Ancient art once lost to time is visible again thanks to modern technology and researchers who weren’t afraid to spend long hours in muddy, narrow, pitch-black caves.
Archeologists and photographers have used a 3D photography technique to uncover detailed carvings that were etched onto cave ceilings beneath northern Alabama between 1,000 and 1,800 years ago.
Among the findings are four human figures, nearly two metres tall, decked out in elaborate Indigenous regalia, a coiled rattlesnake with a forked tongue and a three-metre long serpent.
“When you’re standing in the cave — or in this case, crawling in the cave — they don’t look like anything, because you can’t see them. They’re so faint on the ceiling that they don’t really show up to the naked eye,” ancient art photographer Stephen Alvarez, told As It Happens guest host Helen Mann.
“But what we found is that if we 3D scan that ceiling, we could make out these fantastic figures.”
Alvarez is the founder of the Ancient Art Archive, a non-profit that digitally records and preserves ancient art. He teamed up with University of Tennessee archeologist Jan Simek and U.S. Geological Survey technician Alan Cressler to capture and study the faded carvings in Alabama’s 19th Unnamed Cave.
Art was first discovered in the cave in 1998, but the carvings, etched to a thin layer of mud, had faded over time.
To capture the images in all their former glory, Alvarez and his colleagues used a technique called photogrammetry, which involves snapping thousands of overlapping photographs, then using computer software to stitch them together in a three-dimensional space.
“You end up with a huge data cloud of exactly where everything is in 3D space on the ceiling, and from that we can shine lights on it virtually and begin to identify figures that are otherwise invisible,” Alvarez said.
3D scanning shows this faded carving carving, left, is what appears to be a human figure in regalia, approximately, 2.08 metres tall. rom 19th Unnamed Cave, Alabama (photograph by S. Alvarez; illustration by J. Simek). (Photo by Stephen Alvarez, illustration by Jan Simek )
But while the technology is state of the art, the work itself is down and dirty.
Alvarez had to spend hours in the dark, wet, twisting caves taking more than 16,000 photographs, sometimes in spaces where the ceiling was only 30 centimeters above the ground.
“My knees still hurt when I think about doing the work,” he said.
Watch: Time-lapse video of Stephen Alvarez working in the 19th Unnamed Cave:
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But it’s nothing compared to how much must have gone into creating the art in the first place.
The figures appear to form a larger work of art, Alvarez says, potentially telling a story, stretched out over more than 5,000 square metres, through winding, narrow caves where no natural light could possibly reach.
“They were doing this without ever being able to see the entire composition they were putting together,” Alvarez said. “It just shows the genius of these 2,000-year old artists.”
This carving — believed to be a coiled rattlesnake — is 2.12 metres wide. (Photo by Stephen Alvarez, illustration by Jan Simek)
Radiocarbon dating places the artwork in the Middle and Late Woodland periods, between 500 and 1000 A.D.
The artists would have used homemade torches made of reeds to light their way, possibly working in teams — one person to hold the torch, and another to carve.
While researchers initially believed the carvings to be finger drawings, the intricate details revealed with the 3D scanning suggest the use of more precise tools.
The whole thing left Alvarez in awe of its creators.
“Our technology is so good that their technology seems primitive,” Alvarez said. “However, intellectually, they were our equals.”
What does it all mean?
According to the study, many Indigenous people who populated what is now Alabama during that era believed caves to be “pathways to the underworld,” and the art could potentially have spiritual or ritualistic meaning.
Dustin Mater, a Chickasaw citizen and artist who works with Ancient Art Archive,told the New York Times that some of the figures feel similar to ones he’s learned about in stories passed down by tribal elders.
“It is almost speculative, but there are nuances today that are carried forward into our traditions and in our stories,” said Mater, whose ancestors were forcibly removed from northwest Alabama in the 1800s. “Living cultures take symbols and then revivify them and give them meaning.”
Alvarez concedes we may never know the true motivation behind the work — but that’s OK.
“It is art,” he said. “And you don’t have to know everything about art to appreciate it, to be awed by it, to be moved by it. And so not knowing in many ways makes us appreciate it more.”
Written by Sheena Goodyear. Interview with Stephen Alvarez produced by Aloysius Wong.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
