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Lascaux Cave - Grotte de Lascaux
The Panel of the Great Black Cow, in the Nave at Lascaux.
Photo: Don Hitchcock 2008
Source: Display at Lascaux Révélé
Lascaux Cave is famous for its Paleolithic cave paintings. The original caves are located near the village of Montignac. The paintings are estimated to be 17 300 years old. They primarily consist of images of large animals, most of which are known from fossil evidence to have lived in the area at the time. The cave was discovered on September 12, 1940 by four teenagers, Marcel Ravidat, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel, and Simon Coencas, as well as Marcel's dog, Robot.
The cave complex was opened to the public in 1948. By 1955, the carbon dioxide produced by 1 200 visitors per day had visibly damaged the paintings. The cave was closed to the public in 1963 in order to preserve the art. After the cave was closed, the paintings were restored to their original state, and were monitored on a daily basis. Rooms in the cave include The Hall of the Bulls, the Passageway, the Shaft, the Nave, the Apse, and the Chamber of Felines. Lascaux II, a replica of two of the cave halls — the Great Hall of the Bulls and the Painted Gallery — was opened in 1983, 200 metres from the original.
Text above adapted from Wikipedia.
Map of Lascaux cave, Dordogne, France (redrawn after A. Leroi-Gourhan, (1984), « Grotte de Lascaux », in L'art des cavernes - Atlas des grottes ornées paléolithiques françaises, Ministère de la culture, ISBN 2-11-080817-9)
Photo: User 120
Permission: GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2
In 2003, the General Council of the Dordogne contracted Renaud Sanson and his studio to create facsimiles of scenes set in the nave of Lascaux, a gallery not represented in Lascaux II.
On July 4, 2008, in the workshops at Montignac which saw their creation, the exhibition Lascaux Révélé introduced this facsimile of the Dordogne to the public until December 2008.
This exhibition is intended to travel the world for several years as Ambassador of the Dordogne Valley. Indeed, the casts of the facsimiles are of low weight (less than 10 kg / m 2), and consist of removable panels whose joins are invisible and have been designed to be easily transported.
The exhibition Lascaux Révélé was then transferred to the Thot animal park, located in the nearby town of Thonac and presented to the public in July 2009.
Text: Translated from http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grotte_de_Lascaux
Using laser technology, the gallery was first transferred in three dimensions to computer, then the walls were recreated to an accuracy of one millimetre or less, using lightweight fibreglass resin.
Photo: Don Hitchcock 2008
Source: Display at Lascaux Révélée
Similarly, the entire surface was photographed with great accuracy with regard to both form and colour, and the artwork was then rendered in false colours. The artists paint onto the false colours, projected here onto the facsimile gallery, using coded colours.
This is to ensure the most faithful rendition of the original scenes.
The highly talented artists would otherwise unconsciously try to make the image more art-like, instead of sticking faithfully to what was in front of them.
Photo: Don Hitchcock 2008
Source: Display at Lascaux Révélée
The Two Bison, also known as the Crossed Bison, in the Nave. (length 8 ft.) The artists used the concavity of the wall to create the illusion of the two bison galloping at full speed toward the viewer.
This painting is often held up as an example of the skill of the Paleolithic cave painters. The crossed hind legs show the ability to use perspective in a manner that wasn't seen again until the 15th century.
Text: Wikipedia
Photo: Don Hitchcock 2008
Source: Display at Lascaux Révélée
This is one of the most studied and argued about paintings in Lascaux. It is in what is known as the well, and is reached by climbing down a narrow shaft.
The main scene includes a disembowelled bison, a man with a bird's head who appears to have been felled by the bison, a spear, and a bird on a pole.
Was the man a shaman with a bird as totem? Did the painter believe that dead people became birds? We shall never know.
Photo: Don Hitchcock 2008
Source: Display at Lascaux Révélée
Beside the panel of the man killed by the bison, is this apparently unrelated image of a wooly rhinoceros, which is a superbly realised portrait of a dangerous animal. The six black dots are of unknown significance.
Photo: Don Hitchcock 2008
Source: Display at Lascaux Révélée
The two photographs stitched together show that either the same artist used different techniques for the two panels, or the panels are separated by time and creator. The rhinoceros is done in a more realistic style, with thicker outlines.
Photo: Don Hitchcock 2008
The complete panel.
Photo: http://legacy.earlham.edu/~vanbma/20th%20century/images/surveydayone.htm
This is by far the best photo I have seen of the man, bison and rhino.
Photo: unknown
Engraved Deer in the Apse. It would appear that either it has been coloured on the wall itself, or the picture has been coloured to bring out the shape of the engraving.
This is a superb piece of art.
Photo: Public Domain
Block of haematite showing traces of use over the entire surface, from the excavations by André Glory, 1959.
