| TO BE OR NOT TO BE PALAEOLITHIC |
 TO BE OR NOT TO
BE PALAEOLITHICPetroglyphs of supposedly Palaeolithic style have been discovered in Cueva del Moro, a rockshelter near Tarifa in Cádiz, at the southernmost tip of Spain. Lothar Bergmann reports this find in Almoraina (No.13, April 1995), describing the images of a large-bellied, near-complete horse and two horse heads as being of the 'linear style of the Upper Palaeolithic' (see also Revista de Arqueologia of January 1996). Sergio Ripoll López, the principal researcher of the large site complex of Domingo García in the Northern Meseta of Spain, has examined the new find and confirms its authenticity as 'Palaeolithic', but he nominates as its age only 8000 years. There are also some red paintings in the same shelter, whose exact location is not disclosed for the art's protection. The horse figure is reminiscent of horse petroglyphs at other sites across the Iberian Peninsula, notably in the Côa valley of northern Portugal. Ripoll López is one of the many European rock art researchers who regard all these sites as Palaeolithic, and often as 20 000 years old. The direct dating evidence of some overseas researchers points to a Holocene age of the Côa art, and although it is universally rejected by European Palaeolithic art experts, this finding seems to have begun to shake their confidence. Ripoll L. had attributed the similar Domingo García figures to the late Solutrean shortly before the Côa affair. The most likely explanation for the naturalistic, Palaeolithic-like petroglyph traditions on the Iberian Peninsula is simple, but in the highly polarised and jingoistic debate so far generated by this topic it has remained ignored. It is known that in parts of the Peninsula, an essentially Palaeolithic style of economy continued through to about 8000 years BP. The last 2500 years of that duration is then labelled the Epipalaeolithic. It seems perfectly possible that a style resembling classical Palaeolithic art styles could have continued well into the Holocene. The one most striking feature of the western European rock art of the Pleistocene is how readily modern Europeans relate to it: it resembles closely the perception and artistic preference of contemporary Europeans, even their preferred ways of depicting, say, animal figures. This phenomenon has never been explained satisfactorily, and it would be rather nonsensical to seek some phylogenetic explanation for it. Europe has experienced enormous demographic changes over the past ten millennia, and it is not possible to relate any present ethnic group to some definable Pleistocene ancestry. But there is another possibility, related to the context of the Australian longevity of artistic universals. The most outstanding characteristic of rock art is its near-permanence in a natural landscape. It could act as a long-term cultural determinant, not just within a given culture or society, but even cross-culturally, between cultures that had no actual contact. It could simply operate at the level of iconographic or stylistic communication. When this possibility is applied to the Iberian context it means that the use of an artistic genre could survive across cultural boundaries simply by its powers of communication. Pictures may have been retouched, as often happens in rock art traditions, and the styles of previous occupants of a region may become incorporated in the iconographies of new cultures which relate to pre-existing rock art by regarding it as super-natural. We know for instance that in Australia, all rock art not created by the Aborigines was made by beings of the Dreamtime, 'when the rocks were still soft'. In the case in Spain, these open sites could show how Palaeolithic stylistic traits survived into modern times in European artistic preferences, and thus explain the otherwise inexplicable affinity Europeans feel for their Pleistocene rock art. If this were the right explanation for the Iberian open air sites, it would not only in one breath explain several phenome-na, it would elevate the sites in question to considerably greater importance than that bestowed by a Pleistocene antiquity. It would tell us that European artistic cognition and stylistic perception are rooted in Palaeolithic imagery, not because Europeans are necessarily connected to the peoples of the Palaeolithic period culturally, but because they are heirs to that period's perception of Gestalts in the visual reality. In other words, Europeans might have been conditioned by the use of Palaeolithic art to process visual information in a similar way. We need to consider the very strong possibility, that in the first several millennia of the Holocene, Late Palaeolithic rock art would have been widely visible out of caves, thus providing visual templates of how objects 'are to be depicted'. During the course of the Holocene, rock art out of caves was gradually eradicated by taphonomic factors, and only in some regions have examples survived of traditions modelled essentially on Palaeolithic iconography. We know that, even in recent centuries, Palaeolithic rock art in caves was still known to local populations, and apparently even used by them. In 1458, Pope Calixtus III decreed that the religious ceremonies taking place in 'the cave with the horse pictures' in Spain had to cease. We do not know which cave he referred to, but Calixtus was a Borgia from Valencia, and the pictures were most probably of the Upper Palaeolithic. It was rather unfortunate for Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, the re-discoverer of Altamira, that by the 19th century, knowledge about the ancient cave pictures seems to have disappeared, and his find was rejected by archaeology for decades. We can assume, from other evidence world-wide, that the taphonomic threshold for rock art isnormally about 10 000 years. This means that after such a period, the surviving population has been reduced to a near-equilibrium population of close to nil even in the most favourable of climatic conditions. Rock art survives beyond the taphonomic threshold only under most unusual conditions, e.g. in deep caves, or under rock darnish and other mineral accretions. If we apply this rule of thumb to Europe, we find that Palaeolithic rock art outside caves may have survived until quite recently in some instances, in which case it may have profoundly influenced the artistic perception of more recent arrivals throughout much of the Holocene. Towards the late Holocene, this art body eventually disappeared entirely (except in deep caves), but not without leaving its legacy: the European way of experiencing iconographic veracity in art, the European sense of aesthetics, the European way of processing conditioned visual perception. This, in a nutshell, explains why Europeans feel such an empathy for Upper Palaeolithic art: their own visual experience of the physical world is ultimately derived from it. The Côa sites and others like them may be the evidence for this, if their scientific dating to the late Holocene were correct. That would make them outstandingly important. Robert G. Bednarik |
