The Upper Palaeolithic: art, rituals and beliefs. Any attempt to interpret the attitudes, tastes and behaviours of primitive cultures is dangerous. The distance those peoples and their mental representations and our own is insurmountable. Therefore, perhaps the only recourse left to scientific prehistory is to adequately collect and describe the facts considered relevant, leaving the task of interpreting them to others. Rock art and portable art often reproduce real and easily identifiable themes from the natural environment of the Upper Palaeolithic inhabitants of south-western Europe, but they also include complex figures (‘signs’) with no possible naturalistic reference and hybrid (‘monstrous’) themes composed partly of human representations and partly of zoomorphic additions. There is no doubt that there must be a very rich symbolism here, the ution and “use” of which must involve conventional ritual attitudes. But other behaviours of those human groups related to personal adornment, the taste for collecting and preserving certain material evidence, or the mortuary treatment of their deceased must also be charged with transcendent significance.
The “sanctuaries” of Paleolithic art. Paleolithic art has always been regarded by prehistorians as belonging to a symbolic universe whose meaning has been unsuccessfully sought. Thus, throughout the present century, various theories have been formulated in an attempt to clarify the significance of that dense assemblage of parietal or portable themes. Barely twenty years ago, A. Laming-Emperaire (1962) produced a meticulous critical historiography of that whole accumulation of interpretative attitudes. From the initial positions of Mortillet or Piette regarding the meaning of portable art in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; to those of S. Reinach at the beginning of the twentieth century, who articulated the foundations of magical interpretation (with references to the attitudes of many so-called primitive hunting peoples); or to the positions in vogue 1910 and 1950 (with the opinions of H. Breuil, H. Bégouën, or H. Obermaier), which placed special emphasis on religious or magical attitudes that sought to represent certain deities and protectors or to ensure hunting success and fertility.
Other aestheticist, magical, or religious interpretative stances (around totemic concepts) have further complicated, if possible, that already complex panorama of speculations, which has failed to produce a single interpretative scheme of general validity. The very refined critiques of A. Laming-Emperaire, A. Leroi-Gourhan, and P. Ucko and A. Rosenfeld have helped to clarify the interconnections of the problem of Paleolithic art, pointing toward very interesting research perspectives.
The statistical control of the various themes and styles and of their location within the topography of caves led A. Leroi-Gourhan to define a model of thematic combinations according to certain constants:
– both in the combination or association of certain themes with others,
– and in the ed presence of particular figures in specific areas of caves.
This means that the artists of the Upper Paleolithic did not place their themes at random in any location within any cave, nor did they indiscriminately select one figure or another from the repertoire of animals known to them. Rather, they responded to a sanctuary scheme, to a mitogram astonishingly constant over time and across the various regions of the Franco-Cantabrian area.
There is, therefore, a formalized image of the “sanctuary,” with constant elements in terms of location and hierarchy, according to a binary or more complex relationship among themes. Whether this sought to express sexual dualism (male/female) or some other form of dual reality or social or ritual relationships is, for the time being, an irresolvable question; but the topographic and statistical controls are there and attest to significant situations.
In an elementary classification of Paleolithic art themes, Leroi-Gourhan distinguishes “signs” (that is, themes that do not refer to natural beings) from animal figures and anthropomorphs. Among animal themes, he distinguishes large herbivores (the most frequently represented), small herbivores and other species (fish, birds, etc.), and fearsome animals (carnivores).
Among the signs, open and closed types are distinguished, whose traditional meanings (wounds or marks of destruction, traps, references to houses—“tectiforms,” etc.) or sexual interpretations (open or male, closed or female) are no longer accepted by almost anyone. The usual combination develops around the bison–horse pair, with the mitogram being completed by a third dominant species (for example, deer or goat) and by various additional signs.
Some rock sanctuaries are more complex due to the arrangement of their chambers and side passages or because of the accumulation of themes on panels and friezes. It is assumed that in these cases the presence of groups of artists (or officiants) must have been ed over several periods, close together or separated in time. This seems to be the case with the relative density and distribution in galleries or groups of the painted or engraved figures at Ekain, Altxerri, Erberua, and perhaps Arenaza, Santimamiñe, or Haristoi. Other sites, by contrast, may be “minor sanctuaries,” with few animals uted in similar technique and style, undoubtedly in a single episode: such as Venta Laperra, Sinhikoleko Karbia, Sasisiloaga, Alkerdi, or Isturitz.