Photo and text: http://www.american-buddha.com/lascaux.4.htm
Block of manganese dioxide, used after powdering in a mortar and pestle to mix black pigment for drawings.
Photo: http://www.american-buddha.com/lascaux.4.htm
Fifth Bull in the Hall of the Bulls.
A red cow has been painted over the front legs of the Aurochs.
Photo: Brochure, Lascaux Révélé été 2008 Montignac (Dordogne)
In the section of Lascaux called the Nave, the Great Black Cow has been painted over the top of a herd of horses, which are facing in the opposite direction. The outline of the Great Black Cow shows signs of having had some changes after the first painting, especially along the belly of the animal. Female aurochs have thinner diameter horns than males.
Photo: Don Hitchcock 2008
Source: Display at Lascaux Révélée
Panel of the imprint, in the Nave. This extends over a length of four metres, and is close to the floor of the cave. It contains a number of figures, including three bison and twelve horses. All the figures in this panel have engraved outlines, and have been painted within this engraving. Brown was used for the bodies, and black for the legs.
Photo: Don Hitchcock 2008
Source: Display at Lascaux Révélée
Hall of the Bulls
Photographer: Sisse Brimberg
Photo: © National Geographic Magazine.
Swimming Stags, a copy of the original, in the Musée d'Aquitaine, Bordeaux
Photo: Date: October 2008
Author: Pline
Permission: (Reusing this file) I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following licenses: Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
Source: Musée d'Aquitaine, Bordeaux
Horses and the head of a bull, in the Hall of the Bulls, reproduction in Lascaux II.
Photo: Date: 1 May 2008
Author: Jack Versloot
Permission: (Reusing this file)
This image, which was originally posted to Flickr, was uploaded to Commons using Flickr upload bot on 18:21, 26 October 2008 (UTC) by Maañón (talk). On that date it was licensed under the license below.
attribution : This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Door to the original Lascaux.
Photo: http://www.american-buddha.com/lascaux.3.htm
Me at Lascaux II. Some effort has been made to have this entrance similar to the entrance to the original cave.
Photo: Don Hitchcock 2008
The Office and Souvenir shop have been completed with a roof structure which evokes an abri, a rock shelter.
Photo: Don Hitchcock 2008
This is the shelter where patrons wait for the next tour of Lascaux II, also with the abri shaped roof structure.
Photo: Don Hitchcock 2008
Finding Lascaux
Four Boys and a Dog
Robot the dog with two of the four discoverers of the cave.
In September 1940, four boys and a dog set out on an adventure in Dordogne. The boys - Marcel Ravidat, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel and Simon Coencas – where intrigued by an old legend about a tunnel running under the Vezere River linking the old Castel of Montignac to the Manor of Lascaux. According to the legend, this tunnel would lead to a second tunnel and a treasure hidden deep in the woods of Montignac.
As they walked through the woods the little dog, Robot, ran ahead toward a deep depression in the ground covered with overgrowth and began sniffing the sunken hole. The depression had originally been created by an uprooted tree. The boys hurried to catch up with Robot. When they saw the deep hole, they immediately thought it might lead them to the legendary tunnel and the hidden treasure.
Photo and text: http://www.savelascaux.org/Legacy_Finding.php
After trying to determine the depth of the hole by tossing rocks in the opening and listening for contact with the bottom, they decided to explore it. They enlarged the opening by removing a few stones around the edges with their penknives. Then, each one of the four boys slid through the hole in turn, along a semi-vertical shaft embedded with stalagmites down fifteen meters to a dark underground chamber. “The descent was terrifying,” recalled Jacques Marsal who was just fourteen years old at the time, the youngest of the four boys. Inside the chamber they used their oil lantern to look around shining it on the walls and ceiling.
Marsal remembers this first encounter describing what they saw as a “cavalcade of animals larger than life painted on the walls and ceiling of the cave; each animal seemed to be moving.” The ceiling was pure white, covered with calcite. And the paintings were brilliantly multicolored in reds, blacks, browns and ochres. The boys were standing in The Hall of the Bulls. Mesmerized by their findings, the boys ventured to the end of the cave. By then, the light from the oil lantern was fading and they realized they needed to return to the surface.
The boys were afraid of not being about to climb back out of the cave because of the steep incline of the shaft. But, in fact, the climb out was easier than they expected, recalled Marsal. The narrowness of the shaft served to their advantage allowing them to prop up with their knees and elbows, inching along until they reached the surface.
They were ecstatic with their discovery. The four boys promised to return the next day much better prepared for exploration. They swore an oath of secrecy determined to keep their discovery to themselves for the time being. Marsal remembers keeping the secret was harder done than said in families where brothers and sisters, and sometimes cousins, shared rooms with each other.
