Amir D. Aczel, page 6
Visitors must reserve tickets for entry weeks in advance and must buy them at the small gift shop at the entrance to the gated path leading up to the cave. Fifty such tickets are sold every day for these reserved spaces. Another fifty spaces are available on the day of the visit, on a first-come, first-served basis. This results in a huge line that forms as early as 6 A.M. every day, with people standing for hours hoping to get a place for later in the day—even as late as 4 P.M., just before closing. Inevitably, most of them are turned away.
But despite the long wait and the early rise to beat the crowd and be one of the first fifty, and the return to the cave entrance at the specified time when one is admitted, touring the cave of Font-de-Gaume is very worthwhile. The visitor is treated to an experience the like of which is no longer available, for this cave is very similar to the incredible Lascaux. For decades now, Lascaux has been closed to the public because of damage discovered in the 1960s, after thousands of people visited that cave every single day. For this reason, groups that tour Font-de-Gaume are kept to a small number, evenly spaced throughout the day to minimize damage to the cave.
A steep path in the woods leads up from a riverbed to a towering cliff. Near the locked entrance to the cave, visitors must leave all of their backpacks and other belongings and put on warm clothing. Then the group files through the narrow entrance. After visitors walk for a few moments, the electrically lit path widens and gives way to a stony hall. And here, on both sides of the walkway, one can see a multitude of paintings in vivid colors: red, black, yellow, and brown. The paintings are of bison, horses, mammoths, reindeer, aurochs (large-bodied, extinct wild cattle), bears, wolves, ibex, and rhinoceroses. It is as if one has stepped into an ancient gallery of stunning multicolored oil paintings.
After my wife, my daughter, and I visited Font-de-Gaume, entering the cave of Combarelles was a big surprise. The two caves are so close that we expected them to be similar to each other. Yet few people, relatively, visit the cave of Combarelles. Tickets for this cave are sold at the entrance to Font-de-Gaume, because Combarelles doesn’t have its own ticket office, and there is usually time for a same-day visit.
But when we came to buy our tickets, we had to schedule our visit for the end of the day. Enough people still visit this cave that one can’t easily choose the time of visit. Entering a cave that has been toured all day has at least one unpleasant consequence. The caves have a limited amount of air inside them, and a visitor who comes into the cave after many others have passed through it—and before the air has had a chance to clear overnight—can feel the increased amount of carbon dioxide. This results in not only making it hard to breathe, but it also makes the visitor feel even colder than he or she normally would in the cave’s temperature of around 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
Visiting Combarelles was a strange experience. This cave is narrow and long, and it has some very sharp turns inside it, making it hard to navigate as one walks single file uphill under the low limestone ceiling. We had to wait for an hour outside the large locked gate at the entrance to this cave, and then our guide finally arrived. We were her only customers for this last visit of the day. She opened the gate, and we followed her in. Very soon the path became extremely narrow, and we could feel the lack of air.
My seventeen-year-old daughter, who had never visited a Paleolithic cave before, felt uneasy. But we continued on. After a few moments, we began to see engravings on both sides of the rock face of the cave. These were very densely drawn engravings of horses and bison, antelopes, reindeer, mammoths, and ibex. It was hard to keep track of so many engravings, and there was not a single drawing or painting, which made it difficult to discern what the animals were.
We had to rely on our friendly, talkative guide to use her laser pointer to outline tails and backs and horns and to pinpoint eyes. When we had gone a few hundred yards, claustrophobia set in. We felt that we could breathe only with difficulty, and my daughter was pale—I could see it even in the low light in this cave. Just when we were about to ask the guide to take us back out, she stopped and said, “I know—it’s hard to breathe, and it’s cold. Let’s get out!” Then she stopped. After outlining so many engraved animals, she shone her laser pointer on a small engraving between a horse and an ibex, and said, “And you see this? It is a vulva.” She turned back in the direction of the cave’s exit. Then she added ruefully, “But without the woman.”
