Back to Don's Maps
Back to the Cave paintings, engravings and sculptures index page
Chauvet Cave
Chauvet Cave in the valley of the Ardèche River in France is filled with paintings, engravings and drawings created more than 30 000 years ago, of cave lions, mammoths, rhinos, bison, cave bears and horses. It contains the earliest known cave paintings, as well as other evidence of Upper Paleolithic life. It is situated on a limestone cliff above the former bed of the Ardèche River. The cave was first explored on December 18, 1994. As well as the paintings they discovered fossilised remains, prints, and markings from a variety of animals, some of which are now extinct.
The cave is situated above the previous course of the Ardèche River before the Pont d'Arc opened up. The Chauvet Cave, however, is uncharacteristically large and the quality, quantity, and condition of the artwork found on its walls is stunning. Most of the artwork dates to the earlier, Aurignacian, era (30 000 to 32 000 years ago). The later Gravettian occupation, which occurred 25 000 to 27 000 years ago, left little but a child's footprints, the charred remains of ancient hearths and carbon smoke stains from torches that lit the caves. After the child's visit to the cave, evidence suggests that the cave had been untouched until discovered in 1994. The footprints may be the oldest human footprints that can be dated accurately. Near-toxic levels of carbon dioxide and radon mean that visitors can enter the cave for only a few hours each day.
Text above adapted from Wikipedia.
Photo above: http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/francechauvet.htm
From: National Geographic, August 2001
These mineral stained limestone cliffs along the deep gorge of the Ardèche River in southern France have long attracted cavers eager to explore any uncharted crevice. Here in 1994 three spelunkers found deep chambers filled with paintings, engravings and drawings created some 35 000 years ago.
The Pont d'Arc has spanned the Ardeche River for about 500 000 years. Close by is the Chauvet cave.
Photo: Wikipedia, by "paste", this work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
From: National Geographic, August 2001
Floor plan of the Chauvet Cave, by National Geographic Maps
Floor plan of the Chauvet Cave, redrawn by Don Hitchcock from, and with additional text adapted also from
"Chauvet Cave - The Art of Earliest Times"
Directed by Jean Clottes, translated by Paul G. Bahn
This book is essential reading for those interested
in the Chauvet Cave.
For a printable version, see below.
There are several ways to print this image.
Here is the image as a pdf file which will print on one page.
After opening with Adobe Reader, set your print preferences to "autorotate and center", and page scaling to "shrink to printable area".
This .pdf file will allow the user to print the map as a single page on all computers and printers using the free Adobe Reader program.
Other programs and browsers may open the file, but it is best to use Adobe Reader to print it, since other programs tend to chop bits off.
However, because the image contains text, the above printout may be hard to read if you are printing to US letter or A4 paper.
Here is the image again, as two halves, top and bottom, overlapped by a small amount. This will enable you to print it out as two pages, then glue one half to the other using the small overlap.
Here is the top half of the image as a pdf file.
Here is the bottom half of the image as a pdf file.
Print them both out, then cut off the white margin or border on the bottom of the top half only, align them carefully top over bottom, and glue down.
You could if you wish then glue another piece of paper to the back to strengthen the joint.
Other programs and browsers may open the file, but it is best to use Adobe Reader to print it, since other programs tend to chop bits off. Many people find that the above method is the best way to print the file. It should open in Adobe Reader, which is a free program that most people have, but if not you can get it at:
http://www.adobe.com/products/reader/
One of the most important panels at Chauvet.
Photo: http://www.istmira.com/foto-i-video-pervobytnoe-obschestvo/3924-iskusstvo-predystorii-pervobytnost-2.html
A close up of one of the horses in the above panel, with a red stain from leakage of iron oxide from the wall.
Photo: http://www.istmira.com/foto-i-video-pervobytnoe-obschestvo/3924-iskusstvo-predystorii-pervobytnost-2.html
Photo: Replica in the Brno museum Anthropos. 31 000 years old art, probably Aurignacien.
Date 22 May 2009
Own work (own photo)
Copyright HTO
Approval
(To use this file)
Public domain I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it as public domain. This applies worldwide.
In some countries this may not be legally possible. If this is the case:
I give everyone the unconditional right to use this work for any purpose, unless conditions are required by law.
Source: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankokantabrische_Höhlenkunst
Megaceros with the characteristic black hump on the shoulders, which contains muscles to hold the weight of the neck, head, and horns of the megaceros. This image is of a megaceros with small horns, early in the growing season.
Photo: http://www.istmira.com/foto-i-video-pervobytnoe-obschestvo/3924-iskusstvo-predystorii-pervobytnost-2.html
The left wall of the Hillaire Chamber, just before the large collapse, has many rock pendants covered with engravings.
Photo: http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/francechauvet.htm
Text: Adapted from Clottes (2003)
This horse has been engraved in clay which sometimes forms a thin layer on the walls of caves. In this case, there is a thin panel attached to the roof which the artist has used to advantage, using the curve at the bottom of the panel as the abdomen of the horse. The horse has been drawn with swift, sure strokes, with no hesitation or false starts, the mark of a talented artist.
