 In this first case study, we're going to start at the very beginnings of art history. We're going to be looking at art from two different caves from Altamira and, more importantly, from Peshmeral. So most of the materials I'm going to be showing you and tools are actually from Altamira. I had the chance to visit the conservation lab in the Altamira Research Center. And so what you're seeing here are two samples of ochre that were excavated by archaeologists in Altamira Cave in Spain. And these are some of the types of colors that were used inside that cave for the famous cave paintings. We'll be looking first at ochres like this and talking about how they were processed and used and then we'll move to Peshmeral Cave where that's in France. That's where an archaeologist named Michel Le Blanchet has been able to successfully reproduce the techniques that he believes were used to create the cave paintings in Peshmeral. One of the things that makes Altamira Cave so exciting is the sheer wealth of other archaeological finds in the cave. So not only do we have a vast complex of paintings that were made between about 24,000 and 15,000 BCE. That's as much as 26,000 years ago. But we also have the raw materials and the tools used to process them. We have actual paint and tools used to paint with. So here what you're seeing are a couple of grinding or pounding stones. Those are the round stones toward the top by my label. And then this more rectangular stone that you see here was actually used as a grinding surface. And it would be possible to take a fairly crumbly ochre and the sample of ochre that you see here on the right might have been crumbly enough to actually just scrape it on this rectangular sheet block in order to obtain a powder. Or you could actually pound it as if you were crushing spices or something with a mortar and pestle using one of these rounded pounding stones. And traces of ochre which you can clearly see on these stones indicate that they were used for this purpose inside the cave. Here I'm showing you some processed red ochre that is from Cantabria in northern Spain. But this is ochre that's been processed using modern methods. So it has been purified and probably screened through a fine mesh to make sure that all of the particles are uniform or of a particular size and smaller. But this is the product that these prehistoric artists were trying for was a nice fine powder of ochre. And you've seen a few videos about how ochre is processed for example at Clearwell Caves. So you can understand how you obtain this pure pigment. And the thing about ochre is that it has an extremely it's extremely saturated in its color. So just a little bit of ochre powder can give you just a deep rich color that can be diluted with more water or whatever liquid you're using. Or if you're using it in a powdered form or a chalky form it can be blended really nicely. It's a really wonderful pigment to work with. The painters at Altamira would take that powdered ochre and they could mix it with animal fat, with blood, with spit, with water, with egg. There's all sorts of possibilities. There's some indication that bone marrow might be used in some cases. So here what we're seeing is the containers for mixing and holding that paint. These are shells. They look like fairly ordinary limpid shells. And when you turn them over they become perfect little hand-sized paint pots. And a number of these were also found inside Altamira Cave containing in some cases traces of paint. And in other cases chunks of dried paint. So this isn't too different from the little paint sets that we all had in kindergarten that we would re-wet and use again and again the little watercolor sets. In the cave painting techniques video you saw examples of different types of techniques that were used like drawing and engraving and blending and actually painting with liquid paint. And here is the tool that was used for actually blowing paint onto the wall. It's sort of a paleolithic airbrush, if you will, made out of a hollow bird bone. And this was found in Altamira. They have similar finds from other caves in Cantabria in northern Spain. And here in this close-up you can see that paint has dried on the bone itself from handling during painting and that there are also traces of paint around the openings of the bone. And so this would have been used to blow paint on the wall particularly for things like hand stencils. And I'll show you an example in a moment. Here's a bison from the Hall of the Bulls in Altamira Cave from around 16,000 BCE. And we have the date for this because of testing that was done to the cave surface at that area. And cave dating is becoming a more and more exact science. And it's something that is actually, as the science is becoming more and more exact and more accurate, we're actually pushing back the dates of a number of these cave painting areas because of the new accuracy that we have. But here we have this date of about 16,000 BCE. And I want you to look at this bison in the center of my slide. I want you to notice first of all how the back of this bison is formed almost entirely by a long crack in the ceiling of the