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The Three Lives of Altamira and the Future: Becoming a Place Again Version 1.5.0, Revision 7 17Th October 2017 ∙ 09:30

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The Three Lives of Altamira and the Future: Becoming a Place Again Version 1.5.0, Revision 7 17Th October 2017 ∙ 09:30 The three lives of Altamira and the future: becoming a place again version 1.5.0, revision 7 17th October 2017 ∙ 09:30 David Barreiro, Felipe Criado‐Boado, Virtudes Téllez, Cristina Sánchez‐Carretero and Eva Parga‐Dans Introduction In this paper we aim to propose certain ideas for an alternative management regime for a heritage site at risk: the cave of Altamira. The cave, located in the north of the Iberian Peninsula, hosts a valuable collection of rock art: “Bison, horses, deer, hands and mysterious symbols were painted or engraved during the millennia when the cave of Altamira was inhabited, between 36,000 and 13,000 years ago. These representations are spread throughout the cave, [but] are concentrated in the Polychrome Room.” The foundations of our arguments are the results of the Project on the Social Value of Altamira, led by the Incipit‐CSIC, within the framework of the Research Programme for the Preventive Conservation and Access Regime for the Cave of Altamira, which was carried out between 2012 and 2014, with the support of the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, with Gaël de Guichen (ICCROM) as the scientific director. Starting Point: Altamira in crisis In the 1970s colonies of bacteria endangering the conservation of the cave paintings were detected. Taking the case of Lascaux (closed in 1963) as a precedent, the provisional closure of the cave was decreed in 1977 while scientific studies were carried out in order to determine its state of conservation. In 1982 the cave was reopened but the number of visitors was reduced from more than 150,000 people per year to 11,320. In 1991, José Antonio Lasheras, who sadly passed away in a road accident two years ago, became the director of Altamira. José Antonio was fundamental in the adoption of a new strategy, for which he worked from the moment he occupied his position, including the construction of a totally new museum and a replica conceived as a exhibition structure to provide educational information on the cave. Therefore, the decision was taken to build a replica which recreated the original conditions and artificially lowered the floor of the cave so that visitors could move around freely and contemplate the paintings. What very few people know is that the replica was conceived to work in parallel with the original cave. The idea was to provide all the practical information about the cave in the replica in order to shorten the visit to the original cave, which the visitors would subsequently see in order to have the sensory and emotional experience of the original. The new museum opened in 2001. However, in 2002, faced with the appearance of new signs of contamination, the 1 foundation responsible for the cave (the Altamira Cave Trust) took the decision to provisionally close the cave. The subsequent studies and the complications of the possible solutions prolonged this closure. Over time, pressure grew, particularly on the part of the regional government of Cantabria, supported by the interests of the tourist industry and the demands of the community, for the cave to be reopened. This pressure became especially intense between 2010 and 2012. However, the majority of specialists and the nationwide media were against the idea. In 2012, in an attempt to break the deadlock, the above‐mentioned Research Programme for the Preventive Conservation and Access Regime for the Cave of Altamira (hereafter, the Programme) was launched. This programme had the aim of generating data which would allow those responsible for the site (declared as a World Heritage Site in 1984, which was broadened in 2008 to include 17 other caves along the Cantabrian Coast) to take an informed decision regarding public access to the site: “it was a question of evaluating the incidence of the current natural dynamics of the cave, the impact of human presence on the conservation of the cave and its paintings, defining the access protocols for researchers and occasional visitors and designing the steps to be taken for preventive conservation” (Guichen 2014a: 9). As part of this programme, the Incipit carried out a study on the Social Value of Altamira, with the aim of characterising Altamira as a social phenomenon in different dimensions and on different levels, in order to better assess the transcendence and relevance of the decisions which would have to be taken. The results of this research are what feed the ideas in this paper and can be consulted in detail in the 'Colección Proyecto Valor Social de Altamira', in the open‐access institutional repository Digital.CSIC (https://digital.csic.es/handle/10261/112860). The Three Lives of Altamira: Heritagization across the 20th Century What is now known