SANTILLANA DEL MAR, Spain -- Digital technology is usually seen as blazing a trail to the future, but in some cases it's being used to re-create the past.
Just a few hundred meters from the entrance to the Altamira caves -- which house some of the best examples of prehistoric paintings in the world -- the finishing touches are being put on the most ambitious effort ever undertaken to recreate what many call the Sistine Chapel of late Paleolithic art.
Inside the new cave, ocher and charcoal bison, deer and other animals are full of life. Bold, yet graceful strokes of red, black and yellow give the sense of a herd in motion. Animals charge across the ceiling, shake their manes, raise their tails or lay crouched. Still cryptic symbols intermingle with the animals, and in one corner two handprints seem to reach across the millennia.
These vibrantly impressionistic pieces are masterfully crafted onto the curves and texture of the cave, giving the animals volume and musculature. Some look directly at you; their drilled, almost human eyes penetrate the depths of your soul. The entire ceiling glistens as if the paintings were made yesterday.
Relatively speaking, they were. Aside from knowing that these paintings weren't the ones done 14,000 years ago, they're nearly indistinguishable from the originals. In the new cave at Altamira, virtual reality has been taken to the extreme.
The idea to build a replica cave has been kicked around since 1982, when the cave was re-opened after being closed to the public for five years. Throughout the 1950s, '60s and '70s, throngs of tourists flocked to the cave to seek a connection with early humans.
But mass tourism proved devastating to the ancient paintings. Body heat and carbon dioxide began to extract a greater toll than the ravages of time. Since 1982, visitations have been strictly limited to 8,500 people a year, most of whom have endured a three-year waiting list to see early humans' homage to the hunt.
Two rather bland replicas of the world famous bison room exist but they don't compare to this comprehensive project, which was hatched in 1992 by Jose A. Lasheras, the director of the Altamira Museum and Investigation Center.
"We wanted to give a bigger picture," he said. "We wanted to dispel some myths about early man and show that they didn't just survive, they lived."
The 4,400-square meter, $16 million facility, which will open in June or July, is super-sleek and will accommodate 500,000 visitors a year.
The modern complex will house, in addition to the cave, a permanent exhibition and library about prehistoric man in the region, as well as virtual reality and video presentations. It is a work of art itself and was designed to be as unobtrusive to the bucolic landscape as possible.
"When you stand above it, you can't see that there's a building here," said Pilar Fatás, the curator of the Altamira Museum and Investigation Center. "The construction methods were specially designed so as to minimize the vibrations that could have damaged the original cave."
While the exhibition center provides an exhaustive resource of information about prehistoric life around Altamira, even more impressive is the near-obsessive process by which the new cave was created.
"We adapted technology from cartography and topography and used them on a micro-space level," Lasheras said. "Using portable digital scanners, we took measurements every five millimeters over the surface area of the old cave."
These measurements alone made up a huge computer database that took 18 hours for a workstation to crunch. These scanned measurements resulted in a digital model of the cave as it exists today, which is dramatically different from the one inhabited by the prehistoric artists.
For example, 13,000 years ago the mouth of the cave collapsed, sealing it until it was discovered in 1868. Over the years since its discovery, artificial walls and columns were added inside the cave to support the fragile walls, further altering the shape of the old cave. But a mere copy of the cave as it exists today was not good enough; the team wanted to recreate the cave as it was 14,000 years ago.
"We took all of the information available," said Sven Never, the director of Tragacanto, one of the companies most intimately involved in building the replica. "We looked at all the photography, writings, drawings as well as geological and geographical information we could and extrapolated from our measurements."
Individual pieces of the new cave, derived from the revised digital model, were molded in Madrid and then shipped to the Altamira site to be assembled like an enormous jigsaw puzzle.
"One of the hardest aspects of the project was keeping faith for three years that this would all fit together," Never said. "If one piece was wrong, the whole thing wouldn't work."
But it did work, and the result is as close an approximation as is scientifically possible to what the cave looked like when the ancient artists inhabited it.
The most striking difference is the opening of the cave. Unlike the old cave, which is entered through a tiny metal door, the new cave reproduces the huge mouth of the cave before it collapsed so long ago. It's four meters high and 15 meters across. This lets a surprising amount of light into the recesses of the cave, including the area that contains the most spectacular paintings.
"The walls that were added to the old cave give the false impression that the paintings were done in a secluded part of the cave," Lasheras said. "That's not true as the new cave shows."
Otherwise, every crack, crevice and outcropping of the main part of the old cave is faithfully reproduced in the new one. Even the surface of the cave feels like the original limestone, when in actuality it is a thin skin of a specially developed natural and synthetic compound.
"The skin, which was developed for this project, is absorbent just like the limestone," said Never, who has worked on nothing else for the past three years. "Even the drops of water you see in the old cave were digitally plotted and reproduced."
While technology facilitated the reconstruction of the cave, the copies of the paintings themselves were crafted in a decidedly more retro fashion by two artist-scholars Matilde Muzquiz and Pedro Saura. They've used the same materials -- iron oxides, vegetable carbons and water -- that the Altamira artists used in creating their works. They've even used the same techniques of hand motions.
"Technology from other fields was used to build the cave," Lasheras said. "But the final process is artistic."