Careful inspection reveals much older 'macaroni' marks on the panel, over which the horse has been drawn. Macaroni marks of this nature have sometimes been attributed to children.
Photo: http://www.istmira.com/foto-i-video-pervobytnoe-obschestvo/3924-iskusstvo-predystorii-pervobytnost-2.html
Grotte Chauvet (Ardèche), salle Hillaire. Tracé digital figurant un hibou : les caractéristiques anatorniques de cet animal, dont la tête est retournée à 180° sur la face antérieure identifiable grâce an figuré des ailes, permettent de l'identifier an Moyen Duc.
Chauvet Cave (Ardèche), Hillaire Chamber. An owl traced by finger on the wall of the cave. Owls are able to turn their head through 180° so that they can look backwards over their wings, as shown here.
Photo from: Agenda de la Préhistoire 2002 - 2003, a superb diary with excellent illustrations sent to me by Anya. My thanks as always.
Cave lions - This was a mind blowing article which corroborated everything Jean Auel in her 'Earth's Children' series of books on ice age life has said about cavebears, horses, bison, cave lions, mammoths and rhinos.
Photo: Bulletin May 25 1999
From the Bulletin (an Australian weekly magazine) May 25 1999 Insert from Newsweek. pp100-102
By Sharon Begley
Standing before the hanging rock deep inside the damp cave, archeologist Yanik Le Guillou had a brainstorm: he would mount the digital camera on a 10-foot-long pole, manoeuvre it around and past the rock, turn the whole contraption just so, and ... snap! capture on film whatever was hidden on the wall behind. On the first try, the scientists cut off the head of what looked like a painting of a bison. On the second try they cut off its feet. Finally they captured the whole animal-it was now looking more like a musk ox or a rhinoceros without horns -and the next day bagged even bigger quarry: painted next to the beast were a lion and a mammoth, powerful animals that are almost as rare in Paleolithic cave art as they are on the streets of Paris.
Cave lions on the right of the large panel.
Photo: http://www.istmira.com/foto-i-video-pervobytnoe-obschestvo/3924-iskusstvo-predystorii-pervobytnost-2.html
Running Bison. The artist has shown movement by drawing extra legs.
Photo: Time Magazine 13th Feb 1995
Running Bison.
Photo: http://www.istmira.com/foto-i-video-pervobytnoe-obschestvo/3924-iskusstvo-predystorii-pervobytnost-2.html
Prehistoric painters had been thought to mostly paint non threatening animals, not predators like these cave lions.
It was like peering into the inner sanctum of an art gallery where the dealer kept the best works for his best customers. And although the Grotte Chauvet, in southeast France, was no gathering spot for Stone Agers drinking white wine and nibbling canapes, it came close: for thousands of years, archeologists now think, people returned to the grotto again and again on what seems to have been a spiritual pilgrimage.
Photo: Time Magazine 13th Feb 1995
The Grotte Chauvet is one of hundreds of natural caverns cut into the pale limestone cliffs that form the Ardeche Gorge.
The Ardèche (Occitan: Ardecha) is a 125 km long river in south-central France, a right-bank tributary of the Rhône River. Its source is in the Massif Central, near the village of Astet. It flows into the Rhône near Pont-Saint-Esprit, north-west of Orange. The river gives its name to the French department of Ardèche.
The valley of the Ardèche is very scenic, in particular a 30km section known as the Ardèche Gorges. The walls of the river here are limestone cliffs up to 300m high. A kayak and camping trip down the gorge is not technically difficult and hugely popular in the summer, so much so that controlling the number of paddlers is becoming a headache for park authorities. The most famous feature is a natural 60m stone arch spanning the river simply known as the Pont d'Arc (arch bridge).
Photo: Tjarko Evenboer, Panoramio photo from Google Earth.
Text: Wikipedia
But it is unique. Its stone etchings and 416 paintings - a dozen more were discovered in the 15-day expedition that began last week-are, at 32 000 years, the oldest cave art known to science. The find consists of mural after mural of bold lions, leaping horses, pensive owls and charging rhinoceroses that together make up a veritable Louvre of Paleolithic art. Text above from the Bulletin magazine, May 25 1999.
Aurochs, the ancestor of modern cattle.
Photo: http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t123015/
Aurochs with legs showing movement.
Photo: http://www.istmira.com/foto-i-video-pervobytnoe-obschestvo/3924-iskusstvo-predystorii-pervobytnost-2.html
This bear skull was placed with evident care atop a slab of rock, with fragments of many more skulls on the floor nearby.
