The Amazônia Legal (Legal Amazon), in Brazil, is the fo-cus of several researches ranging from soil, vegetation, and forest products studies to researches on the Amazon’s fauna and flora. Except for studies on caves in the Carajas iron formations (Pará) and studies on Venezuelans Tepu-is quartzite cavities, little has been published about the work done by speleologists in carbonate and sandstone cavities in the region.Therefore, this study has intents of being an aca-demic record of the Caverna das mãos. Local dwellers already knew the cave, mainly due to the dedication of Mrs. Erismar de Souza Silva, who, for decades, has vis-ited such natural underground cavities. From 2011, Mot-ta, a member of the Sociedade Brasileira de Espeleologia(SBE-Brazilian Society of Speleology) began systemati-cally recording these findings. Until the end of this work, the Brazilian national cave record by SBE reached 616 cavities. Among these, 72 were documented by Motta in the municipality of Rurópolis, and only 6 contemplated significant rock art records. Thus, field missions aimed at identifying and documenting cave painting in six sandstone caves, as fol-lows: Caverna jatobá (PA-326), Caverna das mãos (PA-329), Caverna Borboleta Azul (PA-332), Caverna fernan-da Caroline (cave of the 110/PA-336), Caverna Caximbão(PA-431), and Caverna das damas (PA-466). Even with this exploratory study of the caves, one might argue that the sites visited have different characteristics from those reported by Pereira (2003) being, at first, the only ones in the region. The Caverna das mãos shall be highlighted for its cave paintings in the aphotic zone, which is rare, if not the only one, in Brazil.
The caves are located within the boundaries of the mu-nicipality of Rurópolis, near the municipalities of Aveiro and Itaiatuba in the state of Pará. According to Vasquez et al. (2008), the regional geology is represented by Paleozoic rocks covered by areas of dense rainforest. On a lo-cal scale, in general, the region shows sandstone, shale, and siltstone. Access to the study field goes from Belém towards Santarém, then, either by air, land or river, to Itaituba. Set in the Amazon basin, the main regional drainage is the Tapajós River, tributary of the right bank of the Amazon River.
Travassos LEP, Rodrigues BD, Schwertz da MottaAR. Caverna Das Mãos: An example of dark zone rock art in Brazil. AC [Internet]. 2012Dec.15 [cited 2021Aug.21];41(2-3). Available from: https://ojs.zrc-sazu.si/carsologica/article/view/567