How do we as modern people, create cosmology around us?
In 1983, a question was called into the dark—and the dark answered.
The calling was voiced by archaeologist Michel Dauvois and Iégor Reznikoff, a specialist in ancient music and early Christian chant, in the painted caves of Niaux, Le Portel and de Fontanet, in southwest France. The question they called was, in fact, a series of sounds, often as simple as mm—but it was a question nonetheless. Each time it was posed, the researchers waited for the caves to ‘respond’, revealing the degree and quality of their resonance, and from where the echo seemed to emerge. Call by call, Dauvois and Reznikoff investigated the relationship between a cave’s soundscape and the markings painted in it.
Their findings brought new perspectives on paleolithic cave motifs and would spark numerous further research studies. In the 1988 paper ‘La dimension sonore des grottes ornées’, which summarized their findings, Dauvois and Reznikoff suggested that the majority of parietal art was placed on, or in the immediate vicinity of, the caves’ most resonant sites; that the majority of resonant areas featured images, and the spots with the best resonance always featured some kind of marking; and that the locations of certain markings could only be explained by way of resonance (Dauvois and Reznikoff, 1988, p. 241).
These findings came more than a century after Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola and his daughter discovered paintings of bison on the walls of the Altamira cavern in northern Spain, sparking a heated debate that hasn’t yet abated, about the meaning and uses of cave art and, by extension, the origins of humanity. For a hundred years, academics and aficionados had theorized about painted caves—without ever seriously entertaining the input of something as fundamental as their ears. In fact, the resonant qualities of the caves had been so thoroughly ignored that, by 1988, Dauvois and Reznikoff lamented that in many cases, their acoustic environments had already been destroyed, for instance by having the floors lowered (Dauvois and Reznikoff, 1988, p. 246).
This episode from the recent history of archaeology neatly enacts the crisis of meaning-making in the modern era: a comprehensive collapse that has extended to attempts to assemble a coherent theory of the order of the universe—a cosmology. Throughout the twentieth century, the study of parietal art focused on deciphering the markings much like language, scrutinizing them through Marxist, structuralist, and other sociopolitical lenses (Lewis-Williams, 2004, pp. 41–68). Academics had been trying to read the caves as they would a text, from the intellect alone—and, specifically, from its semiotic capacity. And far from the enlightenment such detached analysis once seemed to promise, this line of interrogation led to ‘the collapse of the whole interpretative enterprise’: the belief that ‘it is impossible to know what Upper Paleolithic art was all about’ (Lewis-Williams, 2004, p. 42).
Dauvois and Reznikoff took a different approach. Their cave excursion—ears wide open—proceeded from a phenomenological standpoint, endorsing Husserl’s famous proposition that the phenomenologist (for which we might read, in the context of Husserl’s work: anyone seeking understanding) must go ‘back to the things themselves’. What does it mean, to go ‘back to the things themselves’? In Merleau-Ponty’s definition, it is ‘from the start a foreswearing of science’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, p. ix) in that it recognizes science as secondary to experience, since ‘the whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced’ (ibid., p. ix).
Which is to say: the scientific method that’s at the heart of post-Enlightenment, empiricist epistemology across disciplines attempts to read the world in detachment—as an object or text—even while necessarily filtering all knowledge of that world through experience. It enacts a false disappearance of the subject of experience, rejecting its own participation in the meaning and order of the world it inhabits.
The cultural effects of modern science’s false disappearance of the subject of experience have been far-reaching. Today, the field of cosmology and its parent field of physics acknowledge their own crises; the early 2000s even saw a few global ‘Crisis in Cosmology’ conferences. The world’s most brilliant researchers find themselves confronted with irreconcilable data about the age of the universe, and meanwhile remain unable to explain the confounding fact that everything in existence appears, impossibly to the intellect, to be both particle and wave. Through centuries of breathtaking advances in empirical observation and experimentation, modern science has established that we live in a fundamentally disjointed, irreconcilable universe, tattered by impenetrable dark matter, and that it’s impossible to affirm even the solidity of our own bodies.
The ‘collapse of the whole interpretative enterprise’, then, isn’t restricted to archaeology. And whether in archaeology or cosmology, the standard response to this fragmentation of meaning is to seek yet more data: to work to date every last corner and crumb of the universe, or commit, Sisyphus-like, to splitting matter ever more finely, only to find it exploding in complexity with each division. Meanwhile, the archaeological subdiscipline of archaeoacoustics—founded on the back of Dauvois and Reznikoff’s pioneering work in going ‘back to the things themselves’—is now marked by a preoccupation with the specifications, functionality, and placement of recording equipment. Papers often nod to Dauvois and Reznikoff’s work, even while questioning the validity of a study based in sensory perception. Invariably, they go on to suggest that more data is needed before any conclusion can be drawn about the relationship between sound and cave art.