From:
(left) http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/francechauvet.htm
(right) http://paulsuckow.tripod.com/magatamartsalbum/id3.html
Other hints of the cave's spiritual role include engravings of two large pubic triangles-symbols of fertility? -and a creature with human legs but the head and torso of a bison, suggesting that people hoped to incorporate within themselves some of the animals' power. The cave bear in particular may have had special meaning. The presence of 55 ancient bear skulls, including one carefully placed on a fallen rock as if on an altar, suggests a cult of the cave bear. And that may explain why the cave artists chose Chauvet: dozens of hollows in the floor indicate that the enormous bears hibernated there. People returned time and again to view the works.
Text: National Geographic, August 2001
The cave bear skull placed on the rock which has fallen from the roof of the cave is accompanied on the floor of the cave by a cave bear lower jaw, as well as other fragments of cave bear bones.
Photo: http://www.istmira.com/foto-i-video-pervobytnoe-obschestvo/3924-iskusstvo-predystorii-pervobytnost-2.html
Ibex skull on the floor of Chauvet cave, covered over thousands of years with a thin veil of calcite. It may have been brought here for a ritualistic purpose.
Photo: http://www.istmira.com/foto-i-video-pervobytnoe-obschestvo/3924-iskusstvo-predystorii-pervobytnost-2.html
This cave bear skull may well have been from an inhabitant of the cave before humans first entered the cave.
Photo: http://www.istmira.com/foto-i-video-pervobytnoe-obschestvo/3924-iskusstvo-predystorii-pervobytnost-2.html
Shaded image of a cavebear, with an incomplete outline of a second cavebear below.
From: National Geographic, August 2001.
Photo: Jean Clottes
The complete image includes a third cave bear following close behind.
From: http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/francechauvet.htm
Detail of a cave bear head, Chauvet.
Note the way the fluffy small ears are curled over towards the front of the head.
It seems obvious that the artist had seen cave bears up close and personal.
Photo: http://www.istmira.com/foto-i-video-pervobytnoe-obschestvo/3924-iskusstvo-predystorii-pervobytnost-2.html
Recreation of a cave bear.
Photo: Don Hitchcock, 2008
Source: Display at Le Musée National de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies-de-Tayac
Cave bear teeth show greater wear than most modern bear species, suggesting a diet of tough materials. However, tubers and other gritty food, which cause distinctive tooth wear in modern brown bears, do not appear to have constituted a major part of cave bears' diet on the basis of dental microwear analysis. A solely vegetarian diet has been inferred on the basis of tooth morphology. Results obtained on the stable isotopes of cave bear bones also point to a largely vegetarian diet in having low levels of 15Nitrogen and 13Carbon which are accumulated at a faster rate by meat eaters as opposed to herbivores.
However, some evidence points toward inclusion of at least occasional animal protein in the cave bear diet. For example, toothmarks on cave bear remains in areas where cave bears are the only recorded potential carnivores suggests occasional cannibalistic scavenging, possibly on individuals that died during hibernation, and dental microwear analysis indicates that the cave bear may have fed on a greater quantity of bone than its contemporary, the smaller Eurasian brown bear. Additionally, cave bear remains from Peştera cu Oase in the southwestern tip of the Carpathian mountains had elevated levels of 15 Nitrogen in their bones, indicative of an omnivorous diet, although the values are within the range of those found for the strictly herbivorous mammoth.
Photo: Don Hitchcock, 2008
Source: Display at Le Musée National de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies-de-Tayac
Text: Adapted from Wikipedia.
This is an exquisitely realised horse, at the centre of the large panel, in a niche.
The smudging, whether by accident or design, of the head and mane towards the front of the horse lends an ethereal quality to the image.
Note also that in this portrait, the artist has consciously decided to give the horse a dark head. Obviously there were differences even at that time in the markings of individual horses.
Photo: http://www.istmira.com/foto-i-video-pervobytnoe-obschestvo/3924-iskusstvo-predystorii-pervobytnost-2.html
A superb portrait of a Przewalski horse, considered the descendant of the wild horses of the ice age. Note the erect mane so well shown in ice age paintings.
The photo was taken at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C., USA.
Date: 17 September 2011
Photo: Joe Ravi
Permission: (Reusing this file) Creative Commons Share-Alike License, CC-BY-SA 3.0
Przewalski horses grazing. The characteristic dorsal stripe can be seen in two of the horses.
Photo: GerardM
Date: 24 August 2005
Permission: GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Image of a musk ox.
From: National Geographic, August 2001.
Aurochs between Reindeer.
Photo: http://www.istmira.com/foto-i-video-pervobytnoe-obschestvo/3924-iskusstvo-predystorii-pervobytnost-2.html
This superb "Panel of Horses" shows the use of perspective with several different animals on the same plane
John Robinson, a British sculptor and coordinator of the Bradshaw Foundation, said about the panel of horses that "The panel is without doubt one of the great masterpieces of Homo sapiens Art, besides being the oldest.
I studied the lines of black edges, and the use of smudging to produce shadow. Then I saw that the artist had highlighted the outer edge of the drawing by chiseling into the white rock surface."