We were eager to leave this somewhat unpleasant cave with its suffocating atmosphere. Besides the difficulties of breathing air that was low in oxygen, our eyes also hurt from the exertion of trying to see patterns in lines scratched onto a cave wall. Paleolithic engravings are much harder to make out, and they are also far less aesthetically pleasing than are the much more detailed and easy-to-view charcoal drawings or the even more stunning multicolored paintings found in other caves.
As we walked in silence through the cave’s narrow stony corridor, I wondered about Breuil. How did he feel about stone engravings as compared with vivid, multicolored paintings? Did he have a theory about why two very close caves, geographical twins, really, on opposite sides of the same hill, were so different from each other? I wondered how his eyes had felt at the end of a day spent minutely inspecting and copying stone engravings, which, for us, were so hard to see.
When we finally reached the exit, we breathed a sigh of relief and took in the sweet forest air with its blessed oxygen that keeps us all alive and well. This was one cave we were happy to get out of. We decided to take the next day off: no suffocating experience for us tomorrow.
It was Denis Peyrony who had led the way into the cave of Combarelles that day in 1901, with Breuil and Capitan following behind. Peyrony was from this part of France, and he knew well the caves of the region and felt comfortable even in this narrow, long, and jagged cave. Breuil copied the art in both caves very carefully over a matter of many days.
The following year, a delegation of archaeologists came to the Dordogne in the wake of the discoveries made by Breuil and his comrades. This group further studied the art found in these caves and also used Breuil’s exceptionally high-quality reproductions in their discussions. Although some stubborn objectors remained, maintaining that the art was not authentic but rather modern, most scientists were now convinced of the prehistoric provenance of the paintings, the drawings, and the engravings. Breuil would spend the following decades authenticating the art found in other caves as well, both in France and in Spain.
Several more caves were discovered in the French Dordogne that contained drawings or paintings, and all of this art was similar to that found south and across the high Pyrenees at the cave of Altamira on the north coast of Spain. Altamira was the first major decorated cave to be discovered anywhere and is still considered one of the most important Paleolithic caverns.
In France, unlike in Spain, there was less skepticism about the antiquity of the art found in caves, even among religious authorities, who might have been expected to be hostile to findings that confirmed man’s existence at the time of mammoths, cave bears, and reindeer, much earlier than the age implied by scripture. It is notable that the champion of most of these discoveries, as well as of their interpretation and authentication as being very ancient, was the priest Abbé Henri Breuil. It was through Breuil’s tireless efforts and his prominence and authority as a scholar of prehistory that Altamira and its discoverer eventually received confirmation and vindication after decades of disappointment and virulent attacks by religious and other opponents.
7
The Tale of a Missing Dog
IN 1868, A MAN WENT HUNTING IN AN AREA INLAND from Spain’s craggy north coast, near the city of Santander, in rolling hills that were partly forested and partly meadowland. He lost his dog when he reached a high hill that had commanding views of the ocean, known as the hill of Altamira (Spanish for “High Lookout”).
The dog had fallen into a small hole in the ground surrounded by rocks, and when the hunter found his dog and shoved some stones down to clear the hole so that he could release the animal, he suddenly saw an underground passage leading deeper into the earth. He marked the location of this cave, and seven years later, in 1875, a shepherd working in this area told the owner of the land about its existence. The landowner happened to be the Spanish naturalist and amateur archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola.
De Sautuola was interested in prehistory, and he visited the cave and noticed a few artifacts but nothing spectacular. Three years later, in 1878, he went to Paris to see the Universal Exhibition. It fired his imagination, for there he saw prehistoric objects from the site of La Madeleine, which were similar to some that he had seen in his cave of Altamira. He was most intrigued by small decorative objects made of bone, such as the famous bull licking its side, a classic Magdalenian piece of mobile art. Many of the items Sautuola saw at the Paris exhibition were Magdalenian relics retrieved in the Dordogne area by Piette. Sautuola returned to explore Altamira, and it was then that he discovered the extensive cave art: images of bison, horses, and deer painted in yellow, red, and black on the cave ceiling.
