From the very beginning, prehistoric art took different forms, including sculpture, carving, relief, painting etc. We can initially distinguish between two clear types: art mobilier and cave art.

Art mobilier - also known as “mobile art” - was executed on objects such as bone, horn, stone plaquettes or pebbles. Sometimes it consisted merely of drawing non-figurative decorations on hunting tools, made of horn or bone, such as spears or harpoons. In other cases, the figures were made on hanging objects, or on non-utilitarian objects – either carved on flat pieces of bone or stone (plaquettes), or sculpted in stone, bone, horn or ivory.

What we call cave art or “parietal” art was fashioned on the rocky walls of caves or in the open air. The only examples of parietal art to be found in Gipuzkoa are inside caves. The most frequently used techniques were painting and carving – the most common forms of early stone age art found in western Europe.

Both art mobilier and cave art include figurative and non figurative representations. The former are the most common and include a range of contemporary animals, such as horses, bison, urus, deer, reindeer, ibexes, chamois as well as a number of carnivores and fish. Human figures are less numerous. There is also an enormous variety of non-figurative art which is more difficult to interpret, ranging from simple longitudinal lines to zigzags, wavy lines, stars, closed triangles, rhombuses, ovals etc.

Prehistorians have long tried to find links between art mobilier and parietal art, among other reasons because the former might help to date the latter. Pieces of art mobilier are unearthed in particular strata in a dig and are associated with other materials which allow the stratum - and thus the piece in question - to be dated. Cave figures, on the other hand, are found on walls which are generally unrelated to the strata in the site, and could have been created by artists from any period during the Upper Palaeolithic. This is one reason for the interest in finding relationships between the two fields of art. Thus, by means of a stylistic analysis of the figures, art mobilier may help to date parietal art.