The Ninth Cave - Laugerie Haute
Click on the photos to see an enlarged version
Laugerie Haute entrance. The man was there to open the cave for some journalists. The two large white rocks were once the roof of the shelter.
The Ninth Cave of the Zelandonii (from the books by Jean Auel concerning Ice Age times) is based on Laugerie Haute in the valley of the Vezere, in the Perigord district of France. The nearby Laugerie Basse still looks like a rock shelter, but Laugerie Haute is long collapsed, and has been almost completely excavated, except for what lies under a house on the middle of the site.
Photo: Utika, 30th April 2002
Photo de la stratigraphie de Laugerie haute
La séquence représente 15 000 ans d'occupation humaine fossilisée sur
plusieurs mètres d'épaisseur.
La plus haute couche d'identifiée ici est du magdalénien.
La roche que l'on observe au dessus est donc tombée après.
Cette roche est celle qui se trouve à droite en entrant sur le site.
Elle sépare le site de la route qui passe devant.
Nous n'avons pas d'assurance que les autres roches qui occupent la terrasse
actuellement soient tombées à la même époque. Ce qui est cependant,
possible.
La configuration de la terrasse devait être bien plus spectaculaire.
Cette photo provient de « La province préhistorique des Eyzies » Caisse
nationale des monuments et des sites. CNRS éditions
Photo of the stratigraphy of Laugerie haute
The sequence represents 15 000 years of human occupation preserved in a band several meters thick. The top layer identified here is a Magdalenian one. The rock that may be seen above these sediments has fallen after this date. This rock is the one that is located to the right while entering the site. It separates the site from the road that passes in front of it.
We have no assurance that the other rocks that now occupy the terrace fell in the same era. This is nevertheless possible.
This photo comes from "La province préhistorique des Eyzies" Caisse
nationale des monuments et des sites. CNRS éditions
My thanks to Peire and Anya for access to this resource.
Mammouths affrontés. Protomagdalénien de Laugerie-Haute. Fouilles
Peyrony. Musée national de Préhistoire. Les Eyzies.
Facing mammoths. Protomagdalenian Laugerie Haute. Peyrony Excavations. Musée national de Préhistoire. Les Eyzies.
This appears to me to illustrate mammoths engaged in ritual combat, perhaps during competition for mates.
Denis Peyrony was a teacher from Les Eyzies who carried out a number of excavations in the area in the early 1900s.
Photo and French text: "les mammouths - Dossiers
Archéologie - n° 291 - Mars 2004"
My thanks to Anya for access to this resource.
Go to a map showing Laugerie Haute
Laugerie Haute is 180 meters long, 35 meters wide and nearly 5 metres deep. It is situated on the right bank of the Vezere, about 2 km from Les Eyzies. The site has yielded 42 levels of sediment, making it the "yardstick" for French Upper Paleolithic industry. The lowest levels date to the Perigordian (ca. 33,000-20,000 BCE), and occupation seems to have terminated around 14,000 BCE, during the Magdelenian period, at which time the nearby site of Laugerie-Basse becomes prominent. (this text from http://www.beloit.edu/~museum/logan/paleoexhibit/laugerie.htm )
Most of the stratigraphic data and related text here comes from an excellent book, 'Rock Shelters of the Perigord' by Henri Laville, Jean-Philippe Rigaud, and James Sackett.
Two kilometres upstream from Les Eyzies is the classic rock shelter of Laugerie-Haute, which occupies a great southward-facing line of cliffs that overlooks the right bank of the Vezere River. It is a vast station whose archaeological deposit at the time of its discovery attained a thickness up to 6 m over an area 180 m long and 35 m wide. It is also somewhat peculiar both in the manner in which it has been excavated and in its physical make up. With regard to the former, a large house sits on top of the central portion of the deposit. This portion remains unexcavated and consequently divides the site into two distinct sectors. The sector lying downstream toward Les Eyzies is called Laugerie-Haute Ouest, whereas the one lying upstream is Laugerie-Haute Est.
The lowest levels date to the Perigordian (ca. 33,000-20,000 BCE), and occupation seems to have terminated around 14,000 BCE, during the Magdelenian period, at which time the nearby site of Laugerie-Basse becomes prominent.
Laugerie Haute Ouest (West) Cross Section
Photo: H. Laville et al, 'Rock Shelters of the Perigord'
Laugerie Haute Est (East) Cross Section
Photo: H. Laville et al, 'Rock Shelters of the Perigord'
(p 259) The Laugerie Haute site actually consists of two distinct localities, Laugerie-Haute sectors Est and Ouest, separated by an untouched central block of the deposit which is occupied by a house in which Peyrony himself lived and which has since served as the residence of his successors in the curatorship of the Les Eyzies museum. Our knowledge of the stratigraphy of Laugerie-Haute has been greatly refined by excavations conducted in both sectors between 1957 and 1959 by F. Bordes and P. Smith (Bordes 1958, 1959) which lent considerable precision to Peyrony's findings and provided important new samples for sedimentological, palynological, and paleontological analysis. The bulk of Laugerie-Haute's deposits concern Solutrean and Magdalenian times.
Laugerie Haute recreation
This evocative painting by Jack Unruh (unattributed, but signed by him) shows Laugerie-Haute before it collapsed.
