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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.
From: National Geographic, August 2001. Photo by Evelyn Billo and Robert Marc, Rupestrian Cyberservices.
The Pont d'Arc has spanned the Ardèche River for about 500 000 years. Close by is the Chauvet cave.
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 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.
Cave Lions Photo: Bulletin May 25 1999
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This was a mind blowing article which seems to corroborate everything Jean has said about cavebears, horses, bison, cave lions, mammoths, rhinos. |
| From the Bulletin (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. |
Running Bison. The artist has shown movement by drawing extra legs. Photo: Time Magazine 13th Feb 1995 |
 Prehistoric painters had been thought to mostly paint non threatening animals, not predators like these cave lions. Photo: Time Magazine 13th Feb 1995
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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. |
 This bear skull was placed with evident care atop a slab of rock, with fragments of many more skulls on the floor nearby. Photo: Time Magazine 13th Feb 1995
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The Grotte Chauvet is one of hundreds of natural caverns cut into the pale limestone cliffs that form the Ardeche Gorge.  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. |
From: National Geographic, August 2001.
Photo: Jean Clottes
Shaded image of a cavebear
From: National Geographic, August 2001.
Image of a musk ox.
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 room. 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.
 Horses Photo: http://www.pma.edmonton.ab.ca/events/timetrav/iii/cave.htm |
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. |
| 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. |
Rhinos Photo: Time Magazine 13th Feb 1995
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 Aurochs Photo: http://ez2www.com/go.php3?site=book&go=0810932326
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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 "symbolized danger, strength and power," says Clottes, the artists may have been attempting 'to capture the essence of' the animals. |
| 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. |  Wall showing various animals Photo: Time Magazine 13th Feb 1995
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 Hand silhouette Photo: Time Magazine 13th Feb 1995
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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. |
From: National Geographic, August 2001
Photo: Yanik Le Guillou
This enigmatic creature with human female legs, hips and pubic triangle but with the head and torso of a bison is known as the sorcerer.
From: National Geographic, August 2001
A cavebear slapped a muddy forepaw onto this image of a leopard, the first such image of a leopard known.
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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. |
 Horses and Aurochs Photo: http://ez2www.com/go.php3?site=book&go=0810932326 |
 Fighting Rhinos
Charcoal taken from the two fighting rhinos produced radiocarbon dates of around 31000-32000 BP Photo: Time Magazine 13th Feb 1995
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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 32,000 years ago, art was created for more than art's sake. With Dana Thomas at the Grotte Chauvet |
From: National Geographic, August 2001
Photo: Dominique Baffier and Valérie Ferrugio
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
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 recognized 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 authorized 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 hygometry 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.
A better quality image of the door to the cave, from "dmb01" obtained via Google Earth via http://www.panoramio.com/
The photo is labelled "view of the old entrance of the Grotte Chauvet near Vallon-Pont-d'Arc, Rhône-Alpes (France) by dmb01"
If the rock art in the Chauvet cave is 30,000 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.
Source: Agenda de la Préhistoire 2002 - 2003, a superb diary with excellent illustrations sent to me by Anya. My thanks as always.
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.
"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 15,000 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).
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
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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. |
 Horses
Photo: www.amazon.com
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