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6.3 the Recognition of Cave Art in the Iberian Peninsula and the Making of Prehistoric Archeology, 1878-1929

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6.3 the Recognition of Cave Art in the Iberian Peninsula and the Making of Prehistoric Archeology, 1878-1929 6.3 The Recognition of Cave Art in the Iberian Peninsula and the Making of Prehistoric Archeology, 1878-1929 José María LanzaroTe-Guiral In May 1921, the Exhibition of Spanish Prehistoric Art (Exposición de arte pre- histórico español) opened its doors in Madrid. Hosted by the National Library and inaugurated by King Alphonse XIII, the exhibition presented prehistoric cave art as the first chapter of the Spanish art tradition, placing the peninsula at the cultural origins of Western civilization. This exhibition was conceived of to showcase the work undertaken by Spanish scholars in this field since 1902, when cave art was recognized as such by the international scientific community. Moreover, the organizers did not miss the chance to highlight that it was ‘foreign’ prehistorians, particularly French ones, who had first denied the authenticity of those figurative representations discovered in a Spanish cave in 1878. Inspired by an essentialist conception of national history, this exhibition contributed to define a constructed object of study, ‘Spanish prehistoric art’, which was elevated to the status of national heritage and played a strong role for national identity definition from then on. In order to better understand the role of cave art research in the making of prehistoric archeology I shall deconstruct this hybrid object: What was the in- tellectual and social process that led to the definition of ‘Spanish prehistoric art’? And in order to answer this question, this paper is concerned with the process of configuration of scientific categories and it is divided in two main sections. The first one analyzes the construction of the concept ‘prehistoric art’ between 1878 and 1902, paying particular attention to the Altamira affair, namely the discov- ery, early rejection and definitive recognition of the first prehistoric decorated cave. In a chronological continuity, the second part is devoted to the social and intellectual making of Spanish prehistory in the first decades of the twentieth century. As I shall demonstrate, this process is marked by a strong drive for the nationalization of humanities and sciences fostered by state initiative, which materialized in the creation of research institutions and the organization of public exhibitions. 360 José María Lanzarote-Guiral In analyzing this process, this paper reflects the role of cultural transfers across European borders in the shaping of cognate disciplines such as prehistory, anthropology and art history. It also analyzes from a comparative perspective the contribution of those different fields of study to the making of ‘national heritage’. Combining these approaches, I use the case of prehistoric cave art to argue in favor of a histoire croisée of the humanities.1 The question of cave art and the making of prehistory The origins of prehistory as a field of study are marked by two dates; after its ‘birth’ commonly designated as dating from 1859, when a critical sector of the scientific community arrived at a consensus on the deep antiquity of humanity,2 in 1867 the new field of study was presented in Paris at the Exposition Universelle. In- between those two dates a community of ‘prehistorians’ began to form and become aware of itself through the creation of institutions such as museums for vernacular antiquities, specialized periodicals and a stable pattern of international congresses. Borrowing methods and theoretical grounding from natural and historical sci- ences, those self-proclaimed prehistorians established the foundations of a new discipline.3 Due to its relevance for the question of human origins, prehistory was suspected of heterodoxy and associated with evolutionary anthropology; it be- came enmeshed in philosophical, social and political debates, particularly on the role of science and religion in society. All these elements were present in the con- troversy about Altamira representations that emerged in the late 1870s. The cave of Altamira was discovered in 1878 by Marcelino Sanz de Sautu- ola (1831-1888), a local erudite scholar from Santander in Northern Spain. The cave contained depictions of cold faunal species such as European bison, which were technically remarkable; they were naturalistic, in some cases adapted to the irregular surface of the rock adding a three-dimensional effect and had been ex- ecuted with a combination of colors, a range of pigments using carbon and ochre. The similarity of these representations with the engravings on stratigraphically dated Paleolithic objects that Sanz de Sautuola had seen in Paris at the Exposi- tion Universelle in 1878, led him to conclude that the paintings also