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One autumn in 1879, the Spanish amateur archeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuloa and his young daughter, Maria, set out to explore a cave on the hillside of Altamira, not far from their family estate in the north of Spain. De Sautuloa had a genuine interest in investigating the deep past, and was exploring a cave which was already well known to the locals for a few years before. While De Sautuola was digging up the earthen floor of the cave, hoping to discover some prehistoric bones or tools, young Maria wondered off to explore a part of the cave system on her own. Suddenly she cried out to him.
"Papa. Look, oxen."
The caves of Altamira housed our early ancestors and took on sacred significance over their continuous inhabitation. Working with rudimentary tools in the deep dark of the caves, it is amazing even today what the prehistoric artists manifested. The ornamentation in their cave-dwelling is deeply person al, hauntingly beautiful and connected viscerally to their cultural lives.
On the main ceiling, a large bull measuring almost 3 metres in length is partially hidden under a polychrome bison.
There is an intimate interaction between the undulations of the rock ceiling at Altamira and the outlines of the animals. The outline of the forehead and the line of the belly closely follow natural cracks in the rock. It’s almost as if they saw the shapes in the rocks and used their art to tease out the contours. Altamira may well be the first powerful instance of the very human urge for interior design.
Amongst other human urges like architecture, art, language and expression, the cave was the proverbial crucible for culture. It definitely provided basic human survival needs and then went on to seed a wide variety of human cultural needs. South African rock paintings made by the ancestors of the Bushmen depict healers holding tasselled bags containing medicinal plants. Their drawings show power being received from the spirit world for creating rain and controlling game animals. In a discovery as recent as 2017, archaeologists discovered over 1,00,000 paintings in the Colombian Amazon, from which we now know that our ancient ancestors interacted with armadillos the size of cars, danced and engaged in various ceremonies, including bungee jumping.
The caves are still stunning as a rich documentation of lives lived all those millennia ago, serving as an invaluable portal to ancient lives and times. But what was life like in those caves? What was their home able to provide apart from the basic shelter? What did life in those caves enable? To speculate on those lives, let’s journey back to Altamira.
It is 20,000 BC. You’ve entered the cave of Altamira on a chilly evening. All around you is the biting cold of the European Ice Age. The remains of the day’s forage and last night’s hunt are strewn around. At the mouth of the cave, where you spent most of your childhood, some of your tribesmen are busy skinning hides, sitting around bone-fires and sharpening their tools. Children gambol under the watchful eyes of the elders. You are 16 summers old and have just ingested the Magic Root.
Your father leads you slowly and reassuringly through the complete blackness to the secret gallery. At times on your elbows, at times bumping along the sides, a tiny glow of oillamp light enters the far reaches of your vision. As you walk closer, this low humming sound. The deep rumble of a rubbed stretched Bison hide announces your entry. Father sprays a dark red paint on your face with his Bird bone airbrush. The Shaman is wearing the Bison Head. The Root has now taken hold of you.
A slow oil lamp is lit. Your vision sharpens. The Massive Auroch walks purposefully off the ceiling, peering into your eyes and shakes it’s charcoal mane, but it does not scare you. Its mane is matted with the blood of the hunt, and its smell consumes you. It tells you of the seasons of rutting, the herd’s movement, the winters that went by, and the summers yet to come.
Red deer and stags dance around the roof of the cave in flocks, twisting and turning around the contours of the Rock, animated by the flickering flame. The hands of the tribes touch you, you can hear their voices. They speak to you of responsibility, of magic, of the summers to come. You spend the night in the Cave, speaking to the animal spirits, listening to their voices, embraced by the Rock, warmed by the ceremonial fires.
It is convenient to look at the caves of Altamira as the work of brutish, proto-humans, working without light and with rudimentary instruments, sometimes scaling inaccessible rock faces, and often descending deep into cave systems to leave their marks. Around 22,000 years ago, these rudimentary cave dwellings served a potent purpose. The caves were a place for shelter, raising families, conducting rituals, consuming food and engaging in dances and shamanic initiations. The elaborate rock galleries had a deep significance to the tribes of humans who lived there. Over time, they absorbed massive artistic and autobiographical values, the significance of which we are still unravelling today.
A home for Deep memory
These dwellings, layered with successive artworks, may have served as an evolving record of the world outside. We have still not deciphered the meanings of all the symbols and graphic markings discovered, but some theories state that they may relate to the movements of herds, seasons, and other forms of record-keeping. The homes then became central to the survival and propagation of the tribe by serving as a medium for recording ancestral memory, shared stories, deep histories and learnings.
In the absence of deep mnemonic devices, the home in its physical sense contributed to ancestral memory, serving as a potent reminder of seasons of plenty, herd behaviours and all manner of coding that is now rendered opaque to our modern gaze. Shamans coded the home with patterns of seasonality, the movement and behaviour of predators and seasons. The home was an active participant in the day-to-day reality of its occupants.
The cave physically coded their learnings about the world around them, enabling the day-to-day survival of the tribe. What if the art we surround ourselves with served as documentation of our lives? Modern homes may then reimagine their place in our lives, serving as a record of our families, a home designed around our daily rituals, each uniquely autobiographical to our shared family values.
What codes may we programme into our homes today to keep us healthier, more agile, more observant of the world around us?
The Participation Mystique
Our ancestors belonged to a world that had not lost the elusive ‘Participation Mystique,’ described by the French Scholar Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. He posited that the minds of the ancients did not differentiate the supernatural from reality, rather used ‘mystical participation’ to navigate the world. Our ancient minds were uncontradicted, and the rich coding of the home environment was as much a product of the mind as it was a functional, safe dwelling.
Inaugurāre, ( Latin ) ’to take omens from the flight of birds,’ A confident rider, surrounded by birds of good omen ( 530-550 BC )
It’s interesting that we ‘inaugurate’ a home. The etymology of the word derives from the Latin word ‘inaugurare’ and is transferred from the French word inauguration. The word ultimately hails from the Latin verb, inaugurāre, ‘to take omens from the flight of birds,’ a practice known as augury. Even in Roman times, augurs were priests who advised government officials by diving into the future, based on birds’ flying, singing and feeding behaviour, existing in mystical participation with these natural occurrences.
The act of occupying a home and then populating it with materials and objects with deep significance to ourselves seems almost a primitive idea.
We get design ideas that are selected for us by mathematical algorithms that serve as aesthetic aggregators, slowly but surely completing the shift away from the first-hand experience. We’ve moved far away from the very human act of building our own homes. Now, the way we conceive of it is an impersonal result of the mathematics of cultural agglomerations.
In a world where elements in our homes are crowdsourced, where magical whole-world supply chains supply the insatiable wants, what room is there for the hand-crafted, the deeply personal or the truly autobiographical? Do our homes perform their deeper functions, apart from being static backdrops for entertaining? In their television and couch relationships, do our living rooms talk to the best in us? Do our homes make us better people or even help us engage with the hostility of the world outside?
If the homes of the ancients were meant for deep shared Mystical participation, our homes tend to encourage collective Amnesia.
Technology, convenience, amenities, our wide array of aesthetic preferences, and a slew of the other spoils of modernity surround us. Our modern apartments could not be further away, physically and conceptually, from the caves of Altamira. We build modern homes from a worldwide ecosystem of available products and services chosen from catalogues and from international fairs.
Look around you now, and count the objects around you. How many have you made? How many can you identify the origins of? How many can you claim a personal connection with? Maybe a global slow-down is the best time to rekindle a relationship with the home, with a personal, deeply autobiographical connection with craft and the act of making. We may then discover a deep connection with every object that enters our homes and rediscover a new participation mystique with our own dwellings.