Generally, these decorated areas are located far from the cave entrance, in places where people did not usually live, or simply in cavities different from those occupied as dwellings. Thus H. Breuil used to oppose the concepts of cave-sanctuary and cave-dwelling as irreconcilable when dealing with the Upper Paleolithic in southwestern Europe. For example, no archaeological deposit from that period has been identified at Sasisiloaga, Etcheberri, Sinhikoleko Karbia, Alkerdi, or Altxerri (perhaps covered by later deposits), although it is evident that human groups lived very nearby.
The secluded and sometimes difficult-to-access nature of many decorated friezes has often been emphasized. In Euskal Herria, we can recall particularly striking cases such as the elevated alcove of Santimamiñe (which could only be reached with difficulty by climbing among stalagmitic flows), the arduous location of the art at Etcheberri (in a small gallery about 180 meters from the entrance, reached by passing through narrow and dangerous areas), some of the groups at Altxerri, or the end of the narrow corridor where the engravings of Alkerdi or the painted deer of Arenaza are found.
Most Franco-Cantabrian sanctuaries are interior ones, located several dozen or even hundreds of meters from the cave entrance (Arenaza, Altxerri, Haristoi, etc.). The so-called open-air sanctuaries, always very scarce, may have a different meaning. In the Basque Country we have the cases of Venta Laperra (whose engravings can be seen without artificial light) and the flowstone of the great hall of Isturitz (located right at the cave’s threshold, where oblique rays of sunlight must have reached). It should be noted that these engraved or sculpted figures of exterior sanctuaries (that is, on the rock of cave entrances and vestibules) may be related to figures on large blocks that could be transported with relative ease (as in cases from the Dordogne and surrounding areas—La Ferrassie, Fourneau du Diable, Labatut, Laussel, etc.; but not in the Pyrenees or Cantabria), since neither those parietal works nor these “portable” ones cross the cave’s threshold line. In this matter, the suggestive hypotheses analyzed and discussed by A. Laming-Emperaire in her thesis (1962) can be raised:
– That the meanings of open-air or fully lit works (both sculptures and engravings on rock and those made on loose blocks) differ from those of the rock sanctuaries inside caves (the “deep sanctuaries”).
– That the former are generally older than the latter (although, admittedly, there are some paintings and engravings inside caves that are as old as those of exterior sanctuaries), which raises a double question: was there a successive conquest throughout the Upper Paleolithic of increasingly interior zones of caves, or do deep sanctuaries and exterior ones represent two different concepts in Paleolithic artistic and ritual expression?
As noted earlier, rock art s a striking concentration in a fairly small area of the Southwest, around three fundamental centers: that of the Vézère basin at its confluence with the Dordogne (Lascaux, Rouffignac, Combarelles, Font-de-Gaume, Cap Blanc, etc.) and its “extensions” to the northwest and southeast (in the Lot: Cougnac, Sainte-Eulalie, Pech Merle); that of the central Pyrenees in the upper Garonne basin (from Fontanet and Niaux in the west to Gargas and Labastide in the east, including Niaux, Trois-Frères, Mas d’Azil, Le Portel, Bédeilhac, Marsoulas, etc.); and that of the western Pyrenees and the Cantabrian Cornice (from the Souletine sites of the Arbailla massif to Candamo in Asturias). By contrast, portable art appears wherever sites occupied by Upper Paleolithic humans are found across Eurasia.
Gestures and ritual attitudes in Paleolithic art.
In Paleolithic art, the selection of the site, the ution of the rock artworks, and their subsequent use would have been accompanied by gestures that were largely codified—that is, by a ritual, not fundamentally religious, whose rules were preserved and transmitted over centuries and millennia.
Certain treatments observed in some works of portable art also seem to reflect consistent attitudes among those human groups.
Once the Paleolithic craftsman had selected the size and shape of the available support and conceived the subject to be represented, and knowing the appropriate techniques to approach it, it seems logical to suppose that he had to decide on the distribution of each of the elements of that subject within the space before him, as well as on a certain order in the ution of the themes.
The concept of the “manual field” used by Leroi-Gourhan—referring to the surface that could be easily covered by someone attempting to ute a theme on a specific wall area—could also be applied to portable art, as could that of the “visual” or “mental field,” that is, the area mentally encompassed by the engraver or painter, within which the components of the intended composition had to be rationally distributed.
Once this distribution was conceived, there must have been a logical, hierarchical, and chronological order of ution, according to which empty spaces were respected, themes were completed, or existing elements of the support (outlines, reliefs, fissures, etc.) were exploited. Not all the elements (“major,” “minor,” or “complementary,” also called “essential” and “additional”) that are structured within these thematic complexes need be exactly contemporary; rather, they must have been uted successively, perhaps within a not very long span of time and within the same conceptual and creative process. This only partially accords with the observations of A. Marshack regarding certain pieces of French portable art, when he asserts that the various themes making up a complex “scene” “may have followed one another slowly over periods that could cover days and weeks and even months or years.”
