스페인 동굴 벽화로 떠나는 시간 여행

For tens of thousands of years, these Palaeolithic artworks were unseen. When they were rediscovered, onlookers marvelled at their vivid beauty. One of the world’s leading experts took me up close By Stephen Phelan T he aurochs, the mammoth and the steppe bison are long extinct, but their painted likenesses still look relatively fresh across the walls and roofs of Altamira. Or so said Diego Garate Maidagan, who is one of the very few humans allowed to enter that exalted cave in northern Spain . I met Garate last summer in a small Basque village called Gautegiz Arteaga. A professor of prehistory and Palaeolithic art at the University of Cantabria, he told me he’d been inside Altamira as recently as the week before, furthering his lifelong investigations of the prep work, tools and methodologies developed by early Homo sapiens painters. About 34,000 years ago, our distant ancestors began making frescoes with chiaroscuro effects through that suite of subterranean vaults, which remained in use for many millennia, until the cave mouth was sealed by a rockfall. The best part of a geological epoch passed before a curious gun dog clawed its way across the threshold in 1868, leading a succession of witnesses into the first such prehistoric gallery ever seen by modern eyes. The technique on display at Altamira seemed much too sophisticated for troglodytic numbskulls, as Palaeolithic people were then assumed to be, and self-appointed experts from France initially declared the whole thing a hoax. (Those accusers were to look pretty stupid when similar caves were found in their own country.) Pablo Picasso is said to have visited, or at least looked at some photos, and the quote attributed to him is possibly apocryphal, but an appraisal for the ages nonetheless: “After Altamira, all is decadence.” The site was opened to the public in 1917, partly closed in the 1970s, then shut for good in 2002, as a century or so of gaping admiration revealed the paint-stripping effects of moisture and carbon dioxide from the breath of too many beholders. A replica cave, with replica artwork, was created on an adjacent site. Today, only Garate and other select scholars have access to the original sanctuary. Garate’s specialism requires close attention to the etching or “pecking” technique whereby the artists used flint blades to outline figures on the rock before applying their ochre and charcoal. Altamira is rare and precious, he told me, because those reds and blacks are still so solid and vivid. The colours were preserved in the near-quarantine conditions imposed by that long-ago landslide. The latest thinking on the subject proposes that our ancestors painted their way across western Europe , and what we now know as “cave art’ is only what survived on the deepest, darkest surfaces they touched. Luck, and geology, left us a few great sanctuaries on the scale of Altamira, and a preponderance of others where the pigments are long gone from the walls – eaten by creeping bacteria, effaced by sheets of calcite, scoured away by air and water. All that remains in most cases are vestigial chisel marks, tracing the legs and horns and tusks of beasts that were once as common as cattle. Like the “shadow pictures” sometimes detected by X-rays beneath the weave of canvases by Titian or Caravaggio, these proto-images are very hard to see without expert intervention. In the far north of the Basque Country, the recent search for such apparitions has stirred “a little revolution”, by Garate’s reckoning. He should know, being the main instigator. He is also a native, and lives with his wife and kids in the same small estuary town, Plentzia, where he grew up. The day we met, Garate presented as adventure-ready: face stubbled, hair short enough for the army, a wiry, handsome guy in very good shape for early middle age, wearing tactical trousers with padded knees. He picked me up in a messy hatchback that doubled as a locker for his caving gear, and we drove over the kind of mountain road that can quickly make a note-taking passenger carsick. Garate and his colleagues in Santander planned a campaign to test a working theory: that the caves of northern Spain and south-western France were once lavishly decorated with pictograms and petroglyphs, now barely visible to the untrained eye. “Back then, there were only three of us in my department,” said Garate. “And we would each need three lifetimes to explore all those caves.” So, they consulted, enlisted, and effectively deputised a taskforce from the Union of Basque Speleologists. The academics taught the spelunkers to angle their head torches a certain way, adjust their gazes just so. And, in the manner of messages appearing in shower-steam on a bathroom mirror, ghost portraits of prehistoric animals began to reveal themselves all over the Basque Country. Garate himself has found more than his share, including two bison and a horse abiding in faded stains of ochre at Mount Lumentxa. W e drove around that mountain now, and down into the village of Lekeitio, an old fishing port between the Bay of Biscay and the Lea River. Garate wanted to show me a particular cave, where construction of a residential building had opened a crack in the mountain rock. Inside was a cavity that, as far as anyone could tell, no human had ever set foot in. Finding no prints, no bones, no signs of ingress and certainly no artwork, Garate and his team designated it as a “clean” cave and put it to use as a proving ground for field experiments. Named Isuntza after the nearest beach, it was now a laboratory where multidisciplinary researchers could test their theories in optimal conditions. From the boot of the car Garate handed me a mining helmet with a headlamp, and took out a chunky key to open a low metal gateway at the base of the cliff. We bent ourselves into a limestone crawl space and followed it for about 20ft until we could stand upright in a wider, higher chamber. Here, about half a dozen PhD students stood at workstations, their lights and cameras making the cave look like a movie set. Glowing readouts on laptop screens and phone apps tracked moisture and temperature levels in real time; plotted the contours of the cave for 3D and virtual-reality models; and registered changes in the colour metrics of pigments applied to the surfaces. Within alcoves, behind pillars and over bedding planes they had painted crude approximations of the abstract geometric shapes and archetypal figures seen at cave art sites across Europe, Africa and Australia. The general idea, Garate told me, was to reverse-engineer the processes of prehistoric image-making: to unpack the practical, mechanical decisions of the artists, and thus to better understand their skill set, their knowledge base, their means and modes of communication. One project gauged the “luminous intensity” and “radius of action” achieved by burning different woods and fats to light the cave. Their last live test with flaming torches had generated so much smoke that the whole team had to get the hell out. My beam was now directed to a surface where handprints had been made with the stencil effects by which our ancestors left their signatures at Altamira, and elsewhere. Garate had assisted with this experiment, using bird bones as blowpipes to spray bursts of ochre around his palm and fingers, or filling his mouth with the stuff to spit it back out. “How did it taste?” I asked him. “Terrible. Disgusting,” he said. “And when you work with ochre it stays on your skin and clothes for days.” Another of the handprints belonged to Olga Spaey, a Belgian PhD candidate whose studies had brought her here from Bordeaux Montaigne University. When I spoke to Spaey later, I marvelled that such a poignant little souvenir of her existence might still be on that wall in 37,000 years – which is roughly how long ago a congregation of children, adolescents and adults pressed their palms against a low ceiling in a nearby cave called El Castillo.