One
of the bisons on the ceiling of Altamira in Spain, representing the final
stage of polychrome art in which four shades of colour are used. Photo:
M. Burkitt 'The Old Stone Age' (1955), after Breuil. The following is condensed and adapted from 'Cro-Magnon Man' by T. Prideaux: In 1868 a hunter's dog chased a fox across hilly countryside about 15 miles inland from the port of Santander on the Atlantic coast of Spain. The dog fell among some boulders. When the hunter rescued the dog, he saw the entrance to a cave.
From: 'Cro-Magnon Man' by T. Prideaux, an excellent introduction to the subject:
'By 1867, the march of archaeology reached a milestone in the grand Exposition Universelle in Paris. Sponsored by Napoleon 111, the big fair paid homage to industry and culture. It introduced an oddly ominous vehicle called a batteuse, or locomobile, that was supposed to prove useful as a steam-driven thresher. The United States, though still shaken by the Civil War, sent a display of rubber goods, including a life raft, and a new drink-much sampled in the American bar on a gaslit promenade --- called a mint julep. As a bow to ancient culture, a replica was built of Egypt's Temple of Philae on the Nile. But far more ancient, and more astonishing, was a small but comprehensive exhibit of prehistoric artifacts, assembled from all over Europe.
The visitors peered at elegantly shaped flint lance heads from Dordogne and hand axes found in the Somme Valley. The real crowd-catcher was a collection of 51 pieces of prehistoric art, including an engraving of a mammoth on ivory, which had been found in 1864 by Lartet and Christy beneath a rocky overhang at La Madeleine near Les Eyzies. All over Paris people talked about it and the other examples of prehistoric art exhibited because the art obliged them to revise their hazy estimates of these primitive cave creatures. (One enthusiast offered a million francs for the collection.) Clearly, men capable of such controlled artistry could not be utter barbarians. But who were they? Where did they come from? What were they called?'
A controversial but imaginative approach to Palaeolithic art has been used over the past decade by Alexander Marshack. This worker believes he has detected notation and symbolism in Upper Palaeolithic art. He investigates artifacts by means of a high-powered microscope, and is also working on the development of spectroscopic techniques for analysis of compositions in the painted caves. The majority of his published results concern mobiliary art; a more recent publication of his draws together evidence for symbolism in the Mousterian, which he regards as the background to the sophistication evident in the early Upper Palaeolithic.
One of Marshack's early reports concerned the lines of pits, strokes or notches cut into six bone or stone plaques of the Aurignacian period, housed at the Musée des Antiquités Nationales at St-Germain-en-Laye. He concluded that the pits occurred in multiples of thirty to thirty-one, and were produced by a series of techniques, for instance stabbing, curving to the left or to the right. In a bone plaque from the Abri Blanchard, Sergeac, Dordogne, in sixty-nine marks there were twenty-four changes in the type of pitting (see figure above). According to Marshack the type of technique changes with the different phases of the moon, when the moon becomes crescent-shaped, full or dark. The Abri Blanchard plaque bore eighty-one marginal marks which, in addition to the original sixty-nine, would comprise a record of about six months. Similar analysis suggested that the marks on both sides of a schist pebble from Barma Grande on the Riviera amounted to a total tally of fifteen months. A decorated bone bearing the design of a horse and rows of pits from La Marche, central France, bore a lunar notation of seven and a half months; the horse had been 're-used' several times. These markings could possibly have been used to represent the seasonal sequence of regional phenomena or economic activities, or ceremonies.
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