All four boys kept their promises and met again the next morning. This time they took a rope with them to help in getting down to the second level of the cave, The Well. Marsal described the descent into the deep fissure as “scary because the rope, which was tucked under our armpits, was cutting the flaky edges of the walls and earth kept falling on our face as we were lowered down into the well.
By the third day of their discovery, the boys could not keep their amazing secret any longer. They decided each of them could bring five friends to see the cave but would charge a forty cent per person admission price. Marsal said that was the first “commercial exploitation of the cave.” Once the word was out, the news spread like wildfire and soon the entire village was lining up to have a look at the newly discovered paintings. The boys enlarged the hole and made access easier for the public.
Overwhelmed by the number of visitors and aware that the paintings were probably prehistoric, the boys decided to seek the advice of their schoolmaster, Leon Laval. Mr. Laval, a member of the prehistoric society of Montignac, did not believe the boys’ description of what they had found. It took quiet a bit of convincing to persuade him that the whole story was not just a scam to push him down a hole.
Once inside the cave, Laval was immediately convinced the paintings and drawings were from a prehistoric time. He instructed the boys and gave them guidelines about the fragility of the paintings. He gave them two rules: Do not let anyone touch the paintings, and, more importantly, guard the cave from possible vandals.
Summer vacation was coming to a close. Soon all of the boys, except Marsal, returned to school and their studies. Marsal, worried about the cave’s safety, pleaded with his parents to allow him to guard the cave day and night. Realising the significance of the paintings and their son’s devotion to the cave, they eventually gave in. Marsal pitched a tent at the entrance to the cave and begin what would become a lifelong commitment, the care and safety of the cave and its magnificent prehistoric paintings.
Visitors came daily to the cave and the fourteen year old Marsal became the de facto guide. One day, a young man with a sketch book in hand, came for a tour. As Marsal showed him through the cave, the man made drawings of the images as he went. The man, a student of the famed prehistorian, Abbe Breuil, immediately took them to his mentor who, by luck, was visiting in the nearby village of Brive. Breuil took no time in coming to see the cave after seeing the sketches of his student and confirmed the authenticity and the era of the paintings. The discovery was sensational and now substantiated by the highest authority. News spread throughout France, Europe and the world. The cave of Lascaux became known as the Sistine Chapel of Prehistoric Art.
The cave was located on private property owned by the Count of LaRochefoucault whose family began the commercial exploitation of the cave. By 1948 daily tours brought as many as one thousand people a day through Lascaux. It was not long before the impact of so many visitors was felt.
Photo and text: http://www.savelascaux.org/Legacy_Finding.php
The discoverers of Lascaux, 40 years after their discovery of the Lascaux caves.
Photo: Carolyn Hailstones
Saving Beauty
Adapted from an article in Time Magazine, 2006/5/29 by James Graff
Photo: Norbert Aujolat - CNP/MCC
For more than 17 000 years, the bestiary of the Lascaux cave in southwestern France has survived the ravages of human history. Anyone entering this time capsule is confronted by four metre long bulls that appear to float across the massive vaults like religious apparitions. An enigmatic spotted beast with a round snout and straight, forward-pointing horns, plump horses in brilliant yellow and deer with treelike antlers-all seem in equal part intimates of the present and missives from some distant world. Which they are. Though the draftsmanship is strikingly Modernist - on exiting the cave in 1940, Pablo Picasso said, "We have invented nothing" - these creatures were painted and inscribed on the limestone walls during the Upper Paleolithic age, when everyone was a hunter-gatherer, and Homo sapiens coexisted with Neanderthal man. They are evidence of the quantum leap in neural connections that gave birth to the uniquely human attribute of consciousness. Lascaux is the most fundamental example anywhere of what the iconoclastic 20th century writer and anthropologist Georges Bataille called "the basic desire of all men, of whatever period or region, to be amazed." Like few other creations of the human hand, it is a patrimony not of any one country or culture, but of humankind as a whole.
Yet Lascaux's robust longevity belies a frightening fragility. Five years ago, after the ill-conceived installation of new climatic equipment, Lascaux suffered an outbreak of fungal infection that threatened to destroy in a few years what thousands of years had left largely unscathed. The cave's custodians are still struggling to eradicate this scourge.
Last month French officials admitted to Time that the Fusarium solani fungus has on occasion spread from the floor to the paintings, and that separate fusarium strains have now been identified in the various arms of the 235 metre long cave complex. Time was allowed to visit the cave because its keepers feel they finally have the outbreak under control. But to keep the fungus in retreat, a team of restorers comes into the cave every two weeks - dressed, as everyone who enters now must be, in hooded biohazard suits, booties and face masks - to remove filaments from the walls. Another team visits regularly to audit the cave's sanitary condition using laser imaging.
