Sculptured Serpents Provide a Peek at Mysterious Ukrainian Rock Art and a Forgotten Stone Age Snake Culture

Two curiously shaped ‘ophidian sculptured stones’ discovered in what is now Ukraine were crafted by Stone Age sculptors. The artifacts resemble ‘beady-eyed’ serpent heads, according to the team of archaeologists who studied the rare ancient serpentine rock art.

The scientists’ study was published online this week in the journal Antiquity. Lead researcher Nadiia Kotova, an archaeologist in the Department of the Eneolithic and Bronze Age at the Institute of Archaeology National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of Ukraine, claimed the sculptured serpents “Could have ritual purpose” and she believes they were “Probably used during ceremonies.”

The two serpent stones have been dated to the ‘Mesolithic’, ‘the middle Stone Age’, which occurred between the Paleolithic and later Neolithic. They were originally discovered in 2016 near the famous ‘Kamyana Mohyla’ stone mound, at an archaeological site of the same name, near the city of Terpinnya in Ukraine on the steppe of the northwestern region of the Sea of Azov.