We have an important case to argue in the decorated bone from Torre, where a fortunate series of superimpositions and the logical relationship partial obliterations, juxtapositions, and thematic associations led me to assert (I. Barandiarán 1971: 58–61) the highly probable order of ution of its figures: first, the smaller representations were made (not precisely located in central areas of the support), along with some signs; this was followed by another animal representation, not as “realistic” as the previous ones; and finally, the three larger animal protomes were completed, highly realistic and exactly symmetrical on the surfaces of the bone that had been carefully reserved for them.
It should therefore be assumed that the Paleolithic author—both in portable and in rock art—having conceived the theme and mentally distributed its various components on the support, had to proceed in such a way that, as he uted them, he left sufficient empty spaces to accommodate elements not yet drawn, according to a perhaps ritual conception of the process, whose constants can only be determined through the analysis of a sufficiently large number of cases. J. Clottes and C. Couraud have recently been emphasizing the symbolic value of the very techniques employed in rock art: painted figures are not only more spectacular—because of their visual impact—but may also be the most conceptually important (the most significant within the “sanctuary”).
P. G. Bahn, for his part, has suggested that water mythology may have been the original and decisive factor in the origin and distribution of rock art in certain areas. According to Bahn’s observations on Pyrenean “sanctuaries,” a relationship can be seen them and the presence of exceptional water flows, even including thermal springs. It seems evident that a single craftsman may have produced all the engravings and bas-reliefs of the stalagmitic cone of Isturitz; another may have made and engraved the Magdalenian harpoons from Berroberria; another cut the bones and uted the marks on half a dozen Gravettian pieces from Bolinkoba; another was the author of several painted horses at Ekain; another painted, over successive periods, the deer of Arenaza; or another engraved the three large horses of Haristoi.
In recent years, J. M.ª Apellániz has referred to the identification of hands and masters in various panels and assemblages of our rock art (Apellániz 1982). He has thus believed he could identify various complementary interventions—with retouching added by a second intervention (or “hand”)—on the work of a “master,” at Ekain, Altxerri, and elsewhere.
In portable art, similarities pieces found at considerable distances can be so strong as to ensure that they were produced by the same hand; this implies either that the craftsman traveled from one site to another or that the works themselves were moved through barter or exchange. Isturitz, especially during the Middle Magdalenian, offers several engraved portable works of notable similarity to others from the Pyrenean area; prehistorians who study this region (J. Clottes or P. G. Bahn, more recently) have emphasized the formal and thematic proximity to Espalungue-Arudy, Enlène, or Mas d’Azil. Do the outlines of animal heads recently found by J. Fortea in La Viña cave (Asturias) also come from Isturitz or another Pyrenean site? No intermediate evidence of such works is known the two sites, more than four hundred kilometers apart.
There is evidence that some of the decorated areas inside caves were visited: there are footprints (often those of children) crossing these chambers or stopping in front of decorated panels (in the Clastres network at Niaux or at Fontanet, both in the Pyrenees), as well as remains of torches or food discarded by those occasional visitors. According to those who study the modeled figures at Montespan, they were surrounded by numerous footprints impressed in the muddy floor. In the Enlène–Trois Frères speleological complex, fragments of stalactites and animal bones were arranged as if marking routes toward certain decorated panels; next to the decorated galleries of Erberua there is a widened area where fires were lit and habitation must have occurred. In Erberua itself, some bone fragments were inserted into wall fissures near engraved or painted areas, as is also noted at Trois-Frères. There is an area near the first group of figures at Haristoi where someone broke off a piece of stalagmitic formation. In these cases from the Pyrenean region, it is certain that such visits and actions occurred during phases of the Upper Paleolithic and are related to the rock art panels. The precise motive for these visits, however, remains unknown.
Among the opinions that justified the meaning of rock art as a means of propitiating the hunt, reference was made to the presence of weapons or wounds outlined on figures representing animals to be captured. In fact, there are very few cases in which such references to weapons or wounds can be assured: for example, a horse at Ekain with a conventional “arrow,” some pieces of portable art from Isturitz, or poorly organized marks associated with animal representations at Altxerri. Such allusions are absent in the majority of sanctuaries and figures. In two nearby Pyrenean caves, representations of fearsome animals (bears and perhaps lions) covered with pecking marks or notches and with lines that appeared to wound them were studied by H. Breuil and H. Bégouën; one bear from Trois-Frères even s lines emerging from its nostrils and mouth, as if expressing the vomiting of blood from a badly wounded animal. At Altxerri there is a bison figure almost entirely crossed out by lines and by pecking of the rock surface on which it was drawn. L. R. Nougier and R. Robert, in their various monographs on the portable art of the Pyrenean cave of La Vache, have insisted on the ritual meaning that must be assumed in view of the frequent breakage affecting, almost atically, most of these portable works, according to a process of destruction and abandonment of the image that can be traced in the behavior of some present-day primitive groups.