It was a rock shelter used by Palaeolithic salmon fishers. Several groups probably came together for massive fishing harvests 18 000 years ago.
Note the stone weirs in the painting guiding the salmon to a pool for spearing, the people carrying strings of freshly caught salmon across the shallow pool, the scalers, cleaners and filleters seated beside the pool, the people carrying prepared fillets up the bank, and the racks of drying fish.
On the larger image you can also see that the racks are held up by tripods, each one of which is stabilised by a cord or stick attached to a pile of rocks below each tripod, since there was no soil to dig the tripods into on the rock shelf swept clean by spring floods. Children are playing a chasing game, and someone else is bringing in firewood for the fires under the rock shelter, where there are two types of shelter. In one case there are some sticks stuck in the ground forming a wind shelter, with one side open to the river, and in another case there is a lean to against the rock overhang covered in hides.
Sun drying of the fish would assure a plentiful winter food supply, and thousands of bones have been found in excavations in the area.
Photo: the painting is by Jack Unruh, in National Geographic, Vol 174, No 4, October 1988.
(p 291) The Solutrean is perhaps the most distinctive and at the same time the most delimited tradition of the Perigord's Upper Paleolithic. It begins by 19,000 , B.C. in later Wurm III times and continues into the initial phase of Wurm IV, ending well before 16,000 B.C. Typologically it is, on the whole, exceedingly stable and indeed commonplace, consisting of a basic Upper Paleolithic blade tool assemblage in which end scrapers are very common, burins rare, and perforators numerous, at least in comparison to their abundance in other traditions. There exists no distinctive component of bladelets or microlithic tools and the bone inventory itself is undistinguished and in fact rather impoverished until near the end, when the eyed needle appears. What makes the Solutrean so distinctive in the face of this banality is its leaf-shaped, or foliate, points chiseled into shape by a special retouch that consists of long, narrow, and parallel flake scars that encroach upon the very surface of the piece.
In the view of many prehistorians these foliate points represent the most refined and handsome specimens of flint knapping in the Paleolithic. But this has earned the Solutrean the unhappy fate of being the Stone Age's "martyr" culture, since they have proven so attractive to flint collectors that the overwhelming majority of Solutrean sites have been more quarried than excavated. Happily, however, the site that seems to incorporate the longest and most complete Solutrean sequence, LaugerieHaute, was excavated by Peyrony, who succeeded in defining there the major chronological stages of the Solutrean's regional evolution.
(p298) However, it so happens that the first (Laugerie-Haute) and second (La Madeleine) portions of this seriation pose entirely different problems for the investigator. The first represents a segment of the regional archaeological record that is not simply characterized by Laugerie-Haute but is in fact dominated by it almost exclusively. There is but one other regional site, Le Malpas, which furnishes refined stratigraphic evidence for the Solutrean, and there is virtually none at all for Lower Magdalenian times. Fortunately, Le Malpas' succession equates very closely with Laugerie-Haute's Solutrean levels. And Laugerie-Haute happens to present a stratigraphy that exhibits an unbroken sequence of marked depositional contrasts, fully complementary pollen data, a useful series of radiocarbon dates that is internally consistent, and a well-documented and orderly succession of archaeological industries.
(p 300) The peculiarity of its physical layout is somewhat more complicated to explain. The rearward portion of the fill deposit lies inside a relatively shallow overhang like that found at the back of most collapsed rock shelters. Then, extending in front of this, lies the middle portion, which was originally buried under a relatively thin detritus of fallen roof blocks and rubble. But, instead of merging into a talus slope in the typical fashion, the forward portion of the deposit extends several meters outward on the horizontal, having been buried and preserved under a fall of gigantic blocks that represents a massive yet still intact collapse of the cliff face itself. Hence, walking into the middle portion of the site, which today has been nearly completely emptied of its original deposit save for the segment underlying the house, is like entering a narrow gorge dominated by impressive rock faces on either side.
Like most of the famous rock shelters of the region, Laugerie-Haute has had a long and checkered career. It was initially explored by E. Lartet and H. Christy in 1863, whose work here and at many other sites led to the first major synthesis of the Perigord-Reliquiae Aquitanicae (1865-1875). Numerous excavators followed, but - as so often has been the case - truly methodical investigations at this site began only with the work of Peyrony, whose excavations continued from 1921 to 1935 (D. Peyrony and E. Peyrony 1938). His important collections were reanalyzed in the light of modern techniques in de Sonneville-Bordes' Paléolithique Supérieur en Perigord (1960) and in this form continue to comprise our major artifactual evidence. However, new excavations were undertaken at LaugerieHaute by F. Bordes between 1957 and 1959, which not only brought greatly enhanced precision to our knowledge of the site's stratigraphy but also provided new data for sophisticated analyses of its artifact industries, palynology, paleontology, and sedimentology (Bordes 1958b; de Sonneville-Bordes and Bordes 1958; Bordes and colleagues 1969; Smith 1966; Laville 1964b; Paquereau. 1969c; Delpech 1975). What follows is largely based upon this work. More recent excavations have, however, been conducted at the site over the past decade by G. Guichard (1976a), which will be of great interest when published in detail.
Time scale for the Perigord, which includes the area of the Dordogne
Note that dates are given as BC, not BP.
Photo: H. Laville et al, 'Rock Shelters of the Perigord'
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