When art restorer Rosalie Godin was urgently called to Lascaux in August 2001, she couldn't believe her eyes. "It was as if it had snowed in the cave. Everything was covered in white" she says. Two of the caves caretakers, Bruno Desplat and Sandrine van Solinge, had raised the alarm when the white filaments, spotted in isolated parts of the cave months before, spread like wild fire over a matter of days. Desplat, who lives next to Lascaux and has devoted over 15 years to its care, says he became physically ill upon seeing the luxuriant bloom.
That's not to say that he or the cave's curator, the prehistorian jean-Michel Geneste, could have been entirely surprised. That spring, workers had finished installing a €23 000 air-conditioning system beneath the stairs leading down to the cave.
Caretakers monitor the cave in 2003; every
two weeks, restorers come to remove mold.
Photo: MCC/DRAC Aquitane/Grotte de Lascaux
Note: If the reader clicks on this image and looks at the larger photo, it will be apparent that there are blue spots on the wall of the cave. I am not sure what these blue spots are, and would be glad if someone could identify them for me. The best guess I have is that they are antibiotic patches. - Don
The new machine was a major departure from the way Lascaux's delicate balance of temperature and humidity had been regulated for the preceding 30 years. The old system, installed in 1968 after years of minute studies of the cave's climate, relied on Lascaux's natural currents to pass air over a cold point and make sure that water condensed there, like it does on a beer can, rather than on the walls of the cave. This passive system was only necessary during the wettest periods of the year, when it worked as a functional replacement for the earth that for millennia had absorbed excess water from the saturated air of the cave, but that had been removed since the cave's discovery in 1940.
The new system was designed to automate the process, but also sought to improve it by using two massive high-powered fans to pull the air toward the cold point. Such an intrusive approach scandalized those who had worked so hard to figure out a more modest solution to earlier problems in the cave. "Our idea was always to be as parsimonious as possible" says Pierre Vidal, a retired researcher who worked in Lascaux for decades. "This thing seemed more like a central air-conditioning system."
In most organizations, an individual or board will have the last word on decisions, especially one this controversial. Yet nobody claims authorship of the decision to install the new machine. Geneste, who as Lascaux's curator since 1992 is effectively the cave's top manager, says that he was always opposed to switching to a new principle for regulating the cave, "but following on our decision to restore a machine that could maintain the caves parameters, a chain of administrative decisions led to the selection of a dynamic system."
Philippe Oudin, the chief architect of historic monuments forthe department of Dordogne, who was responsible for planning and overseeing the work, did not respond to a request for comment. Technical advice for the project was provided by Ingéni, an air-systems consultancy firm based near Paris, which had designed systems for supermarkets and museums, but which, like Oudin himself, had no experience with caves. "We proposed a system and that's what they chose" says the firm's managing director, Michel de la Giraudière. "I don't know why they favored an active system over a passive one, but I do know not everyone was of the same opinion. They wanted a certain efficacy, and the discussion was somewhat political"
The fusarium fungus, inset, has spread from the floors to some paintings, such as this horse in the Main Gallery, pictured in 2005; restorers now remove the growths by hand.
Photo: CG Dordogne; LRMH (inset)
The appearance of the mold soon after the new apparatus was put in place in April 2001 suggests it was unequal to the task of maintaining Lascaux's equilibrium. By the end of that year, Geneste ordered the fans taken out altogether. "If we knew then what we learned later, we wouldn't have installed that machine" says Alain Rieu, the director of conservation for the region of Aquitaine, which ultimately signed off on - and paid for - the work. "But the old machinery was in a bad state of repair, and we all decided unanimously that we couldn't take the risk of doing nothing. It seemed like the least bad solution."
If so, it was pursued at arguably the worst time. While a roof over the entrance was removed for the installation of the new system in early 2001, drenching rains poured directly into the cave's entrance, bringing with them dirt and, some suspect, fusarium spores. The danger that spores or other biological agents might contaminate the cave had been foreseen. Jean-Franqois Nicolas, director of contractor Forclim Sud-Ouest Alary Vimard, says his workers were under instructions to wash their feet, limit their working hours, and stay out of the painted chambers of the cave; Desplat himself installed a padlock to insure they did so. "We worked under the rules we were given" says Nicolas. Geneste, responsible for monitoring the work once a week With Oudin's representative, contends that wasn't always the case. "The workers often ignored us and the architect's representative and didn't disinfect their feet" says Geneste. "They didn't keep the door closed all the time; they wanted to get the job done quickly." What's more, France's Research Laboratory of Historical Monuments (LRMH), responsible for monitoring the cave's biological condition, made no inspections during the construction work.
Codin was shocked by what she found when she was first dispatched to Lascaux by the LRMH. "The construction site was run like someone redoing a bathroom" she says. "The entrance to the cave was like a swamp, and there was construction waste all over the place. It was an apocalyptic vision." Contractor Nicolas counters that: "It was not a disordered work site as long as we were there" but says masons and carpenters may have followed. When she first arrived, Godin says, she was flying blind: "I was like a fireman, with no documents, no instructions, nothing" she says. In September, the LRMH identified the fungus as Fusarium solani, a virulent mold that commonly infects soil and crops and often proves so drug-resistant that whole crop fields must be dug up and burned.