as the Cave of Altamira was, during the Upper Paleolithic, part of a living space. The cave probably had the role of an aggregation site, with a high degree of symbolic significance and a peculiar topography which, paradoxically, leads it to be “close to the sky”. Even in the prehistoric age, it surely had its own identity, thus we can interpret it as a place (an encounter between multiple spatial scales and temporal trajectories, in the sense described by Doreen Massey). This prehistoric life is what we understand as its first life. 13,000 years ago, the wide entrance to the cave, which was open, collapsed, plunging the cave into a long state of lethargy, distancing it from the succession of diverse cultural horizons, for which it did not exist. Thus, it stopped possessing an identity and stopped being a “place”. We call this long period of “social non‐existence” the second life of Altamira. The third life of Altamira is its contemporary existence. This began when the cave was discovered and reintroduced into the human‐social world. This life has passed through two distinct stages (life 3.1 and life 3.2). Our research on these lives has enabled us to identify the problems posed by each one and the conflicts with the identity of the site which have arisen. Upon this basis, we propose that Altamira needs to experience a new life, a future life which is different to all the others, as we believe should also occur with many other WH sites and, indeed, with any archaeological site which undergoes an enhancement process. 2 Altamira´s Life 3.1: Monument At the end of the 19th century, the discovery of the cave (in 1868) and of the paintings (in 1879) constituted the return to social life of what came to be known as the Cave of Altamira. The subordinate condition of Spain with regard to the more powerful countries of the north of Europe (in this case, France) led to the authenticity of the cave not being certified until 1902, when Émile Cartailhac published his article entitled La grotte d’Altamira, Espagne. "Mea culpa" d’un sceptique. From the very moment of its discovery, Altamira was affected by the political and economic vicissitudes of the State responsible for it (Spain), whilst at the same time becoming a relevant entity on local, regional, national and international levels. The history of the management and adaptation of the cave for visitors is an intricate and controversial tale. During the initial stage (up to the 1920s), the cave was managed by the local council of Santillana del Mar but the problems caused by the cave's deterioration demanded rehabilitation work which proved too costly for the council. Thus, the management (though not the ownership) passed to the hands of the State, personified in the Duke of Alba, who was the president of the Consejo Superior de Excavaciones y Antigüedades (the High Council for Excavations and Antiquities) and a friend of King Alfonso XIII (1902‐1931). It was he who presided the Management Board (to which the local authorities also belonged). In 1925, an access road was already in existence, the museum was already open (including the hut for the warden of the cave) and an initial project for adapting the cave for visitors was put into action. Altamira was also declared a national monument. In this way, the cave became a national symbol, just like other archaeological elements (such as Numancia), which supposedly harked back to a glorious national past. This process was reinforced by the prominence of Alfonso XIII who, during the 1920s, usually spent the summer in Santander and visited the cave every year. Following the republican interval (1931‐1939), during which all national monuments came to be known as historical‐artistic monuments (a title maintained until 1985), the cave was almost destroyed by the Condor Legion (which bombarded first Santander and then Guernica, among other places) during the Civil War but was saved via the mediation of a Francoist commander. Altamira's status as a symbol was reinforced after the war, with the creation of the Board of Trustees of the Cave of Altamira in 1940, which depended on Madrid. After 1944, the local authorities were no longer represented on the Board of Trustees. The Franco regime attributed a great deal of importance to this heritage site and the nationalist ideology supported itself on its symbolic dimension, whilst reinforcing it and assuming complete control of its management. As Spain emerged from the postwar depression and the years of development began, thanks to its dissemination in the media, to the generalisation of means of transport and to the growing mobility of the emerging middle class as far as tourism was concerned, the number of visitors grew each year. Between 1955 and 1973, the number of annual visits increased from 55,000 to 173,000 as large and small works were carried out in order to make the site more appropriate for visitors and to attempt to slow down the symptoms of deterioration which were beginning to be detected.
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