Photo: http://www.pma.edmonton.ab.ca/events/timetrav/iii/cave.htm
Text: Adapted from http://www.experienceardeche.com/page/the-chauvet-cave/56
Two mammoths have been painted face to face on a pendant rock in Chauvet. This is the mammoth on the right.
Photo: http://www.istmira.com/foto-i-video-pervobytnoe-obschestvo/3923-iskusstvo-predystorii-pervobytnost-1.html
Although Jean-Marie Chauvet and friends stumbled upon the cave in 1994, for years exploration had been blocked by lawsuits over who owned the rights to the grotto. Finally, archeologist Jean Clottes, a science adviser to France's Ministry of Culture, won permission to lead a team into the cave in 1998. Last week he and a dozen colleagues returned, seeking clues to the social structure, mind-sets and spiritual beliefs of the ancient artists.
Text above: National Geographic, August 2001
They certainly left behind enough clues. A string of three chambers, 1,700 feet long, as well as one connecting gallery and three vestibules, are all covered with masterworks breathtaking in their use of perspective (as in overlapping mammoths) and shading, techniques that were supposedly not invented until millenniums later. And eons before Seurat got the idea Stone Age artists had invented pointillism: one animal, probably a bison, is composed of nothing but red dots. Most striking, however, is that the artists had a thing for rhinos, lions, cave bears and mammoths.
In contrast, most cave art depicts hunted animals. "Out of these people's whole bestiary, the artists chose predatory, dangerous animals," says archeologist Margaret Conkey of the University of California, Berkeley. By painting species that virtually never wound up on the Paleolithic menu but which "symbolised danger, strength and power," says Clottes, the artists may have been attempting 'to capture the essence of' the animals.
Photo: Time Magazine 13th Feb 1995
Text: National Geographic, August 2001
The aurochs Bos primigenius, the ancestor of domestic cattle, was a type of huge wild cattle which inhabited Europe, Asia and North Africa, but is now extinct; it survived in Europe until 1627.
The aurochs were far larger than most modern domestic cattle with a shoulder height of 2 metres (6.6 ft) and weight of 1 000 kilograms (2 200 lb). The aurochs was regarded as a challenging hunting quarry animal, contributing to its extinction. The last recorded aurochs, a female, died in 1627 in the Jaktorów Forest, Poland, and her skull is now the property of the Livrustkammaren ("Royal Armory") museum in Stockholm, Sweden.
The extinct aurochs is a completely separate species from the still-extant wisent or European bison.
Photo:http://ez2www.com/
Text: Adapted from Wikipedia
This image shows the Aurochs paintings above in their context on the wall, next to the exquisite "Panel of horses", which in this view is foreshortened because of the shape of the wall.
Photo: Time Magazine 13th Feb 1995
Painting of an aurochs attacked by wolves.
Date: ~1920
Painter: Heinrich Harder (1858-1935)
Source: Wikimedia
Permission:This image is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.
Horse shaped by scraping the clay covering a wall at Chauvet.
Photo: http://www.istmira.com/foto-i-video-pervobytnoe-obschestvo/3924-iskusstvo-predystorii-pervobytnost-2.html
Two small rhinos, a horse and a megaloceros (also known as the Irish Elk, which died out around 7 700 years ago) with the characteristic hump, but no antlers, which have been shed. The hump contains muscles and ligaments to support the head and large antlers.
Note the black shading on the neck between the head and the hump of the megaloceros.
Photo: http://www.istmira.com/foto-i-video-pervobytnoe-obschestvo/3924-iskusstvo-predystorii-pervobytnost-2.html
The Megaloceros is shown here with quite thin legs, a black band at the neck, and with a horse painted over or under it. The beginnings of the next season's antlers appear to have been shown just appearing in this image.
There appear to be cave bear scratches on the wall to the right of this image.
Photo: http://www.istmira.com/foto-i-video-pervobytnoe-obschestvo/3924-iskusstvo-predystorii-pervobytnost-2.html
Megaloceros (Mégacéros en Français )
Note the hump on the withers of this recreation, essential for the support of the large head, neck, and antlers.
From Wikipedia:
The Irish Elk stood about 2.1 metres (6.9 ft) tall at the shoulders, and it had the largest antlers of any known cervid (a maximum of 3.65 m (12.0 ft) from tip to tip and weighing up to 40 kilograms (88 lb)). In body size, the Irish Elk matched the extant moose subspecies of Alaska (Alces alces gigas) as the largest known deer.
Photo: Don Hitchcock, 2008
Source: Display at Le Musée National de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies-de-Tayac
This rhinoceros is depicted with a black band around its body at the abdomen.
Photo: http://www.istmira.com/foto-i-video-pervobytnoe-obschestvo/3924-iskusstvo-predystorii-pervobytnost-2.html
This aurochs is from around 9 500 BP and is one of two very well preserved aurochs skeletons found in Denmark. The Vig-aurochs can be seen at The National Museum of Denmark.
The circles indicate where the animal was wounded by arrows.
