Nancy and Julianne's Travels: Prehistoric Cave Art: Altamira and Paleolithic Painting

Today Julianne and I fulfilled a longstanding desire - visiting Altamira and seeing representations of just about the earliest examples of art made in Europe.

See the scratches where the painter laid out his image before adding color.

The art in Altamira, located in hilly territory very near the coast in northern Spain, is between 14- and 18,500 years old, approximately contemporaneous with Lascaux Cave in France. It's a World Heritage Site and is nicely set up for visits. The area is very beautiful, and the town nearby, Santillana del Mar, is terminally darling with its 12th-century architecture and seafood restaurants. We're staying at a very nice AirBnB cottage in Orena, near Santillana. We're pleased.

View north from Altamira. This landscape may not be much different than it was all that long ago.
Take out the fence and houses, and remember it's a cold climate, with steppe rather than forest.

Bison, horses, antelope stand, run, lay across the rock ceiling in Altamira Cave. There aren't any images of people or objects, only animals and occasionally lines and dots. Sometimes a red hand.

People lived at the mouth of the cave and made the paintings deeper inside. Who were they? How did they do it? What did they intend?

Glassed-in opening of reproduction cave at Altamira

Humans aren't very tidy, and these folks left a lot of debris behind that helps describe their lives. They were hunter-gatherers, wearing tanned leather clothing, making chipped stone tools, living hard lives in a cold climate. They had fire, and their diet wasn't bad - fruits, seeds and leaves, meat, shellfish, some fish. I'm imagining them as very busy keeping body and soul together, and not particularly introspective. Few lived as long as 30 years.

Stories of the cave's discovery vary a bit so I'll just put them together into a narrative: a shepherd discovered the cave after a falling tree dislodged some rocks concealing the entrance. He told a scholar about some drawings in the cave, and the scholar's 8-year-old daughter looking up saw animals cavorting on the ceiling. This was in 1879.

This shows the center of the layout drawing below

Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola was so intrigued he published in 1880, saying the images were very ancient, from the Paleolithic. He was ridiculed, even accused of forgery, until further discoveries confirmed his analysis in the early 20th century (he had died in the meantime, though).

Layout of paintings on the ceiling not far inside Altamira; compare with picture above

Tourists came in droves when the wars in Europe were over, and their breath and dust and carelessness, including grafitti, threatened the paintings, which were closed to the public in 1977.

By 2001 a replica had been completed nearby, with a museum attached, and this is what we saw.

So, how did they paint? With their fingers, it seems, or perhaps leather pads, and they sometimes used hollow bird bones for blowing pigment, like using an airbrush. They scratched the image into the soft stone using harder stone flakes, Their pigments were charcoal and ground ochre - very familiar today! They could manage black, red and some yellow ochre, but not white or blue. Seems they mixed ochre pigment with water, using shells for palettes. The charcoal, of course, came in the form of sticks from their fires.

They painted on the walls and on the ceiling. How did they paint on the ceiling, we wondered. Like Michelangelo, the guide said, lying on a scaffolding. We were rather skeptical, but have no better ideas. Perhaps, we thought, the floor of the cave was higher than it is now (it's lower because the archaeologists dug it out), and they could reach the ceiling? But we are not seeing the real floor in this reproduction cave, anyway.

Layout of Altamira Cave, with locations of images

The images overlap each other and there is no horizon or sense of environment. Upside down, every which way, different sizes, various styles, some incomplete, many outlines without color, some color with no outlines, some crude, some very sensitive and perceptive, if you like that word.

Done over a long time, seemingly without relation to each other. Or...? Some are so similar in style, it's easy to think the same person did them. But....?

It's fun to speculate. The original cave is open now, five people per week, on Friday, by lottery. We'll be in Bilbao by then. So instead, we're going to another couple caves, El Castillo and Las Monedas, which are open to see the originals. Looking forward to that.

There's a lot of fascination with such old and evocative imagery. We are such Johnnies-come-lately to artistic expression. But that hardly stops us, does it? There are in the museum at Altamira some modern interpretations based on the art in the cave. Here are a few, plus one from an early publication: