Kodiak Haakansons: caves

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Santillana Del Mar, Spain

A finished bull

Charcoal outline

Altamira, November 23rd- We headed out early so we could have time in Altamira, Spain where the famous cave of the bulls was found and where now there is a museum and cave reconstruction devoted to the find. The drive was stunning, past farms and hills and tunnels through mountains. We drove from about 1,010 meters to nearly sea level in the last 30 minutes of our 3 hour drive. As we drove into Santillana Del Mar and to our beautiful Hotel Colegiata we all breathed a sigh of relief (and Eilidh spotted a monkey puzzle!). The hotel looked out over the quaint medieval town and over a field with cows and horses. The yard was filled with birds and the room was full of character. We were all hungry from the drive and didn’t feel like searching out a restaurant so we headed downstairs towards the wonderful smells. We ordered 2 3 course meals and split some very nice entrees but were overjoyed to see a chocolate mousse and a decadent chocolate pie for an early birthday celebration. The nice thing for me was the robust red wine that came with the meal as well as the surprise complimentary two glasses of champagne- so hard to take one for the team and drink them up!

Happy and goofy, we all headed straight out to the Altamira museum, just a 5 minute drive away. We were the only people in the museum for most of the time- a splendid feeling. The cave reconstruction was nice (better than not seeing the cave at all) and interpretive but it did seem a little Disney-esque. The museum was more child-friendly than most prehistoric museums that we have visited, offering some chances for the kids to experiment with early forms of musical instruments and to see the step-by-step way in which the caves were painted (first carving a form into the rock, then using charcoal to outline the form, then ochre paint to fill in the forms). There were a couple cute cartoons for the kids which involved grunting Paleolithic families which made us roll our eyes but allowed the kids to realize that the society that created these paintings were normal with regular family dynamics.

Sven liked the way that the cave reconstruction was interpretive and realistic at the same time. As we walked into the cave we were able to view through a window what the cave entrance must have looked like (low open entrance before an earthquake sealed the cave off for 18,000 years), then we wound our way through an interpretive scene of archaeological work in progress, a diorama of a family around a fire (looking Spanish) and then to the wide open space where the bulls adorned the ceiling. As we had the room to ourselves we just laid ourselves out on the floor to relax and to sketch.

The strange and elusive monkey puzzle tree.

View over Santillana from our hotel.

tickets for Altamira museum

After Altamira we decided to explore Santillana Del Mar a bit, having read about how popular of a destination it is. We got ourselves a map and walked around the town, enjoying the peace and quiet. You could see the infrastructure in the town to accommodate summer tourists (there was room in the car park for 20 buses and 50 cars but when we parked our car there were only 4 other groups of tourists). All of us decided later that this stop was one of the highpoints of the trip, maybe because of the timing and how good it felt to be in a small town, but also because of the wonderful sights:
-The medieval church Collegiata functioned hundreds of years ago as a monastery. Now you enter through a very inauspicious entrance into a quiet, low-lying, stunning cloister decorated with Celtic designs and then into the simple (yet massive) church. Through the church and up some stairs we explored a beautiful illuminated manuscript exhibit and Sven was excited to discover a large page (probably a couple hundred years old and used for proselytizing) filled with the lord’s prayer in at least 25 languages, including Navajo, Apache, Haida and even Alutiiq in Cyrillic text.
-The villages’ winding medieval streets were gorgeous and full of character, lined with high walls (and mostly closed doors). Near the church we saw a gushing stream overflowing down a narrow street which made us stop and marvel, also allowing us to notice an exhibit in an old stone building that floored us. Jesus Otero’s sculptures, both stone and wood, featured Altamira-inspired sculptures of animals and religious subjects. His sculptures were sensitive and thoughtful, and all was made better by the fact that we walked around in the space in total quiet through the garden in the gentle mist. For dinner we did the usual thing- walk around for an hour looking for something that served dinner and was non-smoking. In this town there was just nothing open, and when we drove to the next town we finally gave up on finding a non-smoking place and ate burgers in a little smoky place before heading home to bed. Happy to be in the country...

The abbey cloister.

The work of Jesus Otero

Monday, October 11, 2010

Font-de-Gaume and Abri de Cap-Blanc

Unknown geometric design

Font-de-Gaume
Our first day in the Dordogne region, being a Sunday, we had to get up early (unfortunately) to visit the grocery store (only open for 3 hours on Sundays we found out last Sunday to our hunger and disappointment) and make out 10:30 appointment at the Font-de-Gaume cave. Font-de-Gaume was a cave I had never heard of but before leaving Kodiak I ran into someone who had visited this region 10 years ago and recommended it, so I emailed and asked for an appointment. Come to find out, tickets are very hard to arrange as they only allow 180 people into the cave each day- AND its the last cave (in the world!) with paleolithic paintings that is open to the public! Most think it will be closed in the next ten years. Even Lascaux has been closed to the public (people's breath raised the temperature and moisture level of the cave to a point that was eroding the art work). We felt very lucky... even two months ago there was only one tour with spots available!

The cave was absolutely incredible! It was something like 120 meters long and 4 stories high, although there were times we had to duck around stalagtites, and our guide informed us that the very back part of the cave is so narrow that it is impossible not to touch the walls, and the top part of the cave narrows to just a few centimeters in spots. Apparently, the cave is covered with 230 figures, although archaeologists believe many more will be discovered. There are 80 bison, 40 horses, and more than 20 mammoths paintings. Our favorite- 2 reindeer, one (female probably) laying on the ground, and another (male, most likely) standing over her licking her head. All of the animals found (in all cave paintings around the world) are depicted sensitively, never fighting or being butchered. There are no people or wildlife, or even mountains or streams, depicted in the cave- only animals. And they are nearly 15,000 years old, which is mind-boggling. The other amazing fact about the art in the cave is that much of it is properly 3-dimensional, which is something that WE did not figure out how to do until the Renaissance- 600 years ago! Not just this, but they also employ twisted perspective in a few of the images (showing a side view of the animal with a full frontal face, for example) which is something that Picasso played around with in cubism in the early 1900s and allows the viewer to view the subject from multiple perspectives.

Another aspect that we found interesting is contextual. Our guide, Jean-Marie, commented on how little we can say for sure about the caves since it is so obviously pre-written history. We don't know why the paintings were created or by whom. But what we do know is that people did not live in these caves and that they are artistically very advanced. When we view the paintings in textbooks and as seen in photos they look flat, but as we walked through the dark cave we saw (as pointed out by our guide) that the drawings actually conform to the natural texture and shape of the cave walls. And of course the original art would not be seen by flashlight or floodlight (similar to how we've seen photographs of the area)... Jean-Marie commented that when lit from below (like a fire, as the original light source would have been) that the animals appear to move through the cave, and the dark recesses are heavily shadowed. What a dream it was to see this amazing site!

Buffalo frieze.

(previous photographs taken from Font de Gaume website. No photos allowed inside.)

Waiting for the tour to start.

Nearby town of Les Eyzies. Wow!

After a quick lunch of traditional Dordogne foods (cassoulet and a nut tart) we headed to yet another cave, this one lined with sculpture that would have been painted (horses, buffalo, etc).

By this time the kids and Balika were pretty burned out but luckily this was the one weekend of the year when they offered activities for kids, so we were saved for a little while by watching an archaeologist start a fire using traditional methods (flint and iron oxide sparking shaved mushrooms then stuck inside a bundle of dry grass), make spear points and bone needles. Sven got stuck for a while with a wonderful retired archaeologist who showed the kids how to make goat fur bracelets and wooden needles, then we all got involved in engraving slate (except Bubbe who played Scrabble on her ipad). It was a bit much for the girls' brains and short attention span but Sven was in paleolithic heaven! And the cave's carved animals was really quite touching.