I have long wanted to see the Palaeolithic cave art in the Dordogne so I took a train journey to Sarlat and booked myself on a guided tour to see those at Lascaux and Rouffignac and visit the National Prehistoric Museum at Eyzies which overlooks the Vezere Valley. We tend to think of the stone-age people who created the wonderful cave drawings, paintings and etchings, as living in these caves but apparently not and they were a lot more sophisticated than we like to imagine. They lived under overhanging rocks at the mouth of caves from where they had a good view over the surrounding terrain. The caves themselves are deep, dark and dangerous and it is a wonder that the artists managed to crawl through the small spaces some still difficult to negotiate to create art where given the tightness of the space they would not always have been able to see the complete area on which they were working. There was also the problem of light and they are thought to have used sandstone lamps in which they burned animal fat with juniper wicks which prevented smoke from affecting their work. The artists used scaffolding in some larger caves and worked on the walls and ceilings. To allow access to more confined spaces the floors of some caves have been lowered in recent times.
The Musee National de Prehistoire at Eyzies was founded in 1918 by Denis Peyrony who discovered numerous prehistoric sites including the nearby Font de Gaume one a number of caves still open to the public where original paintings and engravings can be viewed. The museum which was expanded in 2004 by the Parisian architect Jean-Pierre Buffi to a state of the art space is reputed to have cost €65 million and is worth every cent in my opinion. Of the six million objects that form the collection 18,000 are on display. and include decorated objects in bone, ivory, antler and stone. Although Neanderthals had already begun to engrave geometric patterns on sandstone from around 35,000 years ago it was Homo sapiens who first used bone, ivory and antler to make tools and spear points, artefacts known collectively as the bone industry. The first cultural period associated with the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe is called the Aurignacian (38,000-27,000BP) which saw the beginnings of more elaborate artistic expression, Venus statues, decorated pendants, designs on the aforementioned materials, the appearance of beads and the earliest manifestations of cave art. This period is also characterized by the development of the blade-flaking technique and the tapping sound of blade-flaking from one of the museum videos accompanied us on our journey around the gallery. The Solutrean period (22,000-17,000) saw the revolutionary invention of the needle-eye, although fine needles had existed since the Aurignacian. As we shall never know the facts I would like to assume the needle-eye was invented when some woman asked her husband to drill a hole into a piece of bone or ivory so that she could sew a bag for carrying food or make a dress or a necklace. In any case how much we owe to the inventor of this item which remains of importance to this day is inestimable. The earlies preserved string consisting of a heavy cord twisted from three two-ply fiber strings was found fossilized in the caves of Lascaux and estimated to have been circa 15,000 B.C. Whereas there is only a fossilized fragment of a possible piece of woven material as evidence, technically speaking weaving would have been possible. It is more likely that readily available animal hides were used for clothing and there is plenty of evidence from burials to suggest that beads were used to decorate clothing and headdress.
One of the first pieces of portable Paleolithic art was discovered at La Madeleine in the Dordogne which gives its name to the cultural period of the Magdalenian (18,000-10,200) and which was excavated in 1863 by Edouard Lartet. It consisted of an engraving of a mammoth on a fragment of mammoth tusk. The precision with which the long extinct mammoth was engraved revealed the previously unsuspected artistic and technical abilities of the maker. Cave art in all its sophistication was to be discovered 40 years later triggering a reappraisal of our notions of “primitive cavemen”.
The model of Neanderthal man exhibited at the museum shows them to have been of heavier build with a less prominent jaw than Homo sapiens, receding cheekbones with a larger and less high-vaulted braincase than ourselves. The first bones of a Neanderthal, human but different from ourselves, were found in Belgium in 1829. There is evidence that they buried their dead and in some cases ritualistically. The Mousterian technology of points and scrapers, denticulate and notched tools is associated with Neanderthals. The discovery of Cro-Magnon skeletons (named after the owner of the land where the cro or shelter was found) in 1868 in Les Eyzies led to the belief that Homo sapiens first developed in Europe. However, earlier Homo sapiens fossils were found in Africa, the Levant and Israel. It appears that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens lived at close quarters in the Levant before modern man, who appeared at least 200,000 years ago on the African Continent, made his way via the Levant to Europe about 40,000 years ago.