David Lewis-Williams pointed out the pitfalls of the perpetual gathering of data in his discourse-shaping 2002 book The Mind in the Cave. ‘Many researchers,’ he writes, ‘[...] believe that still more “facts” are required before we can “theorize”’ about ‘the greatest riddle of archeology—how we became human and in the process began to mark art’ (Lewis-Williams, 2004, p. 7). ‘What is missing today,’ he goes on to say, ‘is not a massive collection of data or some crucial but lost piece of a jig-saw puzzle. We need a method that will make sense of the data that we already have’ (ibid., p. 8). By ‘method’, he clarifies, he means not ‘accurate techniques of dating and so forth’ but rather ‘a clear idea of which questions need to be answered before others can be essayed’ (ibid., pp. 8–9).
For Lewis-Williams, this method entails implicitly adopting a phenomenological approach to the interpretation of cave art. In both The Mind in the Cave and the later Inside the Neolithic Mind, co-authored with David Pearce, he relocates the ground of archaeological inquiry to the human mind. Just as for Merleau-Ponty ‘the whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced,’ Lewis-Williams suggests that the whole endeavour of scrutinizing the semiotics of cave art sidesteps the nature of the mind that produced and interacted with—and now beholds—the art. This archaeological tendency is, therefore, an example of the post-Enlightenment false disappearance of the subject from the interpretative and experimental mode, which has led to so many an intellectual cul-de-sac.
But it’s much more than that, too. Rather than simply another example of the cosmos-shattering intellectualist dynamic that’s played out across disciplines, this tendency in archaeology in fact offers a key to solving the crisis of meaning-making that marks the modern age. Because in this instance, the phenomenological act of reclaiming experience means reclaiming an expanded mode of consciousness that is alien to that of modern scientific inquiry—the very mode that, Lewis-Williams argues, allowed the oldest human ancestors to conceive of, and even experience, an ordered cosmos. He writes: ‘Altered states of consciousness not only create notions of a tiered cosmos; they also afford access to, and thereby repeatedly validate, the various divisions of that cosmos’ (2004, p. 209).
It’s no coincidence that this potential route back to meaning, to coherent cosmology, takes the researcher into caves. If the crisis of cosmology is a crisis of participation in the world and in the production of meaning, and if that participation depends on humans inhabiting the full extent of our experience and consciousness, then caves are precisely the places we as modern humans are most likely to overcome our false disappearance from our relations with the world. Because caves enact—almost force—participation. To stand in a resonant space is to resound in it, with it. It’s to participate.
A descent into a cave, then, has the potential to open the human body and consciousness directly to another way of being. It allows, even invites, modern humans to ‘re-achieve a direct and primitive contact with the world’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, p. vii)—and not just any world, but a world much like the one our oldest ancestors inhabited.
How do we, as modern humans, create a cosmology around us? We don’t.
But how might we, again?
By going underground...
How and when did humans lose our capacity for cosmology?
The reading offered here suggests that the loss has been triggered by a process of detachment from the full spectrum of information conveyed by the human consciousness and senses about the material world, and therefore about the realm beyond the material that occasionally intersects with it. Given the crucial role of caves in the development of human culture, it might be surmised that a critical stage of that detachment came when climatic conditions improved and agriculture took hold, and humans lost our close relationships to caves. Not descending any longer into those resonant depths, they—we—lost a vivid, visceral reminder of our participation in a world alive with unseen energies.
But the cosmological capacity does not appear to be lost entirely. After all, in every human skull rests a brain just like the brains that once pressed deep into the bellies of caves to talk to the energies that animate the cosmos. And the very emergence of the field of archaeoacoustics might suggest a tentative return to a more participatory mode of inhabiting the world, and particularly of scholarly enquiry. For all their emphasis on technological precision in recording, the field’s papers occasionally betray a wonder that reads as profoundly unscientific, by the typical ideals of objective scientific enquiry. Sometimes, this wonder even reads as a yearning to participate in the construction of meaning in the world, from the mythological or shamanic capacity of the human consciousness. Midway through the 2018 archaeoacoustic study ‘Acoustic Measurements and Digital Image Processing Suggest a Link Between Sound Rituals and Sacred Sites in Northern Finland’, the authors write:
‘Something exceptional, and at the same time hardly measurable, could [...] be heard at the foot of the Värikallio, Julma-Ölkky, and Taatsinkirkko cliffs. Apart from the energetic excitation signals, these cliffs reflect soft conversation, laughter, and footsteps, that is, outcomes of social intercourse and casual activities. What is startling is that at Värikallio, the sound appears occasionally to derive straight from the painted figures, as if they were speaking or laughing, as if they were alive’ (Rainer et al., 2018, p. 463).
‘As if they were alive.’
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See, for instance, the proposal for ‘Songs of the Caves’, a major archaeoacoustic study completed in 2014. The proposal reads: ‘The methodology [of Dauvois and Reznikoff’s study] was not based on rigorous acoustical analysis, but was somewhat subjective, researchers using their voices to search for vocal effects.’ (Till, Fadenza, and Scarre. (No date) ‘Songs of the Caves: acoustics and prehistoric art in Cantabrian caves’. Available at: https://pure.hud.ac.uk/en/projects/songs-of-the-caves-acoustics-and-prehistoric-art-in-cantabrian-ca.