedia gives a main wall 46 m long by 3.8 m high, in a formation covering about 250 square metres. A 2022 thesis from the Federal University of Paraíba lists Brazilian authors who give about 50 m long and three to almost four metres high, alongside a team that gives about 24 m by 2.8 m. The researcher Francisco Pavía Alemany described the carved face as about 25 by 3 m. Much depends on where one decides the wall ends. The submission calls the rock granitic, while Wikipedia and the thesis describe it as gneiss.\n\nThe engravings fall into three main panels. The vertical panel is the most visible and most studied. It runs 17.8 m and stands between 1.1 and 2.5 m high. Its engravings are very varied, with few repeats, and they fill almost the whole face. Along its top runs a horizontal line of small cup-shaped hollows.\n\nIn front of it, on the flat slab of the riverbed, lies the lower horizontal panel, 12.6 m by 13.8 m. Its signs are more spread out and repeat more often. The submission draws attention to scattered cup-shaped forms with lines coming out of them, which it says resemble stars. Above the row of hollows sits the upper horizontal panel, 13 m by 1.9 m, with fewer and shallower carvings. That is where the spiral with its westward arrow is found.\n\nThe technique is consistent. The carvers pecked the outline into the stone and then polished the grooves, which average 3 cm wide and between 0.5 and 7 mm deep. Most designs are not figures at all but abstract signs, and some still hold traces of pigment. Smaller engravings, not yet closely studied, continue for about 100 m along the river.\n\n## What archaeology has found\n\nThe origin of the inscriptions is still unknown, the submission states. What research has found is the setting around them: stone tool workshops nearby, and short-stay camps tied to the main site, used from about 10,000 BC to about AD 1,400. The submission suggests the place may have served as a sacred site for those prehistoric populations. It gives no direct date for the engravings themselves, and a span of more than eleven thousand years leaves plenty of room. Wikipedia repeats a view that the carvings were made by Indigenous people who lived in the area until the 18th century, without dating evidence.\n\nArchaeologists group river engravings like these in what is called the Itacoatiara tradition, and the submission quotes André Prous placing Ingá among its most spectacular sites. Gabriela Martin rejected readings of the signs as Phoenician letters or Egyptian hieroglyphs, and saw Paraíba's petroglyphs as abstract work by farming peoples with complex beliefs, as the 2022 thesis summarises her.\n\nEuropeans noted rock markings in Paraíba as early as the late 16th century, during expeditions led by Feliciano Coelho de Carvalho. The Diálogos das Grandezas do Brasil, attributed to Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão and written between 1590 and 1618, is among those early references. In 1757 Domingos Monteiro da Rocha recorded the locality while surveying Paraíba, according to the thesis.\n\n## The row of hollows and the sun\n\nThe most testable idea about Ingá is also the most careful one. In 1976 the Spanish engineer Francisco Pavía Alemany and his wife, Joaquina Ivars Martí, made a stereo photographic record of the carvings. He then began a mathematical study, first published by the Instituto de Arqueologia Brasileira in 1986.\n\nHe counted 117 small hollows along the top of the vertical panel, each about 5 cm across and 2 cm deep. Another writer counted 114 and wondered if they formed a lunar calendar. Pavía Alemany proposed a solar one. In his model, a pole 1.90 m tall set at one point in the riverbed would throw the shadow of the first sunrise light onto the first hollow at the December solstice, and then along the row as the year turns. With the pole in his second position, he reported that hollows and shadows matched to within about a day over some 250 days, from mid August to late April. He put the small mismatches down to the limits of his own measurements.\n\nThe pole itself has left no trace. Pavía Alemany noted that the spot is bare, sloping rock where no excavation is possible. He later turned to the star-like signs, reading groups of them as constellations, and a 2006 compendium of archaeoastronomy edited by the Egyptologist José Lull included his study of both the hollows and the \"constellations\". Wikipedia's summary mentions readings of Orion and the Milky Way among the figures. None of this is proven, but it can be checked on the rock itself.\n\n## The louder theories\n\nOther readings have weaker footing. A supposed Phoenician inscription from Paraíba, first reported in 1872, was later shown to be a fraud and was never the Ingá carving at all, the thesis records. Bernardo Ramos claimed in 1939 to read Greek planet names on the stone. In the 1970s Erich von Däniken printed a photograph of it as evidence of visitors from space.\n\nA 2013 IPHAN dissertation by Ted Henrique da Silva Cézar made drawn, photographic and video records of the panels and of the stone and pottery lying on the surface. It also observed that there was still no scholarly work treating the site as heritage, and that this gap had let fanciful claims become the most widely shared information about it. Wikipedia adds that the rock is at constant risk from vandals.\n\n## Related places\n\nOther rock art sites, from desert engravings to a solar enclosure in Germany, raise the same question of whether early peoples tied carved stone to the turning year.\n\n## The rock at first light\n\nPicture the dry season, the river gone to pools, the slab of the lower panel bare and pale. The sun comes up over the scrub, and as the low light reaches the carved face it fills every polished groove with shadow so that signs nobody can read stand out sharp and black. Along the top edge, the little row of hollows waits in a line. Above them, the spiral with its arrow points west, toward where that same sun will go down.","qs":["What did Brazil's first peoples know about the sky?","Why carve the densest panel on a riverbank?","What would it take to date the engravings?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Itacoatiaras_de_Ing%C3%A1_-_Ing%C3%A1_Para%C3%ADba_Brasil.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Itacoatiaras_de_Ing%C3%A1_-_Ing%C3%A1_Para%C3%ADba_Brasil.jpg","title":"Itacoatiaras de Ingá - Ingá Paraíba Brasil.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Lucia Barreiros da Silva","cap":"Inscrições rupestres."},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8b/Pedra_do_Ing%C3%A1_-_Para%C3%ADba_-_Brasil_-_panoramio.jpg/1280px-Pedra_do_Ing%C3%A1_-_Para%C3%ADba_-_Brasil_-_panoramio.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pedra_do_Ing%C3%A1_-_Para%C3%ADba_-_Brasil_-_panoramio.jpg","title":"Pedra do Ingá - Paraíba - Brasil - panoramio.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Zelma Brito","cap":"Pedra do Ingá - Paraíba - Brasil"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"46","u":"m","h":"A single rock wall covered with carvings","s":[179]},{"v":"Gneiss","h":"Made of","s":[179]}],"hs":{"179":["Wikipedia: Ingá Stone (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ing%C3%A1_Stone"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/SAM-ING.webp","w":800,"h":600,"o":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Itacoatiaras_de_Ing%C3%A1_-_Ing%C3%A1_Para%C3%ADba_Brasil.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled"}}