Paviland Cave

The Red Lady of Paviland is a male Upper Paleolithic partial skeleton dyed in red ochre and buried in Britain 33,000 years ago. It is the oldest known ceremonial burial in Western Europe.

The bones were discovered in the week of 18 January 1823, by Rev. William Buckland in an archaeological dig at Goat's Hole Cave — one of the limestone caves between Port Eynon and Rhossili, on the Gower Peninsula, south Wales. Buckland believed the remains to be those of a female, dating to Roman Britain. Later analysis, however, showed the remains to have been of a young male.

Goat's Hole was occupied repeatedly throughout prehistory. Artefacts are predominantly Aurignacian, but there are earlier Mousterian, and later Gravettian and Creswellian ones as well.

In 1822 Daniel Davies and the Rev John Davies, respectively surgeon and curate at Port Eynon on the south coast of Gower, explored the cave and found animal bones, including the tusk of a mammoth. The Talbot family of Penrice Castle was informed and Mary Theresa Talbot, then the oldest unmarried daughter, joined an expedition to the site and found "bones of elephants" on 27 December 1822.

William Buckland, Professor of Geology at Oxford University and a correspondent of that well-connected family, was contacted. He arrived on 18 January 1823 and spent a week at Goat's Hole, during which his famous discovery took place.

Later that year, writing about his find in his book Reliquiae Diluvianae (Evidence of the Flood), Buckland stated:

"I found the skeleton enveloped by a coating of a kind of ruddle ... which stained the earth, and in some parts extended itself to the distance of about half an inch [12 mm] around the surface of the bones ... Close to that part of the thigh bone where the pocket is usually worn surrounded also by ruddle [were] about two handfuls of the Nerita littoralis [periwinkle shells]. At another part of the skeleton, viz in contact with the ribs [were] forty or fifty fragments of ivory rods [also] some small fragments of rings made of the same ivory and found with the rods ... Both rods and rings, as well as the Nerite shells, were stained superficially with red, and lay in the same red substance that enveloped the bones."

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