Credit: Malene Thyssen, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Malene
Permission: is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2
Source: Wikimedia
On the 30-foot-long "panel of the horses," the charcoal marks of torches being knocked against the wall were made after the paintings, says Conkey: the marks are superimposed on the mineral sheen that covers the figures. If painting was the first step in a spiritual quest, perhaps, then paying homage to the works was the second.
Photo and text: National Geographic, August 2001
One of the panels in the cave, with horses painted facing each other, overlying an earlier outline of a horse.
Photo: http://www.istmira.com/foto-i-video-pervobytnoe-obschestvo/3924-iskusstvo-predystorii-pervobytnost-2.html
Close up of one of the horses, with a red stain on the jaw.
Photo: http://www.istmira.com/foto-i-video-pervobytnoe-obschestvo/3924-iskusstvo-predystorii-pervobytnost-2.html
Like bemused gallery goers, Clottes's team spends long hours staring at a painting and asking, what - does it mean? One clue comes from how the images are integrated into the walls. In the "Goldilocks" chamber, the missing hindquarters of a cave bear drawn in red ochre seem to lie within rather than on the rock. "The bear seems to come out of the wall," says Clottes.
And last week Clottes's team discovered two painted ibexes in the same chamber. The horns of one are actually cracks in the wall which the artist scraped and enlarged. "To these people's way of thinking, those animal spirits were in the walls," says Clottes. Painting them, the artists may have believed, allowed the power within to seep into the real world.
Text: National Geographic, August 2001
Negative hand print, formed by blowing pigment from the mouth over the hand.
Photo: http://taicarmen.wordpress.com/2011/01/
Positive hand prints, formed by coating the hand with pigment and pressing the hand on the wall. The second hand print may have been done at the same time, without recoating of the hand, as it is fainter.
In the frame also are a semicircle of dots, and felines, on the "Panel of Hand Prints", in the Red Panels Gallery.
Photo: Clottes (2003)
This is a conical pendant from the roof of the cave, and consists of a bison and an exaggerated depiction of a pubic triangle and a vulva, with rudimentary legs ending in points rather than feet. The rock pendant is seen by some as penis like.
The whole ensemble is sometimes known as the sorcerer. Although not visible here, the bison is reported to include a human hand on its lower body.
From: (Left) Chauvet Cave by Jean Clottes, translated by Paul G. Bahn. This book should be on every art lover's bookshelf. The photographs are sumptuous, and the text very informative.
From: (Right) National Geographic, August 2001
Both photos: Yanik Le Guillou
A cavebear slapped a muddy forepaw onto this image of a leopard, the first such image of a leopard known.
Photo: National Geographic, August 2001
A bear portrayed vertically, either to fill an available space, or to depict it falling, or for some other reason.
Photo: http://www.istmira.com/foto-i-video-pervobytnoe-obschestvo/3924-iskusstvo-predystorii-pervobytnost-2.html
Panel of large red dots formed using the palm of the hand.
Photo: http://www.crytical.com/
The hand prints suggest the shape of a bison or rhino.
Team members Dominique Baffier and Valérie Ferrugio determined that one person, standing about five feet ten inches tall and using just the right hand to apply pigment, painted the entire panel. A computer reconstruction confirms their hypothesis
From: National Geographic, August 2001
Photo: Dominique Baffier and Valérie Ferrugio
Fighting Rhinos
Charcoal taken from the two fighting rhinos produced radiocarbon dates of around 31 000-32 000 BP
Photo: Time Magazine 13th Feb 1995
Panel of Reindeer.
Photo: http://www.istmira.com/foto-i-video-pervobytnoe-obschestvo/3924-iskusstvo-predystorii-pervobytnost-2.html
Doing cave archeology still means roughing it. Base camp is a 25-foot-deep cave strewn with clothes, equipment and baguettes. But since the discovery of the Lascaux painted caves in 1940, the work has gone high-tech. Clottes's team is photographing the paintings and etchings with a regular 35-mm, a digital camera and an infrared camera, which picks up the red-ochre paint better than standard optical devices. Back at the research base in the valley, the team scans or downloads the photos into computers, which can brighten the colours, pump up the contrast or manipulate the image. That technique has helped explain two arrays of red dots that seem unique to Chauvet. Using a scanner, the archeologists fed images of the dots into a computer. A program superimposed arrays of hands onto the dots. The best fit to an array of 48 dots is a sequence of handprints made by an adolescent or a short woman. A panel of 92 dots was probably the handiwork of a tall man. The presence of people of different ages and sexes suggests either a communal experience or masters passing their secrets on to apprentices. Even 32 00 years ago, art was created for more than art's sake.
Text: National Geographic, August 2001, with Dana Thomas at the Grotte Chauvet
Preservation
From:http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/en/index.html
View of the old entrance of the Grotte Chauvet near Vallon-Pont-d'Arc, Rhône-Alpes (France).
After initial proceedings begun in the very first days, the cave was officially designated as an Historic Monument on October 13, 1995. Also in 1995, the state began taking measures to expropriate the cave from its three recognised owners. The state became owner of the cave on February 14, 1997.