Without deciding on the plausibility of this hypothesis, one may recall the extreme degree of fragmentation of many of the slabs from the Magdalenian huts of Gönnersdorf (in western Germany), or, closer to home, the breakage of the two larger pieces of the great bison outline (found in the two chambers of Isturitz), the several fragments of the Urtiaga slab (dispersed through some 35 cm of deposit), the seven fragments recovered from that of Ekain (in several horizontal squares), or the two parts of the tube from Torre. I do not know, of course, to what extent such breakage should be attributed to ritual intent or whether it is rather the result of frequent trampling on floors where these objects had been left abandoned.
Other forms of ritual behavior in the Upper Paleolithic
“There is very abundant evidence ing that, from its earliest moments, Homo sapiens (or its immediate predecessor) behaves like recent humans”
(Leroi-Gourhan 1971: 143–144).
Such evidence is of interest to religion as well as to technology, dwelling, art, and adornment, creating—by contrast with the preceding period (the “early” Paleolithic)—an intellectual environment in which we broadly recognize ourselves. In his recommended synthesis on religions in Paleolithic prehistory, Leroi-Gourhan insists that their most immediate reference is expressed through the complex repertoire of figures and signs in art: “in a sanctuary, a certain image of the universal order is symbolized through animal or human images.” It is precisely there that a complex ritual apparatus must have taken place, about which archaeological literature throughout the century has produced many suggestive essays of a paleoethnographic nature, lacking the desired certainty of solid documentary support.
“One may reasonably suppose,” wrote Leroi-Gourhan (1971:149), “that the walls of the decorated chambers of caves may have witnessed very picturesque scenes of enchantments and magic, perhaps of human sacrifices and acts of ritual cannibalism, and even hierogamic practices. Nothing that is humanly conceivable within this mental framework is implausible, but the documentation cannot demonstrate it without excessive distortion.”
The decorations of portable art and elements of personal adornment, the arrangement of certain materials in carefully prepared deposits, and the treatment of the remains of the dead must all be referred to equally important facets of that complex and still poorly understood domain of beliefs. The taste for personal adornment, already traceable in the Middle Paleolithic, is a generalized attitude with very diverse expressions among Upper Paleolithic human groups. It is accepted that Neanderthals must have painted their bodies, and finds of coloring materials in Mousterian archaeological contexts are not rare; however, the use of colors and adornment objects as an attitude characteristic of Homo sapiens sapiens of the Upper Paleolithic is distinctive and—according to C. Couraud—constitutes an exclusive trait of the human species, expressing highly elaborated tastes and reflections of a frankly “modern” nature. It is not uncommon to find, in burials of the period, balls or powder of red ochre sprinkled (or charcoal remains) as if coating the bones, which logically would have undergone reburial (or redeposition) after the corpses had decomposed. It is also likely that, as among many present-day hunter-gatherers, Upper Paleolithic people used these coloring substances for body painting. Colors had to be sought out and selected, prepared by grinding and dissolving them in fats, resins, or organic fluids—activities carried out under certain circumstances (social, temporary, hierarchical, etc.) and accompanied by a certain ceremonial apparatus.
Many pieces of portable art—in antler, bone, ivory, shells, or stone—must also have been intended for personal ornamentation. Small parts of the animal skeleton (teeth, vertebrae, shells) were commonly used, provided with the necessary perforations or notches for threading and suspension in series. At Duruthy (Landes), a man buried in the Magdalenian wore a necklace made of more than half a hundred bear and lion teeth, perforated and carefully engraved with figures of fish, “arrows,” and even a seal. At the Barma Grande of Grimaldi (near Monaco), the skeleton of an adolescent had the skull covered with trout vertebrae, shells, and red deer canines; the same accumulation was ed around the neck, wrists, ankles, waist, and knees, undoubtedly testifying to bracelets, necklaces, headdresses, belts, garters, and the like. The presence of perforated pendants is frequent in our Franco-Cantabrian sites from the very beginnings of the Upper Paleolithic. As examples, one may cite the series excavated by G. Laplace at Gatzarria: perforated fox canines (in levels of Archaic, Typical, and Middle Aurignacian), perforated atrophied red deer canines (in the Typical Aurignacian), or steatite beads (Archaic and Typical Aurignacian). In the Typical Aurignacian (level A) at Isturitz, E. Passemard recovered abundant fragments of iron oxide scraped and worn through use by rubbing. Color grinders, containers for holding and mixing pigments (geodes and stones with hollows, bone cavities, large shells), “pencils” of ochre or manganese, and similar items are commonly recovered in our excavations.
