Lascaux IV - by Sue Purkiss

So my post last month - here - got us as far as the entrance to Lascaux. It's a surprisingly modern building, considering it's the gateway to a cave whose glorious paintings were created 20 000 years ago - but still, never mind. Let's go in, and find out more.

When the artists were decorating the pale limestone walls of the cave with their images of horses, bulls, aurochs, bison, and stags, this countryside would have looked very different. The planet was still in the grip of an ice age. Down here, in the balmy south, the summers would have been quite pleasant - but the winters were bitterly cold. It was too cold for forests. Great herds of animals roamed the land, providing food for the hunters. The sewing needle had been invented, and the people made well-fitting clothes out of skins to keep themselves warm. There were fish in the rivers and berries growing on the low-lying scrub. The people made instruments - flutes and pipes, drums perhaps, which they played at their gatherings and festivals. Some of these, almost certainly, celebrated the creation of new art works deep in the caves. Why did they do something so hard as to paint in places where it must have been very difficult to create enough light to see by? What drove them? Something of the same impulse, I imagine, that made mediaeval masons build soaring cathedrals - but I don't know. Nobody does: we can only guess.

Anyway, the decorating of caves went on for hundreds, possibly thousands of years. And then it stopped. Maybe people's lives changed: maybe it was the land itself that changed. Certainly at some stage, the entrance to the cave was blocked. The artists and their work, the very caves themselves, disappeared into the shadowy spaces of the past: no-one remembered them any more. In our arrogance, we modern humans patronisingly thought of those early people as primitives, whose only purpose was to survive. You only have to look at their paintings to see how wrong that was.

`A beautifully smooth lamp found in the caves. It would probably have been filled with animal fat, with a wick made of juniper ( which doesn't smoke).

Then, in the early twentieth century, there was a storm on a hillside above the small town of Montignac in the Dordogne region of France. A tree was uprooted and a small hole appeared. Farmers frowned when they noticed this; it was a danger to their animals. A goat even disappeared down it. So they blocked it up with branches to make it safe, and forgot about it.

Then, in 1940, when war was raging across the planet, four teenage boys, out with their dog, Robot, heard him barking. When they went to investigate, they saw that he was furiously digging away at the hole, making it bigger. They looked at each other. Curious. They dropped a stone down through the hole.

It was a long time before they heard it hit the bottom.

Over the next few days, they brought makeshift lamps and ropes and let themselves down through the hole into what turned out to be a great cave. Imagine their excitement when they played the light from the lamps over the walls, and caught glimpses of the paintings, still vivid and life-like after so many millenia! This is an area of painted caves - they knew what they had found.

Well, after that, the experts came, and eventually the cave, which became known as Lascaux,  was opened up to the public. Of course it was immensely popular - but its success came at a price. The equilibrium of the cave, which hadn't been disturbed for so many thousands of years, was now destroyed: the paintings began to deteriorate. In 1963 the decision was taken that, to save it, the cave must be closed to everyone except a very few researchers and scientists. In 1983 a replica was opened - Lascaux 11. Marcel Ravidat, one of the four boys who had discovered the cave and had been involved with it ever since, came to see it. After examining it minutely, he declared that he was satisfied - the replica was worthy of its great original!

Then, in December 2016, Lascaux IV was opened. This was the exhibit we were going to see.

We were only there for a few hours, and the story of the creation of this place is incredibly complex. I don't pretend to understand it all. As far as I can gather, although the paintings themselves are produced with absolute accuracy, the layout of the cave is not. You might think that a replica can never be authentic, can only be a pale facsimile of the original. Well - I've never seen the original, so I can't judge. But - before we entered the 'cave', our guide gazed at us all solemnly, and said: "I can promise you - what you are about to see is going to absolutely BLOW YOUR SOCKS OFF!"

And he was absolutely right. What you see is stunning. The paintings are beautiful, created with an economy and perfection of line and colour that would be impressive in any age. And the artists used the contours of the rock to create a 3D effect in some places; a sense of power and movement. New discoveries are being made all the time - for instance, I had read that charcoal fragments had been found in the cave, which were probably used by the artists - a detail I had used in my story. Not true: carbon dating has shown that this charcoal was thousands of years more recent than the era of the paintings, which were done using only natural mineral pigments, which cannot - so far - be dated.

But there is still much more that isn't known. Exactly why the paintings were done is the obvious unknown. Another is the meaning of the ubiquitous patterns of dots and small rectangles.

Yet this museum answers an enormous number of questions. And above all, it sets before us this beautiful art. I've only touched on what there is to know about Lascaux: I'd love to tell you the stories of the four discoverers of the cave. And you might be interested to know how my own story, my current work-in-progress, ties in with that of the cave. But I won't try your patience any longer. I'll just put in some pictures, which will speak more than adequately for themselves: and I'll strongly recommend that you visit the museum if you get the chance. And see if, like me, you then become fascinated to know more about the artists and their people: these early - but not inferior - versions of ourselves.

"After Altamira, All is Decadence" Carol Drinkwater

                                            A cave painting of lions at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc

It has been reported in the press this week that a replica of the Grotte Chauvet has been created. It will be open to the public by the time you read this.  The original, containing thousands of prehistoric animal and figure drawings, will no longer be accessible to visitors because our human presence is putting the artwork at risk. This is not a question of hooliganism or graffiti. It is simply the erosion caused by our attendance there, our exhalations near the paintings. A friend who is staying with us remarked that it was a great pity that one should buy a ticket to visit a copy, even one hailed as a near masterpiece. I disagreed with him, recalling one of the most memorable experiences of my travelling life: a visit to the caves of Altamira.