In the past, de Sautuola had found artifacts closely resembling the Magdalenian objects that he later saw in Paris, so on his next visit to his cave, he brought along his eight-year-old daughter, Maria, to help him search for similar prehistoric items. When they entered the cave, Sautuola remained in the forward part of it, digging in the ground in search of ancient objects. Maria, as any curious child might do, wandered off on her own, illuminating her way into the depths of the cave with a torch.
Here the ceiling was very low, but since Maria was a small girl, she was able to stand tall and could look up at the ceiling where an adult would have had to crouch. When Maria raised her eyes to the cave’s ceiling, she was stunned: she saw what nobody had ever seen before—an entire ceiling covered with red, ochre, yellow, and black paintings of bison, as well as some horses and other animals, which looked as if they had just been painted.
She shouted, “Toros, toros!” (“Bulls, bulls”) and ran to get her father. He had to crawl in and then lie on the ground looking up. He was amazed. They stayed there in silence looking at majestic paintings on what is now known as the Bison Ceiling. These images looked freshly painted. In fact, they were almost 14,000 years old.
De Sautuola spent several days copying the incredible paintings on the cave ceiling. Then he sent these reproductions to the department of archaeology at the University of Madrid. Some experts became convinced that the paintings were authentic and thought that they were as old as 50,000 years—there is no reason why that number came up. When the radiocarbon 14 method was developed in the 1940s, these paintings were dated using this scientific technique, and their age was shown to be 13,540 years, with a margin of error of plus or minus 700 years.
But most people refused to believe that the Altamira paintings were ancient and rather held the view that they were modern forgeries. Sautuola was frustrated and enraged. He tried everything he could to bring scholars to the truth, but he had to face stiff religious resistance and suspicion that he was trying to gain attention for himself by forgery. There seemed to be nothing he could do to redeem his reputation or convince people to listen to him. He spent the following decades trying to argue with Spanish scholars about Altamira’s authenticity and importance. People did not believe him, and he was even accused of bringing an artist to his property and having him paint the ceiling of this cave to pass it off as prehistoric. Eventually, Sautuola died a broken man, shunned as a fraud. But in France, one scholar was doing work that would eventually vindicate Sautuola posthumously.
In the spring of 1902, long after Sautuola stopped looking for recognition from the world of science and had already died, Abbé Henri Breuil obtained enough funding from scholarly organizations in France, about 900 gold francs, to support a trip to Altamira and to pay for his time and supplies, thus allowing him to make copies of the cave art found there. A local scholar, Pérez de Molina, met the Abbé and guided him through the muddy hills to the cave.
They had only candles for light and had to crawl on their hands and knees over wet rocks for more than three hundred yards underground, suffering from the dampness, lack of air, and congestion, before they finally arrived at the Bison Ceiling. There, they had to lie on their backs on bags of straw they had brought in with them in order to inspect the paintings and the engravings in this cave.
Because of the dampness, the Abbé could not use his old technique of reproducing cave art. He later wrote to his friend Broderick, “Before I went to Altamira I had never worked in pastel, but I had to do so now. The little water-color technique I had learned would have been of no use to me in the damp atmosphere of Altamira.”1
When the weather was nice, Breuil and his associates enjoyed their lunch in the fresh air outside the cave and had a respite from the suffocating atmosphere inside, which became filled with carbon dioxide and was dangerously low in oxygen. They sat on top of the hill, from which, facing north, they could see the Atlantic Ocean in the distance.
