Pásztor Emília (szerk.): Sámánizmus és természethit régen és ma - Bajai dolgozatok 23. (Baja, 2019)
Sergio Poggianella: A szakrális táj. A Dalmeri menedék sámánja
A Sacred Landscape. The Shaman of the Dalmeri Shelter Devereaux, at a more abstract level, each of these disciplines belongs to both 'psychology' and to 'sociology'. The interaction among objects and subjects occurs at the various physical and psychic levels in which senses and emotions play a determining role, as to the cultural geographies where they live and operate or have lived and operated the diverse human groups. The meanings and values of material objects can be found in the geography of social contexts where the objects were created. The Dalmeri Shelter painted stones have the great advantage of being mobile art from a stratigraphic excavation, while most Upper Palaeolithic art objects, save wall painting, comes from non-stratigraphic sites16. The de facto decontestualisation of mobile art seriously reduces and compromises the potential data and information that archaeological research, in its multidisciplinary relationship with other sciences, can offer us on the relations that they had with the environment, with the individuals who discovered, created and used them, functionally, ritually and symbolically. The archaeological documentation of the Dalmeri Shelter stratigraphic excavation, still ongoing, offers us time by time an extraordinary quantity of multidisciplinary information that can become useful instruments for reading and interpreting the behaviour and the conceptions, artistic, spiritual and cosmogonic, of the Epigravettian human groups that used the Shelter. The archeo-zoological analysis lets us deduce that in the Dalmeri Shelter, Epigravettian human groups met on a seasonal basis, between summer and autumn, to hunt roe deer, deer, chamois, and sometimes bear and badger. But the more coveted prey was Ibex, corresponding to about 90% of the animal remains found in situ. Birds were also hunted, and there was active fishing and gathering. The strata have shown two anthropic levels: carbon 14 dating the first and oldest level shows an age of 13.200 cal BP and coincides with deposition of 267 stones found, painted with red ochre; the second, dated at 13.000 cal BP, shows some hearths and the sub-circular structure of a hut (Fig. 1). New strata excavation campaigns between 2006 and 2009 in the area outside the rock overhang have brought to light three circular ditches (Fig. 2) containing intentional deposits "of probable ritual origin"17, composed essentially of parts of ibex skulls and horns, scrapers and stones painted in ochre. In particular: "the oval ditch named FI, is distinguished by the quantity of anthropic material found there and by the complexity of the sequence of fill levels; the topmost contained ibex horn placed around some stones, one painted red ochre"18. Who can have selected, treated, managed and placed the painted stones and the objects found in the three ditches at the Dalmeri Shelter? What functions and powers, material, spatial and spiritual, were attributed to them? To what symbolic system did they refer? Were they propitiatory objects 213