dated back to the Stone Age.4 Subsequently Sanz de Sautuola informed the scientific institutions in Spain about his discovery and he got the support of Juan de Vilanova (1821-1893), chair of geology at the University of Madrid. In line with his Catholic beliefs and crea- tionist standpoint, Vilanova considered the representations as the first examples of fine art produced by men, and therefore the proof that humanity was created by God with full intellectual and spiritual capacities. Vilanova decided to present The Making of Prehistoric Archeology 361 the new discovery to the international community at the International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archaeology to be celebrated in September 1880 in Lisbon. However, the Altamira paintings met with skepticism from the majority of the congressmen and the discussion on this cave was set aside in favor of other debates, such as the question of the Tertiary man. In the following years, Vilanova tried to raise the issue in several scientific meetings, but again he met with skepticism. Finally, an article published in the pages of Matériaux, the leading journal in the field, at the time directed by Émile Cartailhac (1845-1922), settled the question: the paintings could not date back to the Paleolithic, so they had to be a forgery.5 As he revealed years later, Car- tailhac followed the advice of his mentor, the leader of the materialist school within French anthropology, Gabriel de Mortillet (1821-1898), who suspected that Altamira’s paintings had been planted by Spanish Creationist scholars in order to trick French prehistorians. In the hands of De Mortillet, prehistory became a weapon of social combat, as it was brandished in an attempt to reduce the influence of religious ideas in society and advance the cause of materialist philosophy.6 Moreover, this rejection can be explained by a combination of scientific and social factors. First of all, De Mortillet’s interpretations were influenced by uni- linear evolutionary anthropology, which led him to think that prehistoric men, as modern ‘primitive peoples’, did not possess symbolic thinking and therefore were not capable of producing fine art. Secondly, even for those scholars who did not share his viewpoint, the idea of prehistoric art was hard to conceive of, even if some prehistoric objects that had been found in caves did have natu- ralistic representations. These were considered just ornamental depictions on tools at best, comparable to ‘crafts’ but not to high forms of fine art. In the eyes of nineteenth-century specialists, Altamira representations were either ‘art’ for their technical proficiency or ‘prehistoric’ for their location and what they rep- resented, but could not be both; the combination of those categories at the time was unthinkable.7 In 1870 the French scientific divulgator Louis Figuier (1819-1894) had pub- lished a plate titled ‘The Forerunners of Raphael and Michelangelo’ [Fig. 6]; al- most as a caricature, even if it was not intended as such, the illustrator Émile- Antoine Bayard (1837-1891) presents two sitting sculptors carving statuettes, whereas a third standing figure is drawing a reindeer on a rock slab. Interestingly, this figure fits the stereotype of the artist in Western tradition as a painter in front of the easel. This was the way most nineteenth-century scholars thought of art: as a noble activity, born out of genius and creativity and formally based on mimesis. Neither this illustration, born from the imagination of a nineteenth- century scientific divulgator and a contemporary artist (which was soon to be 362 José María Lanzarote-Guiral Fig. 6: Émile-Antoine Bayard, The Forerunners of Raphaël and Michelangelo, or the Birth of the Arts of Drawing and Sculpture in the Reindeer Age, engraving from Louis Figuier, L’Homme primitif (Paris, 1870, first edition) The Making of Prehistoric Archeology 363 contested by the leading prehistorians of the time), nor the depictions from the Altamira cave, met with the idea that the scholars of the time could expect from the ‘primitive’ men of prehistory.8 The Altamira affair was settled for some years until new decorated caves were discovered in France, starting in 1885. Little by little the consensus was challenged, and finally in 1902 Cartailhac, one of the scholars that had most prominently denied the authenticity of Altamira, pronounced his mea culpa.9 His change in opinion was grounded in the redefinition of prehistory’s social and scientific cre- dentials, and the shift in its epistemological paradigm after the turn of the centu- ry. The unilinear evolutionism cherished by the materialist school was gradually substituted by the cultural-history paradigm, which led to an acknowledgement of regional differences within the archeological record.10 This, coupled with new approaches in the history of religion, led to a reappraisal of the intellectual and symbolic
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