But more often than not, storms came in from the ocean, bringing rain and mud. This was hard, tedious work. The Abbé’s eyes hurt badly by the end of the day from the constant strain of inspecting the paintings by candlelight, and his cassock had acquired white blotches made by the melting candle wax. His back ached for days from his working in a contorted body position. But the reproductions he made of the art of Altamira, and above all of the magnificent Bison Ceiling, are of surprisingly high quality, and they can still be seen today. Often, they are used instead of photographs to decorate books on cave art and to show its beauty. Breuil’s reproductions were published in a book that Pablo Picasso saw, which made him decide to visit the cave. Picasso was influenced by the cave art, and his painting Dora Maar and the Minotaur bears a striking resemblance to cave art that had not even been discovered by the time of his death: The Sorcerer, found at the Chauvet cave, which was first revealed in 1994.
Breuil returned to France and later took up an entry-level teaching position (privat-dozent) at the Catholic University of Fribourg, in Switzerland. He remained there for four years and then returned to Spain. The paintings of Altamira that he reproduced came to the attention of Prince Albert of Monaco, who was interested in prehistory. The prince supported Breuil’s publication efforts and gave him a stipend that would allow him to remain in Spain and conduct further research on Altamira and other caves found in the same region of Cantabria. Like the French Dordogne and Pyrenees regions, Cantabria, too, is rich in prehistoric caves.
In 1909, Prince Albert sailed his yacht—which he usually kept docked in the Mediterranean—out through the Strait of Gibraltar and on to the Spanish harbor of Santander, where Breuil came onboard to show the prince new reproductions he had made of Cantabrian cave art. The prince continued to support Breuil’s work, which allowed the Abbé to remain free of religious duties and enabled him to work on prehistoric art wherever he desired.
All told, Breuil worked in seventy-three different caves, in Spain, France, and Italy, and by his own reckoning spent more than seven hundred days inside caves.2 If Altamira was the first of the important caves whose art was studied, copied, and authenticated by the Abbé, Lascaux was the last one—four decades later.
Although Breuil thought that the twenty superb bison on the ceiling of Altamira had been drawn by many artists over a long period of time, recent scholars have disputed this assumption.3 Only sixteen of the twenty bichrome animals on the famous ceiling are confirmed as bison; the remaining four have been identified as other animals, such as boars. But the bison are seen as one unit—a grazing herd. This herd, drawn in vivid colors, has been analyzed as being caught up in sexual frenzy, and two of the bison are in the first stage of copulation.
The males are often depicted as dust-wallowing, an activity that is known from observing the behavior of American bison. The stance of many of the females, with raised tails and lifted heads, has been identified as that of females in heat. The ceiling is now seen as a single composition with the central theme of a grazing, sexually charged herd of bison. These figures are large, each about four to five feet in length, and they span the cave ceiling in various places, as is often seen in other caves, but the animals’ positions are all believed to be perfectly correlated with one another. This is a symbolic conception of an entire group of animals acting as a unit, and recent analysis shows clear male-female associations in this integrated composition. The portrayal is also identified as a seasonal depiction, because European bison are known to rut in August and September.4
The horse is the main opposing animal on the great ceiling. It is also drawn in bichrome, red and black, and it stands in contrast to the rutting herd of bison. There is a large hind on the other side, on the periphery of the ceiling. This is an accompanying animal to the main theme of the ceiling, but it is drawn in a size larger than that of a bison. In the corridor outside the Great Hall are engravings of bison and mammoths, which are also accompanying animals of the bison in the main theme of the ceiling composition.5
Even some earlier observers have noted the seeming unity of the paintings on the ceiling at Altamira and their unique qualities. There is a good reason this cave was dubbed the Sistine Chapel of prehistoric art.
8
The Sign of the Bull and the Legend of the Minotaur
SOON AFTER THE DISCOVERY OF THE FIRST CAVES IN France, Font-de-Gaume and Combarelles in 1901 and Niaux in 1906 (the art of which has also been studied, copied, and authenticated by Abbé Henri Breuil), scientists began to address the deep mystery of the meaning of the myriad signs that invariably accompany the glorious art in these caves.
