Word: altamira
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...three-month brush-up course in anthropology-no bad thing, perhaps, but not an exciting prospect either. Bronowski in Ethiopia's Omo Valley musing over the cranial capacity of our earliest ancestors, Bronowski reflecting on the first stirrings of the artistic impulse before the cave paintings at Altamira -it is all ground that other popularizers have covered. Though he makes an engagingly earnest guide, other cultured minds have already taken short trips over the same territory...
...earliest prehistoric paintings. According to this version a dog named Robot chasing a rabbit actually discovered the cave. Henri Breuil, a French Jesuit anthropologist provides Davenport with a voice to describe the caves as brains for the earth. Breuil talks about his discoveries in China, Africa, the Altamira caves in Spain where Picasso studied the ancient bull drawings for the bull he painted in "Geurnica." Everything becomes interconnected in Davenport's stories; history isn't simply a series of layers, one ignorant of the other. Rather it's a finely woven mesh all intricately related. To neglect a sense...
Work of the Century. Already, the first families of settlers are moving into the clearings left in the bulldozers' wake. Small backwater towns of the Amazon like Altamira and Maraba (see map) have turned overnight into construction boom towns where disputes are often settled with a gun. In gold-mining Itaituba, for instance, marijuana is literally worth its weight in gold; an ounce of one buys an ounce of the other...
...exist." Art, facing an increasingly fragmented epoch growing less certain of itself, must maintain a running struggle to illuminate "impressions" of human existence from artist to audience. Sometimes, these impressions merely state the quiet yet dramatic fact of human existence, like the paintings on the walls of Spain's Altamira caves, or else they can boldly declare individual existence with the sincerity of a Roman bust...