On my way out of the Museum I found amongst the many on display a wonderful book called Stepping Stones by Christine Desdemaines-Hugon an expert in both art and archaeology who specializes in Ice-Age cave art and lives with the caves of the Dordogne on her doorstep. Our next stop was the cave at Rouffignac which consists of 10kms of space spread over three levels. The art thought to be 14,000 years old is found over a distance of 2kms on the upper level and it is accessed on rumbling former mine trains whose headlights provide light in the otherwise pitch blackness of the cave which helps preserve the artwork. Like many of the caves it is in private ownership and the owners Jean and Frederick Plassard have identified 258 animal drawings in total of which 159 are mammoths which accounts for nearly half of all the mammoths represented in European cave art. In Font the Gaume the most frequently represented animal is the bison and it is the only cave still accessible to the public where polychromatic paintings can be seen. In Combarelles the horse takes pride of place and in the more recently discovered cave at Chauvet rhinoceroses, bears and mountain lions are represented and only rarely seen in other caves. At Rouffignac there are also bison, horses, ibexes, rhinoceroses and one bear, four humans, and sixteen tectiform or geometric figures, which appear to have constituted an early symbolic language. The lack of light was frustrating as it was difficult to see the etched animals pointed out by with our guide with a small spot light as we passed through meters of cave. Apparently the engravings are best seen with a side light. We passed bear pits and bear scratching and eventually arrived at a central chamber which houses what is known as the Great Ceiling. Allowed to disembark from the noisome train we could fully appreciate the work of the artist who 14,000 years ago covered the ceiling with well executed animals using manganese to create what reminds me of the swirling creatures of Chagall.
We mostly hear about Lascaux which is no longer open to the public although Lascaux IV a state of the art replica is well worth a visit. Lascaux is famous for its beautiful polychromatic paintings which caused Picasso to shake his head and proclaim “we have learned nothing”. Here mineral colors were used iron oxide and manganese dioxide prepared and blended into a variety of shades of red, yellow and brown. Pigments were applied in a number of ways, using sticks of color with pointed ends, brushed, dabbed or sponged onto walls, smudged with fingers and even blown onto walls. The effects are nothing short of stunning.
Cap Blanc is famous for housing a unique sculpted frieze 12 meters in length and not in a cave but under a cliff shelter. It includes an aurochs most of which is eroded, five large horses four of which face right except the central figure which faces left. The head of a bison is carved over the first horse’s head, a combination that also occurs in the caves and appears to be of some unknown significance. One horse is depicted smaller and in less detail to make it appear further back and the artists used other methods such as leaving a small gap where the hind leg meets the body to create a sense of perspective, a phenomenon which bypassed the Greeks and Romans and was not explored again until the Renaissance. Whereas examples of negative and positive handprints have been found in caves Bernifal houses the only example of engraved pairs of hands. Humans were not generally realistically represented as it is thought to have been taboo but there is one small portrait of an expressive human face to be seen in Bernifal cave.
Represented throughout the caves are disjointed body parts including images of the vulva which were rare in the Aurignacien, Gravettian and Solutrian periods and became numerous in the Magdalenian. Looking at some examples I cannot help but think that they influenced Picasso’s representation of the vulva in Guernica and other works. And like Picasso the cave artists were masters of abstraction often reducing animals down to essential lines. The caves which housed these images were clearly of great importance to the community. It is not fully understood whether their significance was mythological, magical or spiritual, but what is understood is that great value was attached to the achievement of high quality art and no one seeing these wonderful works today could reasonably regard the so called cavemen who created them as “primitive”.
References: Stepping Stones, Christine Desdemaines-Hugon.
L’Art Prehistorique, Alain Roussot.
