Paleolithic Cave Painting
The caves id Altamira, Pech-Merle, Lascaux and other sites in prehistoric Europe are a few hundred to several thousand feet long.
They are often choked, sometimes almost impassably by deposits such as stalactites and stalagmites.
Far inside these caverns, well removed from the cave mouths early humans often choice for inhabitation, painters sometimes made pictures on the walls.
Examples of Paleolithic painting now have been found at more than 200 sites, but pre-historians still regard painted caves as rare occurrences, because images in them, even if they number in the hundreds were created over a period of some 10,000 to 20,000 years.
To illuminate the surfaces while working, the Paleolithic painters used stones lamps filled with marrow or fat, with a wick, perhaps, of moss.
For drawing, they used chunks of red and yellow ocher.
For painting, they ground these same ochers onto powders they mixed with water before applying.
The analyses of the pigments used show that Paleolithic painters employed many different minerals, attesting to a technical sophistication surprising at so early a date.
Large flat stones served as palletes. The painters made brushes from reeds, bristles, or twigs and may have used a blowpipe of reeds or hollow bones to spray pigments on out-of-reach surfaces.
Some caves have natural ledges on the rock walls upon which the painters could have stood in order to reach the upper surfaces of the naturally formed chambers and corridors.
On e Lascaux gallery has a holes in one of the walls that once probably anchored a scaffold made of saplings lashed together.
Despite the difficulty of making the tools and pigments, modern attempts at replicating the techniques of Paleolithic painting have demonstrated that skilled workers could cover large surfaces with images in less than a day.
Paleolithic Cave Painting
