mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== paleolithic art jean clottes *Extracted from the Adorant magazine 2002* European Ice Age rock art, often called 'cave art', is well-known all over the world, probably because of the high quality and antiquity of its images. So far, about 350 sites have been discovered, from the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula to the Urals. Out of them, nearly half (about 160) were found in France. They include some really major caves. When the Abbe Breuil published his big book "Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art", he pointed out what he called 'The Six Giants', one in Spain (Altamira), the other five in France : Lascaux, Niaux, LesTrois- Freres, Font-de-Gaume and Les Combarelles (Breuil 1952). No doubt that nowadays he would at least add Chauvet (Clottes (ed.) 2001), Cosquer (Clottes & Courtin 1996), Cussac (Aujoulat et al. 2001) and Rouffignac (Plassard 1999) to the list. Portable art is no less famous for the same periods in France. In the course of the XIXth century, major discoveries were made in several sites such as Le Mas d?Azil, Gourdan, Brassempouy, Laugerie. Other top sites were excavated in the XXth century (Isturitz, La Vache, Enlene, La Marche) with thousands of engraved or carved objects. Mobiliary art is just mentioned here as the purpose of this paper will mainly be rock art (about mobiliary art see Clottes (ed.) 1990). *1. Geographical location * Obviously, rock art locations heavily depend upon the presence (or absence) of caves and shelters. However, areas which one might have thought favourable on that account, such as Languedoc, Roussillon, Provence or again the valleys and causses in the south of Quercy and Aveyron have few or no painted or engraved sites. Cultural choices were a determining factor. Differential preservation is another one, as many caves and shelters may have been destroyed by all sorts of phenomena. For example, at the end of the last glaciation, the 115 meters rise of the sea flooded dozens of caves in the Mediterranean. Several could have had wall art. Only one was partly preserved (Cosquer). france *Fig1 : Paleolithic Art in France *Click for Enlarged Map Four main areas with Paleolithic rock art stand out (fig. 1). The most important one is that of Perigord, with more than sixty sites, ranging over the twenty thousand years during which wall art was done and including some of the most spectacular caves ever discovered for paintings (Lascaux, Rouffignac, Font-de-Gaume), engravings (Les Combarelles, Cussac) or low-relief sculpture (Le Cap Blanc). Quercy (especially the Lot but also the Tarn and Tarn-et-Garonne) is a group in itself, immediately east and south of that of Dordogne. It includes more than thirty painted caves. The major ones are Cougnac and Pech-Merle. The Pyrenees constitute a group equivalent to that of Quercy. Its thirty-odd painted or engraved caves are mostly Magdalenian, but a few are older (Gargas, some galleries in Les Trois-Freres and Portel). They are often to be found in small groupings, like the Basque caves in the Arbailles mountains in the west of the chain, the three Volp Caves, and the six caverns in the Tarascon-sur-Ariege Basin. Several are most important (Niaux, Les Trois-Freres, Le Tuc d?Audoubert, Le Portel, Gargas). The lower valley of the Ardeche used to be considered as a minor group - numbering about twenty caves - before the discovery of the Chauvet Cave, in itself a most exceptional site. The other caves and shelters with rock art are scattered in various places : the Cosquer Cave Provence by the Mediterranean, Pair-non-Pair in the Gironde, Le Placard, La Chaire-a-Calvin, Roc-de-Sers in the Charente, Le Roc-aux- Sorciers and its splendid sculptures in the Vienne, the two caves of Arcy-sur-Cure in Burgundy, the Mayenne Sciences cave in the Mayenne, one or two shelters in the Fontainebleau Forest and two other caves, including Gouy, in Normandy. *2. The nature of sites * Contrary to a well-spread idea, Paleolithic rock art is not merely a 'cave art'. In fact, a recent study showed that if the art of 88 sites was to be found in the complete dark, in 65 other cases it was in the daylight (Clottes 1997). Three main cases can be distinguished : - the deep caves, for which an artificial light was necessary; - the shelters which were more or less lit up by natural light ; - the open air sites. The latter are essentially known in Spain and Portugal. Only one case has been discovered in France (the engraved rock at Campome in the Pyrenees-Orientales). The art in the light and the art in the dark: those two tendencies have coexisted for all the duration of the Paleolithic. The art in the dark was preferred in certain areas (the Pyrenees) and at certain periods (Middle and Late Magdalenian). The low-relief sculptures are only to be found in shelters. On the other hand, the paintings which used to exist in shelters have for the most part eroded away and only very faint traces remain, contrary to engravings which could in many cases be preserved in them. In the shelters, there have most often been settlements next to the wall art. People