Restorers shrouded the mold with bandages soaked in a mix of fungicide and antibiotics.
Photo: Dominique Bouchardon-LRMH
Not everyone is convinced that the fungus entered the cave on the thick soles of contractors' boots. Isabelle Pallot-Frossard, director of the LRMH, says that a long-term, low-level presence of formaldehyde in the cave - ironically used as a foot wash for decades to prevent such infections - may have killed off many of the other organisms that might have prevented such an explosion of fusarium. "The fusarium strains we found in the cave are extremely resistant to formaldehyde, unlike strains from elsewhere" says Pallot Frossard. "It didn't come from outside, but had been there all along. All it needed was a slight modification in climate to take off."
And take off it did. At first Godin's team sprayed the mold with an alcohol solution of Vitalub, a common ammonium disinfectant. But the fusarium appeared oblivious: scientists learned that it lived in diabolical symbiosis with a bacterium, Pseudomonas fluorescens, which was degrading the fungicide, so the restorers added antibiotics to the mix in which they soaked bandages to plaster the lower walls of the cave. Tons of quicklime, which kills the fungus but also temporarily raised the cave's ambient temperature, was spread on the floor. Since the worst of the infection has been brought under control, "mechanical removal" continues - that is, carefully plucking the filaments from the wall by hand.
Degradation of the walls of Lascaux.
Photo: http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/cnp/fr/parietal_06.htm
Macrophotographs of the structure of the carbonate encrustations on the walls of the hall of the bulls, Lascaux.
Photo: http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/cnp/fr/parietal_06.htm
Photo: Norbert Aujolat - CNP/MCC
An oil lamp (a deer fat lamp), found in Lascaux cave in Montignac, Dordogne, Aquitaine, France. Magdalenian culture, 17 000 BP. It can be viewed in the National Prehistory Museum in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac.
The red sandstone lamp was found by Abbé André Glory at Lascaux. André Leroi-Gourhan, said in 1982 that Abbé Glory was the man who best knew Lascaux.
Photo: Wikipedia Creative Commons license, photographer Sémhur, 25 September 2009
Source: Original on display at Le Musée National de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies-de-Tayac
The lamp is just as beautifully completed on the back as the front. Note the layers of sandstone symmetrically circling the bowl of the lamp.
This is a masterwork.
Photo: Don Hitchcock 2008
Source: Original on display at Le Musée National de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies-de-Tayac
Another version of the lamp of rose-coloured sandstone, found at the foot of the Shaft Scene during excavations by Andre Glory, 1959. It bears two signs on the upper face of the handle.
Photo and text: http://www.american-buddha.com/lascaux.4a.htm
This shell was used as jewellery, as shown by the slit cut in the shell for a thong to suspend it. It is an elegant solution to the problem of turning the shell into jewellery, since the craftsman has used an existing groove which was part of the growth pattern of the shell.
This is a marine shell, collected from a beach, a long way from Lascaux, which demonstrates the existence of trade between groups over a long distance.
Photo: http://www.american-buddha.com/lascaux.4.htm
Objects found during the excavations by Henri Breuil and Severin Blanc, 1947-49. Portable objects, lithic items and bones are rarely found in the context of parietal art. Here too, Lascaux forms an exception. Three hundred and fifty pieces were unearthed, including blades, backed bladelets, scrapers, burins and flakes.
Photo and text: http://www.american-buddha.com/lascaux.4.htm
Spearheads found during the excavations by Henri Breuil and Severin Blanc, 1947-49, featuring cruciform incisions or convergent nested elements.
Photo and text: http://www.american-buddha.com/lascaux.4.htm
Alain Roussot and André Glory at Lascaux, 1953
(Note that in this photo André Glory is using a translucent medium directly on the surface of the cave, in order to trace the image - Don)
Photo: http://albuga.free.fr/fr/prehistoire/Bara-Bahau/agrandissement.html#02_P1290060.JPG
Text below from Eshleman (2003)
Glory's most spectacular find in the Shaft was a burner (bruloir) in a ground layer below the tail of the rhinoceros. "Shaped like a large spoon made of red sandstone, 8 3/4 inches long by 4 3/16 inches wide and 1 1/4 inches thick, the burner is finely polished and symmetrical. Its shallow oval cup serves as a receptacle for fuel. It has a capacity of two fluid ounces. The upper surface of the handle is decorated with two abstract signs of chevrons fitted into each other, such as are found painted or engraved in various parts of the cave."
When the burner was discovered, "it still contained sooty substances grouped in a circle at the bottom of the cup on a magma of fine dust" These particles were tested and determined to be the remains of a juniper wick used for ignition.
