The Biscay coast (stretching from Galicia in the West through Asturias, Cantabria and the Spanish and French Basque Country) contains some of the most remarkable Stone Age treasures in Europe. The most famous are the cave paintings in Lascaux in the French Basque Country, and at Altamira in Cantabria. There are plenty of similar smaller sites in the Spanish Basque Country, the most notable being Santimamine near Gernika. We didn´t actually manage to visit Santimamine, but we did get to Altamira on our weekend trip to Cantabria – and it was a very memorable trip.
Rediscovered in the 19th century after the caves collapsed in the late stone age, the paintings at Altamira were the very first stone age paintings to be found in modern times, and there was enormous scepticism about them at first: people simply didn't believe such extraordinary paintings could be so old.
Nowadays, you can’t actually go into the caves at Altamira (except by special arrangement), since the environment is too delicate to sustain the massive numbers of tourists. The caves were shut to the general public in the 1970. In 2001 a superb life-size fibreglass replica of the caves and all the paintings within was opened:
Rediscovered in the 19th century after the caves collapsed in the late stone age, the paintings at Altamira were the very first stone age paintings to be found in modern times, and there was enormous scepticism about them at first: people simply didn't believe such extraordinary paintings could be so old.
Nowadays, you can’t actually go into the caves at Altamira (except by special arrangement), since the environment is too delicate to sustain the massive numbers of tourists. The caves were shut to the general public in the 1970. In 2001 a superb life-size fibreglass replica of the caves and all the paintings within was opened:
It was the first time I’d seen Stone Age cave paintings in situ. I was amazed at their richness and the sheer number and extent of them. I was also fascinated to see that the artists were, in many places, actually using the shape of the rock to guide their painting – either using a natural undulation in the cave surface as a kind of ‘boss’, a panel on which to paint, or using the contour of the rock to echo the shape of the thing they were painting:
The interpretation centre built around the caves at Altamira is outstanding, and I was sorry I couldn’t spend more time there. Absolutely up-to-the-minute in terms of the quality of graphic and audio-visual design, it really helped one to understand the kind of society which produced these paintings. So many archaeological displays don’t really explain what those rather dull pieces of bone and clay actually are and what they actually did and how they were actually made, but this one really brings it all to life.
The exhibition is particularly illuminating about the paintings themselves, showing how the paintings were made, as well as speculating on their functions, and illustrating the far-reaching influence of the discoveries of these ancient art works on modern art: Picasso is quoted as saying: ‘After Altamira, everything is decadence.’
Learning about how the paintings were made was perhaps the most interesting bit. I had little idea how sophisticated the techniques used were – not only using the contours of the rock but also engraving the outlines and major details of the figures before painting them in using different pigments and a variety of ‘smudging’ techniques to express movement, light and shade etc. Paint was applied using fingers, fur rags, and sometimes even airbrushing – blowing paint through tubes made from birds’ bones – depending on what effect was required. (Pictures below from the internet).
The exhibition is particularly illuminating about the paintings themselves, showing how the paintings were made, as well as speculating on their functions, and illustrating the far-reaching influence of the discoveries of these ancient art works on modern art: Picasso is quoted as saying: ‘After Altamira, everything is decadence.’
Learning about how the paintings were made was perhaps the most interesting bit. I had little idea how sophisticated the techniques used were – not only using the contours of the rock but also engraving the outlines and major details of the figures before painting them in using different pigments and a variety of ‘smudging’ techniques to express movement, light and shade etc. Paint was applied using fingers, fur rags, and sometimes even airbrushing – blowing paint through tubes made from birds’ bones – depending on what effect was required. (Pictures below from the internet).
An equal sophistication is apparent in the surviving artefacts made by these people, left behind when they abandoned the cave for unknown reasons 14,000 years ago – tools such as harpoons and needles, and pendants and other decorative adornments, finely carved from bone and antler as well as stone – and in the techniques they used to turn animals into clothes and food, and so on, e.g. tanning and roasting with herbs. The exhibition draws parallels between this culture and the hunter-gatherer lifestyles of some modern eskimos, aborigines etc.
In fact, one of the revelations of this museum was a sense of how recent these paintings are, relatively speaking, and of the relative continuity between them and modernity, something I’d never quite sensed before. If you’re anything like me, you probably have incredibly little grasp of the chronology of things in the very distant past, before the Greeks and Romans, say. Just how long ago were they? This museum really helped me to grasp the relative time scales concerned. The paintings at Altamira are between 18,000 and 14,000 years old, dating from the last centuries of the Palaeolithic world of hunter-gathering before the Neolithic world of agriculture began around 10,000 years ago – not so long when you think that the late Stone Age (Stonehenge etc.) and the start of the Bronze Age in the near East was only about 5,000 years ago, and the Anglo-Saxons 1,500 years ago.
The museum was also excellent on explaining the archaeology of the caves, and the extraordinary events of the nineteenth century which led to the discovery and interpretation of these works of art which forced a revolution in understanding of history and culture.
In fact, one of the revelations of this museum was a sense of how recent these paintings are, relatively speaking, and of the relative continuity between them and modernity, something I’d never quite sensed before. If you’re anything like me, you probably have incredibly little grasp of the chronology of things in the very distant past, before the Greeks and Romans, say. Just how long ago were they? This museum really helped me to grasp the relative time scales concerned. The paintings at Altamira are between 18,000 and 14,000 years old, dating from the last centuries of the Palaeolithic world of hunter-gathering before the Neolithic world of agriculture began around 10,000 years ago – not so long when you think that the late Stone Age (Stonehenge etc.) and the start of the Bronze Age in the near East was only about 5,000 years ago, and the Anglo-Saxons 1,500 years ago.
The museum was also excellent on explaining the archaeology of the caves, and the extraordinary events of the nineteenth century which led to the discovery and interpretation of these works of art which forced a revolution in understanding of history and culture.
We had to do more wrestling with the chronology of the distant past at another exceptionally interesting museum we went to, in Burgos a few weeks later. This was the new Museum of Human Evolution, built as an interpretation centre for the extraordinary Stone Age finds (of 1994) from the nearby archaeological site of Atapuerca 15 miles away. Again, the museum contains outstanding recreations of the caves and the environment of the caves as an aid to understanding their history and archaeology. (Trips can also be made to the excavations at Atapuerca, which are still ongoing.)
Considered some of the most important archaeological finds ever made, the caves at Atapuerca don’t contain paintings, but the remains of the oldest hominids ever found in Europe – the ‘homo antecessor’ of 900,000 years ago – as well as later species such as ‘homo heidelbergensis’ (400,000 years ago). It’s believed that ‘homo antecessor’ might be the common ancestor of both ‘homo sapiens’ and ‘homo neanderthalis’.
The museum itself, again extremely impressive in terms of its graphic and audio-visual display, and the clarity of its narrative, is a kind of mixture of archaeology, history and science, exploring not only the archaeology of the finds themselves but also setting them in the context of the science of evolution and the history of discoveries about evolution:
Here, one’s sense of time is stretched in a different way. Whereas at Altamira, one realises how recent the late Stone Age was, at Atapuerca one realises how long the Stone Age was, and how long ago the early Stone Age was. The first ‘homo’ is reckoned to be around 2.5 million years ago, whilst ‘homo sapiens’ originated only around 200,000 years ago. Here at Atapuerca we have the hominids of almost 1 million years ago; at Altamira, the stone age art of only 14,000 years ago.
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