The first measure of protection consisted of 24-hour surveillance of the entry by local police. Soon after, a solid door and simple alarm system were installed while awaiting the intervention of Commander Cadias, who is responsible for the security of Historic Monuments with the Ministry of Culture. A large-scale operation was subsequently undertaken to equip the cave with a reliable protection system. Today the cave is under permanent audio and video surveillance, and a complex protocol is followed before each entry. The authorised persons are obliged to follow a strict set of procedures requiring them to wear a special suit and shoes that have not been in contact with the exterior. In this way, all biological exchanges with the cavity are avoided as much as possible.
Inside the cave, a system of climatological and biochemical surveillance has been installed by the Laboratoire Souterrain du CNRS de Moulis and the Laboratoire de Recherche des Monuments Historiques. This system continually regulates the hygrometry and temperature within the cave, as well as the bacteriology and growth of concretions.
Finally, a program of adapting the area around the cave, and the paths of access inside, is currently in progress.
Photo: "dmb01" via http://www.panoramio.com/
Bear DNA is clue to age of Chauvet cave art
Fighting Rhinos at Chauvet Cave. Some prehistoric art experts believe that the art is too sophisticated to be ~30 000 years old. However, charcoal taken from the two fighting rhinos pigments produced radiocarbon dates of around 31 000 - 32 000 BP.
Photo: Raphael Gaillarde/Gamma-Rapho/Getty
Exploring a gorge in south-east France in 1994 for prehistoric artefacts, Jean-Marie Chauvet hit the jackpot. After squeezing through a narrow passage, he found himself in a hidden cavern, the walls of which were covered with paintings of animals.
But dating the beautiful images - which featured in Werner Herzog's recent documentary film Cave of Forgotten Dreams - has led to an ugly spat between archaeologists. Could the bones of cave bears settle the debate?
Within a year of Chauvet's discovery, radiocarbon dating suggested the images were between 30 000 and 32 000 years old, making them almost twice the age of the famous Lascaux cave art in south-west France (see map). The result "polarised the archaeological world", says Andrew Lawson, a freelance archaeologist based in Salisbury, UK.
Lawson accepts the radiocarbon findings. "Nowhere else in western Europe do we know of sophisticated art this early," he says. But Paul Pettitt of the University of Sheffield, UK, is adamant that the paintings cannot be that old. The dating study doesn't stand up, he claims, insisting that the paintings' advanced style is enough to mark them as recent. To suggest otherwise, he says, would be like claiming to have found "a Renaissance painting in a Roman villa".
Despite a comprehensive radiocarbon study published in 2001 that seemed to confirm that the paintings were indeed 30 000 years old (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/35097160), Pettitt and his colleagues were unconvinced. Two years later they argued that the cave walls were still chemically active, so the radiocarbon dating could have been thrown out by changes over the millennia to the pigments used to create the paintings (Antiquity, vol 77, p 134).
To try to settle the controversy, Jean-Marc Elalouf of the Institute of Biology and Technology in Saclay, France, and his team have turned to the remains of cave bears. Along with mammoths and other huge mammals, cave bears (Ursus spelaeus) dominated the European landscape until the end of the last ice age.
The Chauvet cave contains several depictions of cave bears, and Elalouf argues that these must have been painted while the bears still thrived in the area. To pin down when the bears disappeared, his team collected 38 samples of cave bear remains in the Chauvet cave and analysed their mitochondrial DNA.
They found that almost all the samples were genetically similar, suggesting the cave bear population was small, isolated and therefore vulnerable. Radiocarbon dating showed the samples were all between 37 000 and 29 000 years old, hinting that by the end of that period they were extinct, at least locally. Samples from a nearby cave, Deux-Ouvertures, gave similar results (Journal of Archaeological Science, DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2011.03.033).
Given the age of the cave bear remains, "it is clear that the paintings are very ancient", says Elalouf. Michael Knapp of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, who also studies cave bears, says he has no doubts about the DNA analysis.
While we do not know exactly when cave bears became extinct, all reliably dated remains in Europe are at least 24 000 years old, says Martina Pacher of the Commission of Quaternary Research in Vienna, Austria. "So the results at Chauvet are not surprising, and I agree with their conclusions," she says.
"We now have an independent line of evidence that the bears [in Chauvet] date to before 29 000 years ago," Lawson says. "That bolsters the case for an early date."
Pettitt remains unconvinced, calling the new research "sloppy". He says that the team is trying to extrapolate the regional spread of the bears over time by relying on evidence from just two caves.
Pettitt also questions whether the paintings show cave bears at all: brown bears lived in the area long after the cave bears were gone. But Elalouf says the two species can be distinguished by skull shape, and that the paintings definitely show cave bears.
Gours and Gour Pools
The niche of the Ibex and Aurochs (left) and the niche of the Panel of Horses (right), when water starts to enter the floor of the Skull Chamber, creating a series of gour (or "rimstone") pools. Gours occupy the largest part of the floor of the Skull Chamber, forming islets of clay which preserve animal and human prints.
