Martín Almagro Basch, Fernando Gil Carles and the Corpus of Levantine Rock Art

Abstract

The Corpus of Levantine Rock Art [CARL] (1971-1976) is a compilation, as yet unmatched in quality, of color photographs and contextual information on three quarters of the paintings known in Mediterranean Spain. Our reconstruction of its genesis is based on published literature, archival records, and oral history (the last of these constituting a particularly important source for the history of science). Its formation by the prehistorian M. Almagro Basch and the photographer F. Gil Carles illustrates the institutional, personal, and economic context of research in the Franco era. We emphasize Almagro’s contributions in studying, documenting and protecting the art and in resorting to an external purveyor within a scientific project. Gil Carles’s training, his work and his innovative classification of the material (described here for the first time) made him Spain’s first heritage photographer. The article shows how the combined efforts of the two made the CARL the only systematic Spanish photographic archive built on an interregional scale and with explicit criteria.