cave. And similarly that its chin by its nose and then leading to maybe its upper shoulder, that's another crack that is formed in the ceiling of the cave. So one of the things that a cave painter would do is actually take advantage of the surface quality of the cave. This is a bowl that's probably about 10 feet long. And in some of the bowls at Altamira, the artist would also take advantage of areas of the cave that projected kind of like those areas that you see to the right in the slide, where you have pieces of rocks sticking out and down into the space of the viewer. Here we mostly see just that the existing cracks and then a drawing being made in charcoal. And then you can see that the artist probably took their hand and simply smeared powdered red ochre onto the face and neck of this bison in order to give a sense of shading and of color. Now we're going to move to Peshmeral Cave, which is located in France. And here at Peshmeral, an archaeologist named Michel Lorblanchet decided to do a little bit of experimentation, and he actually reproduced the scene that you see here of horses and hand prints. Color photos of Lorblanchet doing his experimental reconstruction were included in an issue of Archaeology magazine, and this made quite a splash in the world of cave painting scholarship because it really represents one of the first attempts to truly figure out how these things were done. And what Lorblanchet did is he actually chewed up pigment and spat it onto the wall rather than using an airbrush like the one that we associate with Altamira, and he was able to spit pigment, both charcoal and ochre, onto the wall in order to create hand stencils, and you see some of those here. And then he also created this really marvelous horse that you see, and he did it using a combination of drawing, of shading, and of spitting. And what you see in these images are Lorblanchet using his hands kind of like a stencil in order to frame different areas of the painting, and so that's how he's getting the legs of the horse, for example. And then he also used an actual stencil of a piece of leather with a hole cut into it in order to get the spotted portion on the horses. Here's a step-by-step diagram showing the way that Lorblanchet recreated those spotted horses. So first he started with sort of contour outlines of the horses and darkened in their heads and their tails, and you can see the two horse figures overlap. Then he went in and did the individual hand stencils around the horses. Then he added a series of dots using his leather stencil, and most of the dots are on the horses, but a number of them are apart from the horses, and there are some theories that the dots could possibly represent droppings or numbers of creatures. There's a whole lot of different theories about how to interpret cave art. Unfortunately, I mean, we're talking about prehistory, a time prior to a written record, and so really for many of these questions, all we can really do is put forth theories. The fourth stage here is the application of red ochre to highlight certain areas and to call certain areas out, and it's possible, given the fact that these red marks don't match up entirely with the two horses, that this could have been done by another artist and possibly also in another time. Now we're back to our horses and hand prints from Peshmeral. Now, I want to say a little bit about interpretation. There are theories that these were used as sort of like a passage into adulthood where individuals would perhaps go through some sort of an ordeal or adulthood test, manhood test, if you will, and then go and put their hand print on the wall. There's some indication that some scholars think that perhaps images like these would have been used for instructing hunters or perhaps for hunters to illustrate stories or to celebrate particularly good kills. What's really interesting is that all of the paleolithic cave art that we have in Europe, and that's primarily in central France and in northern Spain, although there are some isolated examples in other areas, in almost, in just every case that I know of, all of the cave art is in the darkest areas of the cave. You cannot get any daylight into the areas that are painted. So these artists were choosing deliberately deep, isolated portions of the cave that were dark. They had to use lamps. They had to bring in their pigment. They had to prepare it. There's a certain degree of difficulty to all of this that indicates that it must have been an incredibly important activity. Even in caves where there's evidence that people lived in them, like in the mouth of the cave, for example, at El Castillo cave, not too far from Altamira, we know that they did not do any paintings right in the entrance where they were living. They went deeper into the cave, again, beyond the reach of daylight, and that's where you see the first paintings. So even though we don't know what they mean and why they were made, these are truly significant works. We also don't know if ochre was a precious substance for them or if it was simply a means of getting color. Perhaps the answer lays somewhere in the middle there. We may never know.