Cave Paintings at Altamira Altamira is a cave site in Spain. The paintings on the ceiling of the cave were first brought to the attention of Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, a local landowner and an amateur archaeologist, by his daughter Maria in November . The little girl was ‘running about in the cavern and playing about here and there’, while her father was digging the floor of the cave. Suddenly she noticed the paintings on the ceiling: ‘Look, Papa, oxen!’ At first, her father just laughed, but soon realised that some sort of paste rather than paint had been used for the paintings and became ‘so enthusiastic that he could hardly speak’.
He published a booklet the following year, but for almost two decades his findings were dismissed by European archaeologists on the ground that these were too good to be ancient. A drawing of a bison at Altamira, northern Spain. Hundreds of paintings of animals (done between , and12, years ago) have been discovered in the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet, both in France, and Altamira, in Spain. These include depictions of bison, horses, ibex, deer, mammoths, rhinos, lions, bears, panthers, hyenas and owls.
More questions have been raised than answered regarding these paintings. For example, why do some areas of caves have paintings and not others? Why were some animals painted and not others? Why were men painted both individually and in groups, whereas women were depicted only in groups?
Why were men painted near animals but never women? Why were groups of animals painted in the sections of caves where sounds carried well? Several explanations have been offered. One is that because of the importance of hunting, the paintings of animals were associated with ritual and magic.
The act of painting could have been a ritual to ensure a successful hunt. Another explanation offered is that these caves were possibly meeting places for small groups of people or locations for group activities. These groups could share hunting techniques and knowledge, while paintings and engravings served as the media for passing information from one generation to the next. The above account of early societies has been based on archaeological evidence.
Clearly, there is much that we still do not know. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, hunter-gatherer societies exist even today. Can one learn anything about past societies from present-day hunter-gatherers? This is a question we will address in the next section.