Everyone knows that painters apply paint in a sequence. An artist, for example, may lay down the flesh color of a face, then the colors that make up an eye, then shadows and highlights that give the eye dimension.
Even Pollock splashed one color first, then another, and then another. As a result, the paint applied first is under the subsequent paint layers on the canvas. This sequence can be determined by placing a painting under a microscope. However, since rock art can't be moved and placed under a microscope, it has been very difficult to determine with the naked eye the paint sequence of ancient murals.
The Dino-Lite digital microscope changed all that.
Now we can take a microscope into the field and see the paint at such high resolution that we can determine which colors were applied first, second, third and so on - in other words, we can determine the stratigraphy of the paint application.
We could not have known just how game-changing this information would be.
At White Shaman, we applied this technique to the entire mural. Rather than painting the mural figure by figure, we found, to our surprise, that the ancient painters laid down all the black paint first, then the red, then yellow, and finally the white.
This means that the entire mural:
Would have started out like this:
Now, let's think about this. Take, for example, the red antlers with black dots at the end of the antler tines on the figure below.
How would you draw this? Would you use red to draw the head and antlers and then add black dots to the end of the antler tines? Seems logical...
But that's not what the stratigraphy shows. They painted the black dots first! And then painted the red antler tines to meet the black dots.
To be able to paint a mural panel with so many attributes and alignments one color at a time and to reach a cohesive final product would have required a great deal of planning and a high level of skill. Shumla's discovery proved that the mural was not only painted at one time (rather than in spurts over hundreds or thousands of years by many artists) but that it was a composition that was entirely planned and purposeful.
Naturally, we wondered if this was unique to the White Shaman panel or if we would find a similar stratigraphic pattern at other sites. We have begun testing paint stratigraphy at three other sites with our Dino-lite (Cedar Springs, Halo and Black Cave) and, so far, we have found that the pattern holds!
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| Black dots under red antler tines at Cedar Springs |
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| Microscopic image of red over black at Cedar Springs |
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| Black dots under red antler tines at Halo |
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| Using the Dino-Lite at Halo |
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| Microscopic image showing red over black at Halo Shelter |
We'll keep you posted as we continue to test this hypothesis. One thing is for certain... the ancient artists weren't painting on a whim. They were highly intelligent people, capable of sophisticated planning, with a complex and cohesive story to tell. A story we are learning to read!