Text below from Aujoulat et al. (2005)
From 1952 to 1962, Father André Glory undertook a survey of the painted figures and engravings of Lascaux, located beyond the room of the Bulls.
Very friable rock in places prohibited affixing the translucent paper directly on the wall. He got around the problem by using transparent media, namely a cellulose film, kept a few centimeters from the images.
In 1955, at Bara-Bahau, he used a similar procedure: "with the help of two assistants who held a large plate of semi-rigid plexiglass a few centimeters from the figures I was able to trace the figures onto the plate. The separate drawings were then reassembled from the partial drawings." (Glory, 1955).
Report on the conservation status of Lascaux Cave 31st January, 2011
Discovered by accident in September 1940 by four teenagers, Lascaux Cave has become a reference that has shaken the international perception of cave art, and more generally, the symbolic behavior of prehistoric people.
Since its opening to visitors, the public flocked to enjoy this collection of unique wall art and visitor numbers increased exponentially , reach the dizzying number of 100 000 visitors in 1960.
Because of the climatic and biological changes to the cave, the Minister of Cultural Affairs closed the cave to the public in 1963, when it was still in private hands. The art was being degraded by 'green sickness' and 'white sickness', fungal or bacterial infections which was first noted in the early 1960s. It was decided to identify the problems and provide effective solutions, and to identify the conservation efforts which would preserve the climate of the cave and avoid damaging microbiological activity.
Although the system was in balance until the late 1990s, the nevertheless fragile environment was degraded shortly after the installation of an airconditioning system which was supposed to rectify matters.
The measures taken from the year 2000 on to stem the crisis have resulted in a state of conservation of relative stability.
Although the parameters which affect the state of the paintings have not all been identified, the knowledge of the main factors affecting the cave has greatly increased in the last ten years.
Research programs undertaken since February 15, 2010 will promote our understanding of this The measures taken in the years 2000 to stem the crisis have resulted today in a state of conservation of relative stability. If the various phenomena of interest to the cave have not yet found all the explanations, our knowledge of the operating mechanisms of the cave has significantly enriched in 10 years. Research programs underway and those to be initiated by the new Scientific Council established February 15, 2010, will promote our understanding of this remarkable cave.
As was the case for several years, access to the cave for the past year has been strictly controlled and even more limited in order not to exceed the number of hours considered acceptable based on current climate studies. Thus, in 2010, the amount of time has been set at 590 man-hours in the decorated part of the cave and 253 man-hours in the vestibule, specifically the technical parts that of the airlock and the engine room. In comparison, the human presence in 2009 was of 705 man-hours in the decorated part of the cave and 147 man-hours in the vestibule. The reduction of the time spent in the decorated part of the cave was possible due to the relative stability of the cave of a microbiological point of view. The increase in time spent in the vestibule is explained in turn by the need for maintenance of the technical installations which control the temperature, humidity and airflow in the cave system.
In addition, the access protocol to the cave, already strict, has been further strengthened. Thus, a new document setting out the practical arrangements for entry and exit of the cave was approved, and this was complemented by a computerised registration system installed in the door of the complex, which automatically records the number of hours spent, and all movements into and out of the cave, to the minute. This allows for a computerised management of human presence in the cave, and allows its strict control.
There has been no biocide treatment of the Lascaux Cave since January 2008. Conservators responsible for monitoring the events in the cave and site personnel have continued their work of observation, particularly in sensitive areas to assess any changes or modifications. Each procedure begins with a review of the area and continues with an overview of the contamination on the decorated areas. These observations are intended to establish the level of general contamination of the cave and to identify areas that may, under archaeological supervision when the procedure is safe for the paintings and engravings, allow manual removal of microorganisms as necessary.
Thus, after approval of the curator of the cave and the director of scientific research, mould was removed on the lower wall, but only on undecorated areas was conducted, with brushes of different sizes and hardness, and used in the manner of surgical instruments. At the same time that this was done, residual organic deposits were removed by a special machine (a Gregomatic) from the undecorated areas.
(A Gregomatic is a machine which injects pure cold water onto a stone surface, immediately vacuuming up the water and the material it has loosened, cleaning the pores of the rock surface while preserving the surface itself. It is advertised as removing dust, dirt, grease, bacteria and poisonous substance from any material or structure. See http://www.gregomatic.com/en/S100_vakuumwaschen.php - Don)
Throughout 2010, the overall level of contamination of the cave remained relatively stable and restorers responsible for monitoring the health of the cave did not observe significant variations in the location of contaminated areas.