lived there and went on with their daily pursuits close to the engravings, the paintings and low-relief sculptures. The case is quite different for the deep caves which usually remained uninhabited. This must mean that the art of the one and that of the other were probably not considered in the same way: in the deep caves the images were nearly never defaced, destroyed or erased, where as in the shelters the archaeological layers - i.e. the rubbish thrown away by the group - often ended up by covering up the art on the walls (Gourdan, Le Placard). The art inside the caves was respected, while the art in the shelters eventually lost its interest and protection. *3. The themes chosen * Whether for the art in the dark or for the art in the light, the themes represented are the same. They testify to identical beliefs, even if ritual practices may have varied according to the different locations. Above all, Paleolithic art, from beginning to end, is an art of animals. In the past few years, some specialists have insisted upon the importance of geometric signs. It is true that those signs and indeterminate traces are numerically more important than the animals and that they constitute one of the major characteristics of the art. Under their most elementary forms, as clouds of dots and small red bars, they can be found from the Aurignacian in Chauvet to the Middle and Late Magdalenian in Niaux. They are the most mysterious images in cave art. Very few caves have none (Mayriere superieure, La Magdelaine) or, on the contrary, have nothing but geometric signs (Cantal and Frayssinet-le- Gelat in the Lot). This means that those signs are practically always associated to animals, either in the same caves and often on the same panels or directly on top of them (G.R.A.P.P. 1993). However, our first and most durable impression of Paleolithic art is above all that of a bestiary, plentiful and various while remaining typical. Most of the animals represented are big herbivores, those that the people of the Upper Paleolithic could see around them and which they hunted. Those choices were not compulsory. They might have preferred to draw birds, fish or snakes, but they did not do so. upper paleolithic niaux *Fig 2 : Horses (left) are most frequent in Paleolithic wall art in France. Photo by J. Clottes Fig 3 : Bison (right) are more numerous in the Ariege Pyrenees as here in Niaux. Photo by R. Robert Click for Enlargements* Horses are dominant (fig. 2). Locally they may be outnumbered by bison (the Ariege Pyrenees; fig. 3) or hinds (Cantabrian Spain), occasionally even by rhinoceroses and lions at the very beginning (Chauvet) or, much later, by mammoths at Rouffignac (Plassard 1999). None the less, they always remain numerous whatever techniques were used at any period and in any region. We might say that the theme of the horse is at the basis of Paleolithic rock art. This is all the more remarkable as that animal, even though present among the cooking debris of Paleolithic living sites, was often less plentifully killed and eaten than reindeer and bison, or again ibex in mountainous rocky areas. This means that it played a major role in the bestiary. The same could be said, even if less so, for the bison, whose images are also found in relatively high numbers from the Aurignacian to the end of the Magdalenian. The importance of animal themes varies according to the different regions but much more in function of the periods considered. For ex-ample, the enormous number of normally rare dangerous animals in the Chauvet Cave created a surprise: rhinoceroses, lions, mammoths and bears represent 63% of the recognisable animal figures (Clottes (ed.) 2001) (fig. 4, 5). chauvet cave chauvet cave *Fig 4 : Lions (left) are rarely represented except at the beginning of Upper Paleolithic Art here in Chauvet (Vallon-Pont-d'Arc, Ardeche). Photo by J. Clottes Fig 5 : Rhinoceroses (right) are also quite rare in general except at Chauvet. Photo by J. Clottes Click for Enlargements* However, this is not a unique phenomenon, isolated in time and space. In the Dordogne, at the same epoch, Aurignacians made use of the same themes in their shelters and their caves in much higher proportions than can be found in later art. This would mean that an important thematic change took place in the art of the south of France at the beginning of the Gravettian or at the end of the Aurignacian, when their choices changed from the most fearsome animals to the more hunted ones (Clottes 1996). Human representations can be found, but in far fewer numbers in comparison with the painted and engraved animals. About a hundred have been published, not counting hand stencils and hand prints or isolated female sexual organs. This numerical inferiority, constant at all times during the Upper Paleolithic, is in sharp contrast to what one can see in most forms of rock art all over the world. In addition to their relative scarcity, human representations evidence two main characteristics: they are nearly always incomplete or even reduced to an isolated segment of their body; they are not naturalistic, contrary to the animals. 3 *Homepage* | *Next Page* 4