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Pre-Historic Art and Material Culture

Basque or euskaldun culture is defined as the culture that has the Basque language (Euskera) as its linguistic vehicle. Basque written culture began to develop relatively late, in the fifteenth century. Until then, Euskaldun culture was transmitted through the plastic arts and oral literature.

Euskal Herria is located along the main axis of what archeologists call the "Franco-Cantabrian" culture, in which the first signs of art in mankind have been found in the cave paintings of the Upper-Paleolithic and Magdalenian periods.

Important pre-historic material culture has been found in several caves in Euskal Herria (Basque Country). Remains and fossils of humans and animals, and ceramics, drawings and rupestrian paintings were found In Arbil, Aitz-Beltz, Ekain, Isturitz, and Urtiaga. Among the human remains found, the skulls were decisive in establishing the hypothesis that Basques originated in situ. According to anthropologist Jesus Altuna:

"[t]he deposit of Urtiaga is important among other things because in it appeared a series of skulls that illustrate to us the origin of the Basque race. The oldest of them belongs to the end of the Upper Paleolithic and shows great similarity with the Cro-Magnon man, even if it has initiated already its evolution toward a type of present-day Basque. The Azilian skulls of the same deposit are intermediate between the Cro-Magnon type and the Basque type. Finally, the skulls of the Bronze period of the mountainous part of the country are mostly of the Basque race. This one, therefore, was not formed outside the country, coming subsequently to settle down in it, but originated right here, in the western Pyrenees, through an autochthonous evolution starting from the Cro-Magnon man"(1).

One of the most important European deposits of art mobilier belonging to the Magdalenian period have been found in the caves of Isturitz in Lower-Nafarroa. Some of the most important rupestrian paintings have been found in Oxocelhaya (Isturitz) in Lower-Nabarra; Etxeberriko Karbia (Camou-Cihige) in Zuberoa; Venta de Laperra (Carranza), Arenaza (Galdames), Santimamiñe (Cortezuri), and Goikolau (Berriatua) in Bizkaia; and Ekain (Deva), and Altxerri (Aya) in Gipuzkoa; and Alkerdi (Urdax) in Nabarra.

"Pyrenean culture" was present during the Neolithic and Aeneolithic periods between the Ebro and the Garonne, with the main axis along the Pyrenees as far as Catalonia. Those were the periods of megalithic monuments, dolmen, cromlechs and grave mounds with characteristic personal effects buried with the corpses. The largest dolmens are those of the Araba Plain: Aizkomendi (Egilaz), Sorginetxeta (Arrizala), San Martin (LaGuardia), and Hechizeria (Elvillar). Ceramics appeared around the end of this period.

In the Metal Ages there were many large cromlechs (huge funeral monuments made of stone) in Ohiartzun and Aralar. According to Jesus Altuna (Lehen, Euskal Herria. Bilbo 1975), "corpses were cremated and the ashes put in a vase or small urn which was placed in the center of the cromlech".

Sources: Jesus Altuna, Lehen, Euskal Herria, Ed. Mensajero, Bilbo, 1975;Jokin Apalategi, Quelques traits essentiels de son histoire culturelle euskaldun, Euskadi en guerre, Ekin, 1982; Joseba Zulaika, Basque Violence, Metaphor and Sacrament, University of Nevada Press, 1984.

(1) English translation in J. Zulaika's Basque Violence, Metaphor and Sacrament.