Contamination of the cave by the white sickness remained very low throughout the year. These small occurrences of very fine white tufts tended to decrease in size and thickness in 2010. The phenomenon is almost non-existent on all the walls of the Hall of the Bulls and the Axial Gallery and disappearances of the white patches were recorded in areas where the contamination had persisted for years. After the disappearance, in 2009, of the contamination in the figures on the Panel of the Chinese Horses, a gradual decrease in white colonies until their disappearance was found on the panel of the bears in May 2010. This regression of the contamination was also observed in the Nave at the frieze and the Ibex Panel Imprint, with as well the absence of mycelium visible on the frieze of swimming deer. Only the roof of the passage remains a sensitive area with, however, between April and November 2010 a number of disappearances of the white down more common than new appearances.
The rehabilitation of the original site of Lascaux would be most effectively done by reducing the influx of tourists to the site of Lascaux. The infrastructure of Lascaux II and the 300 000 tourists per year that the site attracts is one of the most important problems that the original site of Lascaux faces.
This could be accomplished by moving the parking area as far away as possible from the original site. This can be accomplished by setting up another version of Lascaux further away from Lascaux I and II. Land has been acquired for this purpose.
A museum visitor center attached to a new facsimile of the entire cavity, a most comprehensive project, will be built at the foot of the hill, which will then be revegetated. This project, called Lascaux IV, was launched in early 2011.
In preparation for this, a travelling international exhibition (as seen at Lascaux révélé above - Don) with five panels of the Lascaux Cave, Vache Noire, Panneau de l’Empreinte, Bisons adossés, Frise des Cerfs nageant, Scène du Puits, currently visible at le Thot, called Lascaux révélé, will be the heart of the exhibition. The travelling exhibition will be taken around the world over a two year period.
Getting into a hole
Entrance to the Lascaux Cave at the end of September, 1940. From left to right: Leon Laval (teacher), Marcel Ravidat, Jacques Marsal (the two discoverers) and Henri Breuil. Successive alterations would bring about an important widening of the entrance, enlarging it from the sub-vertical shaft through which the discoverers had entered the cave for the first time, to the entire breadth of the gallery.
Photo and text: http://www.american-buddha.com/lascaux.7a.htm
Visit to Lascaux by Abbé Breuil and Count Bégouën, on 24 October, 1940. Sitting in front of them the Lascaux discoverers Jacques Marsal, left, and Marcel Ravidat, right.
Lascaux would have escaped history and its indignities if four boys rambling on a hillside just east of the Vézère River in southwestern France in 1940 hadn't decided to investigate an opening revealed by a fallen tree.
Photo: http://www.american-buddha.com/lascaux.7a.htm
Soon Abbé Henri Breuil, a pioneer in the study of Paleolithic cave art who had been examining cave paintings in southern France and northern Spain for almost 40 years, arrived to inspect their extraordinary find. He theorised that Lascaux's broad galleries of compositions suggested a magical or religious function for the drawings; Lascaux became known as the "Sistine Chapel of prehistory" and people clamored to see it.
After the war the La Rochefoucauld family, which owned the property, authorised work to enlarge the entrance, shunt off the water that had once cascaded through the cave, and install steps and concrete flooring through much of the underground complex. As many as 1 700 visitors traipsed through Lascaux every day, but by the late 1950s, the presence of so many carbon dioxide-exhaling, warm-blooded bodies had altered the cave's climate to the point where calcite deposits and lichen were threatening the paintings. "There's been a tradition of intervention at Lascaux from the very beginning" says Frangois Bourges, an independent hydrogeologist and expert on France's eaves. South by 230 km, the D'Audoubert and Grotte des Trois Frères, caves of a similar vintage and impact as Lascaux, have never been open to the public. Count Robert Bégouën, whose father and uncles found the eaves on the family's Pyrenean estate in the years just before World War I, continues a family tradition that decrees no one enters either cave without a Bégouën at their side. Not even Jean Clottes, who wrote an extensive monograph on Tuc, was allowed to venture off a narrow path along the center of the cave. "My grandfather said that a cave opened to the public is lost to science:' says Bégouën. "Since nature conserved it for 17 000 years, we do absolutely nothing: no new plantings on the surface, no sealing it off with doors, and for each generation, just one chief responsible for studies and conservation. Everything we did is the opposite of Lascaux."
After the cave opened to the public in 1940, up to 1 700 visitors traipsed through each day.
Photo: René Burri - Magnum Photos
The era and the circumstances of Lascaux's discovery prevented such a pristine approach. After the war, France - and the community of Montignac - needed a boost, and as a phenomenal tourist attraction, Lascaux was there to provide one. Moreover, Breuil, unlike his friend Bégouën, believed that the wonders of Lascaux ought to be shared as an educational experience with as many people as possible. But by 1963, the threat of permanent damage had grown so acute that André Malraux, France's first and most famous Minister of Culture, ordered the cave closed.
