Cueva de las Manos
cave with cave paintings in Santa Cruz, Argentina
Cueva de las Manos (Spanish for Cave of the Hands or Cave of Hands) is a cave and complex of rock art sites in the province of Santa Cruz, Argentina, 163 km (101 mi) south of the town of Perito Moreno. It is named for the hundreds of paintings of hands stenciled, in multiple collages, on the rock walls. The art was created in several waves between 7,300 BC and AD 700, during the Archaic period of pre-Columbian South America. The age of the paintings was calculated from the remains of bone pipes used for spraying the paint on the wall of the cave to create the artwork, radiocarbon dating of the artwork, and stratigraphic dating.
The site is considered by some scholars to be the best material evidence of early South American hunter-gatherer groups. Argentine surveyor and archaeologist Carlos J. Gradin and his team conducted the most important research on the site in 1964, when they began excavating sites during a 30-year study of cave art in and around Cueva de las Manos. The site is a National Historic Monument in Argentina and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Location
Cueva de las Manos refers to both the main site of the cave and the surrounding complex of rock art sites that includes it. The cave lies at the base of a stepped cliff in the Pinturas River Canyon, in the upper part of the Deseado River basin, in an isolated part of Patagonia. It is about 165 km (103 mi) south of Perito Moreno, a town in northwest Santa Cruz Province, Argentina.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q223385. VIAF identifies the subject as 315529721. The Library of Congress control number is sh2005005294. Authority coordinates are -47.150, -70.667. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1964.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cueva de las Manos” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.