From Buried Time to the Resilient Image: The Neanderthal Man and the Lamalunga Cave

Abstract

Within the karst depths of the Murgia plateau, the Lamalunga Cave serves as a natural sanctuary that has preserved the Altamura Man for over 150,000 years. This Homo neanderthalensis, embedded in a calcitic matrix and coated with coralloid formations, represents one of the most significant cases for paleoanthropological research worldwide. The most recent investigations (2025) mark a turning point: the integration of digital surveying and ground-penetrating radar (GPR) has enabled mapping of the fracture network and the stratigraphy of deposits, defining relationships between voids and solids and identifying discontinuities within the karst system. The analysis of geophysical anomalies has enabled the detection of volumes exhibiting anomalous behavior, interpretable as secondary cavities or occluded conduits, making it possible – for the first time since the discovery – to hypothesize the configuration of the cave’s original accesses. In this context, representation is no longer a simple replication of reality but becomes a cognitive environment in which scientific data is translated into spatial experience. Memory emerges as a stratified dimension: on the one hand, a mineral memory, inscribed in the rock and decoded as a digital palimpsest; on the other, an embodied sensory memory, in which spatiality and proxemics contribute to the construction of an immersive ecosystem. The findings thus transform into resilient images: informational entities capable of moving across digital environments, adapting to technological languages, and sedimenting as collective memory. Representation, therefore, becomes both a critical and operational tool, capable of redefining the paradigms of knowledge and access to inaccessible heritage. Buried time is not replaced but made interpretable through digital mediation that amplifies its meanings, making the past a shareable experience in the present.