That courageous decision ushered in an era of innovative study of the world's most iconic painted cave. A team led by Paul-Marie Guyon, a young physical chemist, and including Jacques Marsal, one of the boys who discovered Lascaux and who grew up to become its guardian and most practical connoisseur, worked to model the air flows and monitor the carbon dioxide content and temperature in the cave. At the same time, the meaning of the prehistoric cave paintings, like those discovered earlier in southern France and northern Spain, became a topic of fertile interdisciplinary discussion. Some saw in these beasts primary evidence that from the beginning art was wrought for the sake of art. Others contended that the images were purely utilitarian, drawn solely to marshal magic that would help hunters succeed. Yet archaeological evidence is strong that while humans were painting in Lascaux, they could count for sustenance on massive herds of reindeer, an animal that is only rarely depicted.
By the beginning of the 1970s, Lascaux had found a kind of stability. The crowds were gone, the lichens banished, and Marsal was in the cave almost every day, alert to even the slightest changes. The studies of Guyon and others had determined that the cave could handle about five visitors a day for 35 minutes each, five days a week. With some variation, that protocol was never exceeded for the next 30 years. Since 1983, even the crowds were back, in manageable numbers, to visit Lascaux II, a facsimile that gives visitors an inkling of the cave paintings' power. And anyone determined and patient enough could successfully petition the authorities for permission to visit the real cave. The only precaution was to walk through a trough of formaldehyde solution - the regimen which Pallot-Frossard of the LRMH suggests may have inadvertently enabled the fusarium fungus to flourish.
Future Tense
Pallot-Frossard contends that the fungus has not caused irreversible damage to the paintings, but others disagree. Laurence Léauté-Beasley, a Franco-American who led art tours into Lascaux from 1982 to 2001 and formed the International Committee for the Preservation of Lascaux in 2004, says one knowledgeable visitor to the cave last month not only saw fusarium on the paintings, but noticed a grayish tinge to formerly black surfaces where growths had been removed. And the treatment itself may have taken a toll. When the quicklime that did the most to bring the outbreak under control was removed from the cave over the course of last year, so too was what was left of the soil - with possible ramifications for the cave's climate and humidity. Desplat, the Lascaux caretaker who first discovered the outbreak, says that in the course of restoration work, a large stone flake painted with a horse's head that many millennia ago had fallen from the Great Hall of the Bulls - the first and most voluminous chamber of the cave - sustained three cracks; Geneste says the cracks aren't new. Some believe that a ridge around part of the Great Hall bears the marks of the restorers' ladders, and that the lower parts of the walls have been changed through the use of a Gregomatic, a kind of powerful waterbased vacuum cleaner. Pallot-Frossard has no regrets. "Theres nothing more complicated than a cave" she says. "We had to intervene fast and we did the best we could"What doesn't exist is an independent judgment of what went wrong at Lascaux and whether it is being put right. The committee the Ministry of Culture created to perform that task includes Oudin, the architect who installed the disastrous climate system; Geneste, the curator, who accepted the plans and oversaw the installation project; Pallot-Frossard, the lab director; and the responsible bureaucrats. How a committee so constituted can arrive at unbiased answers is "a good question" admits Marc Gauthier, an expert on the Gallo-Roman era and the committee's chairman. But he says it's working. "Too often we've reacted to the symptoms of the problern" he says. "But for the last three years we've been reflecting and acting on the reasons." Léauté-Beasley is unconvinced. "We feel that big mistakes have happened and may still be happening" she says. "The French are dealing with them like it's their backyard, but they need to feel accountable to the rest of the world. After all, who does the past belong to?"
Lascaux's keepers are no longer using chemicals to eradicate fusarium from Lascaux: no more antibiotic patches or quicklime. But no one can be content that restorers still have to go in to pick fusarium filaments off irreplaceable paintings and run the Gregomatic on the lower walls. Geneste sees a few tiny insect colonies as evidence that a new ecological balance is slowly taking shape in the cave. "My goal is to reopen Lascaux in 2007," says Rieu, the regional director of conservation. "If the scientists' hopes are realized, that could happen, though for very restrained numbers of visitors." Business as usual may come as a relief to the ranks of bureaucrats taught a lesson in humility by Lascaux. Whether that lesson sticks will be determined by future generations. It will be a terrible indictment of this one if it does not.
References
- Aujoulat N., Perazio G., Faverge D., Peral F., 2005: Contribution de la saisie tridimensionnelle à l'étude de l'art pariétal et de son contexte physique, Bulletin de la Société préhistorique française. 2005, tome 102, N. 1. pp. 189-197.
- Eshleman, C. , 2003: Juniper fuse: upper paleolithic imagination & the construction of the underworld Wesleyan University Press, paperback, 356pp, ISBN-13: 9780819566058, ISBN: 0819566055
- Glory, A., 1955: La caverne ornée de Bara-Bahau, l'an 40000 naissait l'Art, Le Bugue, 20 p.