Altamira (a UNESCO World Heritage site), located a few kilometres from Santillana del Mar in Cantabria, northern Spain, was the first site with cave paintings to be discovered, in 1880. How the discovery came about was quite by chance and a rather lovely if sad story.

                                                                   Bison, Altamira

In 1875, a Spanish landowner, lawyer and amateur anthropologist, Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautola, learned that a stone mason, while quarrying locally, had unearthed some rather unusual caves. Don Marcelino went to take a look. He found a pencil-thin aperture. It had been revealed after millennia by the landslides caused by the mason’s gunpowder explosions. Don Marcelino slid through the opening and found himself within a series of labyrinthine caves, chambers and tunnels that measured in length some 270 metres, almost a quarter of a kilometre. This dark hidden space had not been visited for at least ten thousand years. Don Marcelino, even in the crepuscular light, noticed markings on many of the cave walls but he could not make out what they were.

Three years later while he was attending the Anthropological Sciences pavilion at the World Fair in Paris, he spotted a display of prehistoric tools. He learned that they had come from caves in France. This knowledge inspired him to return to the Cantabrian caves and begin excavations. Digging around outside, he unearthed bones, spears, shells and tools. He returned to the site on a regular basis and on one of these trips he took his eight-year-old daughter, Maria, with him. As the story goes, penetrating the caves, oil lamp in hand, the small child looked up at the very low ceiling and remarked, ‘Look, Daddy, at the painted bulls.’ In fact, the child was pointing at a series of paintings in red ochre of a herd of prehistoric bison.

                                                                           Picasso

I try to picture that moment. The moment when Don Marcelino was witnessing, confirming what he had found. The relevance of his discovery, the realisation that his work had not been in vain. This revelation was a moment he had been working towards for several years. Back then, one hundred and thirty years ago, cave art was a completely unknown archaeological science. De Sautola was the first to propose it. A pure, untouched paleolithic universe.  He was standing in the midst of what had once been a prehistoric settlement or meeting place, where the hunters or their wives, their women perhaps, were artists, a community of artists who whiled away their time painting the world that existed for them beyond those caves where they lived or sheltered.
One of the sights that touched me deeply were the handprints.  Those early artists have imprinted the cave walls and ceilings with impressions of their hands. Handprints. Their signatures, perhaps?

Don Marcelino published a small book on his findings, with copies of many of the illustrations he had seen at Altamira and other, lesser sites in the area. He was mocked. The scientific world did not take him seriously. The Church also declaimed him, vociferously so. They were keen to discredit such findings for fear the discoveries threatened the omnipotence of God or put the subject of evolution into the spotlight. Tragically, Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautola died in 1888, a disillusioned man. The brilliance of his investigative work and his findings were not recognised until 1902.

My reason for making the pilgrimage to Altamira was because I was searching for ancient olive stories. The birth of, the beginnings of agriculture. Olive pressing, the cultivation of olive groves, for my book The Olive Tree. Might these hunter-gatherers have lived on a diet of fruit, berries? Might they have pressed juices from these fruits? To create lighting, for food? Might there have been wild olive trees growing in the vicinity?

I had bought my ticket to visit the caves of Altamira online weeks in advance and had arranged my travel schedule to fit in around the date allocated to me. The guided visits are limited to ten persons and they are not very frequent. Imagine my disappointment when I learned that I would not be visiting the original caves but a neighbouring replica. I felt a little cheated (It was probably mentioned on the website where I purchased my ticket but the information was in Spanish and I must have missed it).

During the 1960s and 70s, the paintings were showing early signs of damage caused by the damp breath, exhalations of carbon dioxide from those flocking to visit the rupestral art. I was assured the neo-caves opened in 2001 would not disappoint.

And they did not. The reproduction has used identical colour pigments fashioned from the same powders as the originals. Every bump and incline, every rockface, nuance and contour has been represented down to the minutest detail.

I think we were nine in my group plus the guide. Everyone of us was moved to tears. I am not exaggerating. One couple, Japanese if I remember correctly, were on their knees in front of one of the images, weeping at the sheer beauty, the purity and exhilaration of the artwork. Picasso, who from his earliest days was fascinated by primitive art, visited these caves, the originals, before 1939, when he exiled himself for the rest of his life from Franco’s Spain.

His words when he exited las cuevas were: 'Beyond Altamira, all is decadence.'

                                                              Hand with fish, Picasso

I left the site in a state of euphoria, wandering the hillsides for hours looking at, into colours, at light, as though I had never seen grass or trees or cows before, reluctant to return to the town, to noise and modernity. I had seen the world anew. I did not find olive clues in the vicinity but the experience did put a new spin on my journey. The first time. Man’s very first experiences. It was as though my sight had been unshackled. My travels continued for another nine months or so. No other place I visited reached back in time as far as Altamira - how could it? - but when I sat beneath millennia old olive trees trying to imagine the people who had planted the trees, who harvested them and pressed their fruits, I frequently recalled the simplicity and purity of the artwork at Altamira. Once Upon a Time… when Man and Nature lived hand in hand.

www.caroldrinkwater.com
Twitter: Carol4OliveFarm