When water containing dissolved calcium bicarbonate (Ca (HCO3)2, almost universal in the water percolating through a limestone cavern) accumulates in a small depression, but the supply of water is only sufficient to just maintain the size of the pool after evaporation, then at the edge, where the effect of evaporation is greatest because of the thinness of the water, the concentration of calcium bicarbonate dissolved in the water may be sufficient to deposit a thin film of calcite at this point, as carbon dioxide is released, and solid calcium carbonate continues to precipitate out over time, preferentially at the existing crystalline surface in the normal manner.
The chemical reaction may be summarised as:
Ca (HCO3)2 → CaCO3↓ + H2O + CO2↑
This creates a tiny wall of calcite at the edge, which over time accumulates as more calcite precipitates out from the water. Thus the depth of the pool gradually increases. Any excess water will then overflow from this minuscule dam, creating scallops on the side of the gour pool, and often there will be a chain of such pools, creating a beautiful effect, but one which is only possible over a long period of time in stable conditions.
Photo: Clottes (2003)
From The New Scientist, 15 April 2003:
Doubt cast on age of oldest human art
If the rock art in the Chauvet cave is 30 00 years old, it is the most ancient example of human art in existence and the implications for the evolution of culture are immense. This date is accepted and celebrated by archaeologists. But could it be wrong?
Horses from Chauvet Cave.
Grotte Chauvet (Ardèche), panneau des chevaux. Triple figuration de cheval dont les têtes sont réhaussées à l'estompe. Observer le rendu des crinières et le voile de calcite coloré d'oxyde de fer qui, venant sceller le dessin, en atteste l'ancienneté.
Source: Agenda de la Préhistoire 2002 - 2003, a superb diary with excellent illustrations sent to me by Anya. My thanks as always.
"I would be astounded if this date proves to be correct," leading archaeologist Paul Bahn says now. "It flies in the face of all we know about ice-age art." He has reignited the debate about the age of the paintings at Chauvet by questioning the science that says they are so old. The controversy is currently dividing the archaeology community.
The Chauvet cave was discovered in a valley in southern France in 1994. Its walls are a spectacular gallery of prehistoric art and the depictions of wild animals - rhino, lions and bison among others - are so sophisticated that specialists in ice-age art first assumed they must be relatively recent. Certain features, such as animals shown face on, also suggested that the cave paintings were about 15 00 years old.
But a few months later, tiny samples of black charcoal were scraped from some of the pictures and sent away for radiocarbon dating. The date that came back from the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Science (LSCE) in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, shocked everyone. It suggested that the paintings dated to the very beginning of the Upper Paleolithic era, around 30 000 years ago (New Scientist print edition, 13 July 1996).
Picasso or Michelangelo?
People are generally wary of stylistic dating, explains Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford. So once the more "scientific" radiocarbon results were available, most researchers dismissed the more recent date suggested by the paintings themselves.
Instead the carbon data was used to support the revolutionary theory that sophisticated art developed extremely rapidly once modern humans arrived in Europe, and archaeologists who thought culture evolved over millennia were sidelined.
There is good reason to doubt chronologies based purely on style, admits Chris Witcombe, an art historian at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. He explains the difficulty with an analogy: "Imagine you are living in the distant future and only two objects survive from a lost and forgotten past: a painting by Picasso and a painting by Michelangelo. Which is the earlier work and which the later?"
But archaeologists must also be wary of radiocarbon dates, argue Pettitt and Bahn in a paper that appeared in Antiquity last month. Bahn's suspicions were aroused when he translated the latest coffee-table book on the Chauvet cave into English. Around 30 radiocarbon ages are presented in this book, but the measurements were all made at the same French laboratory. Using results from only one team, however skilled, just is not scientific, says Bahn.
Worse, the same laboratory is currently embroiled in an argument over the age of the artwork in another cave, Candamo in Spain. They dated black dots on its walls to 30 000 years ago, but Geochron Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts, estimated the age of a second sample to be just half that.
The point is that carbon dating rock art is difficult. Because the samples tend to be incredibly tiny, it is difficult to measure the number of carbon-14 atoms relative to other carbon isotopes - the key ratio for pinning down the age.
"Everybody agrees there are problems," says Marvin Rowe, who heads a radiocarbon-dating lab at Texas A&M University in College Station. Contamination from groundwater or rock scrapings may further confuse the results.
Jean Clottes, the archaeologist at the French Ministry of Culture who led the team exploring the cave, stands by his Chauvet results. But he has agreed to send Rowe a sample of charcoal from the cave floor, so that they can compare their results. This is crucial, says Pettitt. "We are not saying the dates are necessarily incorrect, but they need to be checked."