The few representations of the human figure in the art of the period almost always introduce some deforming element that seems to prevent precise identification, thus contrasting these representations with the animals depicted with striking realism. It is customary for the human figure (“anthropomorphs,” in generally accepted terminology) to be n nude and with intentional alterations of the head and face: either some basic features (eyes, mouth, ears) are absent, or the fronto-nasal profile or the opening of the mouth is exaggerated and distorted. In exceptional cases, some elements of body adornment seem to have been suggested: with due reservation, one might point to the supposed necklace, wristband, and anklet on a small bone figurine from the Middle Magdalenian of Isturitz, or the apparent feather on the head of an anthropomorph on the Final Magdalenian bone from Torre.
In 1921, E. Passemard found in the Typical Aurignacian of Isturitz what he quite rightly described as “the oldest known musical instrument” (Passemard 1924:24): a kind of flute made from a bird bone broken at one end, still bearing a single row of three large holes. Other similar later finds at Isturitz itself and at other European sites—such tubes interpreted as flutes or smaller pieces considered whistles (at La Paloma in Asturias, for example)—support a reasonable interpretation of these objects as being used both for everyday purposes (“hunting calls,” “play,” etc.) and in rites and ceremonies.
In the Cantabrian cave of El Juyo, from the Lower Magdalenian, accumulations of archaeological elements of an apparently exceptional nature have been identified: these are ordinary materials in themselves (lithic and bone industries, workshop remains, bone fragments), but apparently arranged in an organized manner in significant concentrations. The “sanctuary” and the “offering pits” of El Juyo are similar accumulations of materials that are often identified in excavations of Upper Paleolithic sites. At Erralla, two of these “ritual deposits” have been defined: they rest on the sterile basal level and consist of red deer antlers and specific sets of faunal remains (goat legs, mollusks) and artifacts (two square-sectioned spear points), with no lithic tools at all. Other striking concentrations of elements, in pockets or as accumulative deposits, have been reported from the Cantabrian cave of El Castillo (a group of spear points) and from the Gipuzkoan caves of Ermittia (backed bladelets) and Ekain (in a small pit), among others. In the Pyrenean region, French prehistorians have also recorded some of these exceptional deposits, such as the so-called “flint gallery” of Mas d’Azil studied by the Saint-Just Pécquart couple, or the “horse sanctuary” identified by R. Arambourou at Duruthy, with abundant references to that animal.
Upper Paleolithic funerary rites are fairly well known from various assemblages excavated in the Dordogne and other regions of Central and Eastern Europe, but burials from this period are not abundant in the Pyrenees or Cantabria. Particularly noteworthy is the grave discovered in 1914 at Duruthy, with an important deposit of adornment elements associated with the corpse. Also of great interest is the set of remains identified by J. González Echegaray and L. G. Freeman in Morín Cave (province of Cantabria), where the buried individuals were accompanied by offerings of meat, sprinkled with pigment, and, in one case, decapitated. Of particular importance are the various traces of treatment observed on some human remains from Isturitz. In the advanced Gravettian level, the Saint-Périers found a nearly complete mandible (from a man about 20 to 30 years old) ing evidence of having been manipulated, according to the careful study carried out by H. V. Vallois: the ascending ramus had been partially ablated “as if there had been an intention to extract long bone splinters from it,” and it also displayed horizontal or oblique striations on its anterior part. The same type of intentional striations was observed on two mandibles from the same level: one from a child aged 7 or 8, and another from a child aged 2.5 to 3. The closest parallels for such grooves and wear are those observed on many animal bone splinters—the so-called “defleshing marks,” left on fresh bone by flint tools used to remove flesh or trim tendons and muscle masses. Were the marks on the human bones from Isturitz made to clean the mandibles of the flesh that covered them and thus ensure better preservation? Or do they instead reveal anthropophagic practices? R. de Saint-Périer (1936:53–54) noted in the Magdalenian of the Great Hall of Isturitz a possible fragment of human skull, classifiable among the so-called “cup-skulls”: it bears scraping marks from stone tools on both faces and an edge completely worn smooth by polishing.
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