Prehistoric Cave Art Found at Lascaux

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Prehistoric Cave Art Found at Lascaux

Overview

On September 12, 1940, four boys formed a small expedition team to explore a shaft they found while hiking through the sloping woods above Lascaux manor. Armed with shovels and picks, they expanded the restricted opening enough to enable them to descend into the unexplored chambers below. As they made their way through the narrow entrance shaft into the largest room of the cave, the young explorers noticed the walls and ceiling were adorned with brightly colored renderings of bulls and other animals. The boys had stumbled upon one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century—the Paleolithic paintings at Lascaux Cave.

The Cave at Lascaux, or Lascaux Grotto, is located in hills surrounding the Vézère River valley near the village of Montignac, Dordogne, in southwest France. It is one of 150 prehistoric settlements, and nearly two dozen painted caves, dating back to the Stone Age in the Vézère valley. Lascaux Grotto contains perhaps the most unprecedented exhibit of prehistoric art discovered to date.

Background

The first person to conduct scientific research at Lascaux was French anthropologist Henri-Edouard-Prosper Breuil (1877-1961). Breuil concluded that the cave was most likely a ceremonial site that was probably not constantly or even seasonally inhabited by humans. By analyzing the content of the murals, he theorized that the cave was used for ritualistic purposes, most likely connected with hunting practices. Though he did not conduct in-depth archaeological research, more recent excavations inside the cave have yielded no evidence of constant human habitation. Large fire pits for cooking, lithic debitage (the flakes produced when making stone tools), and abundant animal and plant remains from human subsistence are for the most part absent from Lascaux—all evidence that supports Breuil's initial conclusions.

The cave consists of a main chamber that is 66 feet (20 m) wide and 16 feet (5 m) high. The walls and ceiling of the main room and several branching chambers create steep galleries, all of which were magnificently decorated with engraved, drawn, and painted figures dating from about 15,000 b.c.. Based on carbon-14 dating, as well as the fossil record of the animal species portrayed in the paintings, the Lascaux artwork dates from the Upper Paleolithic period. The type of lithic industry, or stone tools, found and depicted further identifies Lascaux as part of the Aurignacian (Perigordian) culture present in Europe from 15,000 to 13,000 b.c.

The paintings were done against the stark contrast of the limestone, sometimes smeared with a pale pigment, in various shades of red, yellow, brown, and black. Among the most captivating paintings are those of four huge auroch bulls, some 17 feet (5.25 m) long, whose horns are depicted in a stylistically twisted manner characteristic of the artworks of Lascaux and neighboring caves. These bulls are located in the main chamber of the cave and earned the room the name the "Hall of Bulls." The ceiling of the main chamber and surrounding galleries are marked with depictions of more common animals such as red deer, various felines (many now extinct), horses, and bovids.

Of these murals, there are two that are most impressive. One portrays only the heads of several large stags, 3.3 feet (1 m) tall, as if to suggest that the horses are fording a river, the other is a rare narrative scene that depicts the killing of a bison and bird-headed man with an erect phallus. The latter of these murals is perhaps an insight into the shamanistic beliefs of the Stone Age people who created the works at Lascaux. The graphic murals are some of the earliest representations of death and fertility in the archaeological record.

Impact

The creation of the murals at Lascaux required technological skill that archaeologists originally thought did not exist in the Paleolithic period. Painting in a dark cave meant that the artists needed some type of portable, long-burning light source—in other words, a lamp—and archaeologists have unearthed small stones with smoothed out depressions containing thickly smeared charcoal, consistent with a "lamp" fuel mixture of botanicals and fats. In addition, the height at which some of the paintings appear indicate that the people of Lascaux were more technologically adept than had been previously assumed. While the artists frequently stood on natural ledges while painting, round, worn notches and natural grooves in the cave walls also suggest that they constructed some sort of scaffolding. Finally, some of the pigments used in the paintings came from metal ores and oxides imbedded in rock that had to be identified, mined, and crushed to obtain the desired color. Others tints required the skillful processing of plants to extract dyes that were combined with other powder pigments and animal fats.

Though Lascaux is perhaps more famous for its contributions to art history, the cave also provides unique insight into the daily life and practices of prehistoric man. Lascaux and other caves in the region contain what may be considered the closest approximation of an historical or literary account of prehistoric Europe. Instead of interpreting only their material cultural (e.g., stone tools, botanical remains, and other artifacts), Lascaux enabled archaeologists to conduct rare cognitive studies, providing a perspective on how man reacted to his environment and what that environment actually looked like.

Though Lascaux is thought to be a ceremonial dwelling and not a site of continual human habitation, the interior paintings nonetheless depict everyday life in a hunter-gatherer, or nonagrarian, society. Scenes that depict hunting practices also depict men using tools similar to those that archaeologists excavated from the cave floor. Thus, archaeologists were able not only to evaluate the hunting implements themselves, but also to have an idea of the context in which men used such tools. For example, a painting of a bull kill shows that men hunted in groups, not just individually. This had long been speculated by archaeologists, but Lascaux and similar caves lent credence to this scientific hypothesis.

Along with deer and horses, paintings at the cave also portray several auroch bulls, a wild ox that is now extinct. The cave murals reflect not only a culture, but also an environment that was on the verge of change. The paintings at Lascaux are contemporary with the earliest stages of a slow transition from glaciation to a more temperate climate—a change characteristic of the late Pleistocene epoch.

One of the greatest lessons learned from Lascaux is the importance of historic preservation, when efforts to balance the often contradictory interests of public access and site conservation became a four-decade battle at Lascaux. The French Ministry of Culture opened the cave to the public in 1948. Though measures were taken to preserve the paintings, there was little regard for the potential archaeological discoveries that lay embedded in the sediments on the cave floor.

The narrow cave entrance was hastily enlarged to accommodate a walkway for the visitors, thus destroying archaeological information. Artificial lighting was installed to illuminate the artwork, and the feet of nearly 100,000 people a year damaged the archaeological deposits in the cave floor. The paintings themselves were damaged by the breath of so many tourists, which elevated carbon dioxide levels and introduced foreign bacteria into the cave; crowds also caused the natural temperature of the cave to rise slightly. This combination facilitated the growth of destructive algae on the cave walls, and caused the pigments used in the murals to crack and fade. To prevent further deterioration, the cave was closed in 1963.

In 1980 an ambitious project was undertaken that allowed the public to once again view the paintings at Lascaux and permit scientists to more carefully study the cave. A partial reproduction of the cave was commissioned for public visitation. The creation of the exact replica of the Hall of Bulls and the Picture Gallery demanded that scientists and artists take exact measurements of the cave surface and endeavor to copy the paintings. The cement structure mimicked the exact contours of the cave walls, and geologists even conducted studies on the wall surface to better approximate the texture of the limestone.

Artists, archaeologists, and art historians used projections of the original paintings to copy the murals onto the walls of the facsimile. Attempts were made to use some of the same techniques and materials employed by the prehistoric artists at Lascaux, but the concrete reproduction did not bond with the crushed ore pigments in the same manner as limestone, so synthetic ingredients and paints had to be used also. Inside the original cave, a computerized monitoring system was set up to allow scientists to more carefully monitor climatic conditions in the cave, such as temperature, moisture and carbon dioxide levels, and gas pressure. Lascaux II, the replica, opened to the public in 1983. It now welcomes 300,000 visitors per year.

ADRIENNE WILMOTH LERNER