The horses of Ekain
The Ekain cave, located in the Sastarrain valley (municipality of Deba, on the border with Zestoa), contains an amazing collection of cave paintings from the Magdalenian period (10,000 - 14,500 years ago). This artistic legacy from the Palaeolithic age was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site on 13 August 2008, and its importance and the need to protect it has led to the creation of a replica (www.ekainberri.com), while access to the original cave is closed to the public.
In the original cave, we are welcomed by a large horse's head illustrated in black block painting. From that point on, the drawings are distributed into five large groups: the first, in a lateral gallery, contains several drawings of goats and deer, as well as a salmon. As in the case of other sites, the relief of the rock surface is included into the illustrations; having said that, this is the most atypical group of paintings in the cave, as it does not contain any horses and the deer are engraved, while the other animals have been painted in black. In the central part of the main gallery, we have "the most beautiful collection of horses in all of Franco-Cantabrian parietal art”: 25 horses and nine bison, together with other minor figures. The predominant colour is black, though red is also used in the paintings. The third group is comprised of a pair of bears, after which we come to the end of the cave, where the other two groups of paintings can be found. The fourth features seven horses, together with a few engraved lines, while the last group shows engravings that have traditionally been interpreted as two rhinoceroses.
It is noteworthy that most of the horses are facing towards the bears. Another striking feature is the rock situated in the centre of the cave, next to the largest group of illustrations, which bears a distinctive resemblance to a horse's head. The nostril section seems to have been engraved, and accompanies the horse-bison pair. It is therefore considered to be another of the representations and, together with the first painting, suggests that this is a cave is dedicated to the horse.
What aim, what function did these illustrations have, in the depths of the cave, far from the eyes of the people that inhabited it? It is unlikely that they were mere decorations, and several theories have been put forward.
One theory deals with associated magic: by "capturing" the animal’s image, this would make it easier to catch the real animal. However, in the Ekain cave, no bone remains have been found in the human settlement at the cave’s entrance of the most-depicted animal – the horse – while the bones of other animals that do not appear so often in the cave paintings (deer, mountain goat and bison) have been found. This information could support another theory: the idea that the horse was a totemic figure or sacred animal which represented the people who inhabited Ekain, and it was therefore shown respect. Nevertheless, the inner cave paintings show horses being wounded by darts and javelins, clearly suggesting that they were hunted. Another theory concerns shamanism: it is based on the belief that certain people, under specific conditions, can enter into contact with powers from parallel universes; this contact can take place through auxiliary spirits, which sometimes present themselves to the man or woman shaman in animal form.
As Jesús Altuna suggests, there may be some truth in all of these theories, though none of them can completely explain the phenomenon. Neither can we rule out the idea that those people who were able to create these perfect representations were linking the spiritual and transcendent world with art out of a pure need for expression, in the same way that people have done throughout history, and continue to do in the present day.
Further information here: "The origins of art in Gipuzkoa" (Bertan Colection)