Cueva de las Manos

Today we went to a place called Cuevo de las Manos ( in english it is cave of the hands) to see art, I thought it was going to be paintings on easels but I was totally wrong. We got there and got out of our car to breathe some fresh air, in front of us was a tiny house we walked over to it and went inside it had a big desk and a tiny museum and next to the door there were nails that were sticking out of the wall and hemets were hanging on them. Wondering what the hemets were for I walked inside, the man at the desk beconed my mother toward him there he gave her a slip of information paper I watched my mom fill out the piece of paper. After she was done I turned around and saw a family a mom a dad and a little boy they were all wearing helmets and talking in some languge that I did'nt know the name of. A woman soon came over and took helmets off the wall and gave them to us,us and the small family gathered around the woman who gave us our helmets. She said her name was Narcissa and she was from Buenos Aires then she turned toward us and and said "Where are you from" and we told her the United States and then she asked the family next to us and they said they were from Germany. Narcissa lead us to the back door and outside then we stopped and she told us that the helmets protected your head because when it was windy rocks fell and hit places. She explained that the paintings were painted by the hunters. They made there paint by rubing two rocks together and making dust then they would mix the dust with blood, water, animal fat and urine, they would mix it all together and make paint. Narcissa lead us down steps and I looked around it was an enormous canyon. In front of us were steps and around us were enormous rocks when I looked down there was a river and a grassy field with bushes. We kept walking down the steps then we stopped and I looked at the rocks around us and they had hands like stencils with paint around it. There was even a 6-fingered hand! Narcissa asked us to find it - and we did. Narcissa said that the hunters liked to paint pictures of their hands and animals by putting the paint on their lips and also putting their had on the rocks and blowing around their hand making hand stencils. Narcissa said that the hunters came and lived in a cave and made the paintings, she said that we would go past the cave and see the paintings of the animals. So we walked on and soon we found ourselves at the entrance of the cave. It had a fence all around it. Narcissa explained that people would sneak in here when there was no fence and chip off some rock with paint and take it. They did it so much that the people working here had to put up a fence to make them stop. We walked past the cave down some steps and stopped on the rocks were hands and what looked like horses. When we reached the paintings Narcissa asked us what the animals represented. Meghan said Guanacos (bigger llamas) and Narcissa said "that is corect!". She also said that lots of guanacos used to live here and they were very useful to the hunters. They ate the meat, they used the bones for knives and wepones, they used the blood for paint and they used the fur for coats and blankets. We kept on walking then stopped again and on the rocks were perfect paintings of black guanacos there was also a picture of a person dancing his hands were on his hips and he was a stick man and his face was a circle that was blank. There was a red circle with a circle inside with a circle inside and so on. Narcissa told us that the circle meant the sun, the water and the land. We walked farther on and then we saw that the steps stopped right in front of us. We had come to the end and we turned around.