Jenny Hogan
From:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0110/06/world/world19.html
in The Sydney Morning Herald, 6th October 2001
Ancient paintings challenge old wisdom on the history of art
Europe's oldest cave paintings - a menagerie of lions, rhinos, bears and panthers drawn at least 30 000 years ago - are so sophisticated that they may force scientists to think again about the origins of art.New radiocarbon datings of the Chauvet cavern paintings in Ardeche, France, have confirmed that their Stone Age creators were as skilled as painters 15 000 years later.
The hundreds of animal paintings and engravings discovered in 1996 near Vallon Pont d'Arc are among the most spectacular in the world.
They include the only known cave paintings of a prehistoric panther and owl, alongside images of hyenas, mountain goats, buffaloes, lions, mammoths, deer, bears and a woolly rhino.
The painters were probably the Aurignacians, an early group of modern European Homo sapiens skilled at carving.
Chauvet Cave horses
Photo: www.amazon.com
A team of researchers led by Dr Helene Valladas of the Climate and Environmental Sciences Laboratory at the National Centre for Scientific Research in Gif sur Yvette used carbon dating to confirm the age of the paintings at between 29 000 and 32 000 years. The team believes that the art, which incorporates features in the rock walls, is as sophisticated as that in the more famous caves of Lascaux, near the Pyrenees, painted during the Magdalenian period, 15 000 years ago.
'We have derived new radiocarbon dates for the drawings that decorate the Chauvet cave which confirm that even 30 000 years ago Aurignacian artists, already known as accomplished carvers, could create masterpieces comparable to the best Magdalenian art,' they report in Nature.
'Prehistorians, who have traditionally interpreted the evolution of prehistoric art as a steady progression from simple to more complex representations, may have to reconsider existing theories of the origins of art.'
The caves have challenged the conventional theory of the evolution of art, which states that it had crude beginnings in the Aurignacian period followed by gradual progress over thousands of years. The age of cave paintings used to be worked out by their subject matter, but dating based on the charcoal or pigment has become more precise in recent years. Scientists can also date the smudges of soot from torches used by the prehistoric artists.
The Telegraph, London
From:
http://www.museum-security.org/reports/04398.html
Archaeologist at Last Wins Battle With France
Government Worker Eligible for Rights, Royalties in His 1994 Discovery of Prehistoric Drawings
By Dana Thomas Special to The Washington Post Saturday, July 25, 1998; Page A15
LYON, France-Jean-Marie Chauvet, the French government archaeological official who discovered the oldest known prehistoric cave paintings, has been vindicated after more than three years of legal wrangling. An investigating magistrate here concluded this week that government papers stating that Chauvet was on official assignment when he stumbled upon the caves in December 1994 were backdated, as Chauvet has long claimed. Three senior Ministry of Culture officials have been charged with falsifying the documents. Chauvet, who was an employee of the regional Ministry of Culture, has insisted that he was on Christmas vacation in the mountainous Ardeche region of southeast France when he discovered a half-mile labyrinth of caves containing paintings and etchings of rhinos, horses, woolly mammoths and wild cats.
The accomplished depictions date to the Upper Paleolithic period more than 30 000 years ago, studies later revealed. Chauvet took photographs and made a videotape, which the Ministry of Culture used at a news conference to announce the find. The ministry also distributed the images via a photo agency and on the Internet, maintaining that Chauvet was officially working when he found the prehistoric treasure and therefore not entitled to any royalties or reprint rights. Government officials offered the 'temporary authorisation for archaeological prospecting,' dated Dec. 14, 1994, as proof. Chauvet challenged the government's assertion. And this week, investigating magistrate Gilbert Emery concluded the document had been forged. He indicted Patrice Beghain, the regional director of cultural affairs in the southeast Rhone-Alpes region at the time of the discovery, and Jean-Pierre Daugas, the regional archaeological curator, on charges of forging documents. Maryvonne de Saint-Pulgent, a former head of the Ministry of Culture's heritage department, was charged with complicity.
They will be tried later this year, and if found guilty, could be sentenced from six months to three years in prison. 'They flip-flopped,' said Jean-Robert N'Guyen Phung, Chauvet's attorney, of the three government officials. 'First, they insisted the paper was authentic. Then they admitted that it was false but said that they forged it for good reason: so Mr. Chauvet could be reimbursed for the expenses he incurred while exploring the cave. This was a grotesque argument. Mr. Chauvet only had $800 in expenses.'
The government earned thousands of dollars in royalties on Chauvet's images, N'Guyen Phung said. N'Guyen Phung does not expect the three government officials will serve jail time. 'And that's not why Mr. Chauvet filed charges,' he said, adding 'There's a moral question. We want these political appointees who live privileged lives to stop treating the little people as peasants.' Once the criminal trial has concluded, N'Guyen Phung expects to press civil charges. 'It is inconceivable that [Chauvet] can't benefit financially from the books that he helped write, the images he made that have been distributed all over the world, and the archaeological park that will be built on the site,' the lawyer said. The government plans to appoint a mediator in the next few months to settle monetary compensation from past sales of Chauvet's images.
References
Back to the Cave paintings, engravings and sculptures index page