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Issue 72

September 2003

Art of the Hunters

Paul Bahn describes how the first Ice Age cave art in Britain was found
earlier this year at Creswell Crags

I have wanted to find Ice Age cave art in Britain for more than 25
years, and that dream has finally come true. It is perhaps slightly
ironic that the discovery has come in the year that marks the centenary
of cave art being found in several important Spanish caves such as
Covalanas and El Castillo. Britain has had to wait a long time, but its
hour has come at last.

There was never any reason why cave art should not exist in this
country. After all, we have no lack of caves with Upper Palaeolithic
occupation, and we already had a few pieces of portable art from the
period, most notably the figurative specimens from Creswell Crags - the
horsehead from Robin Hood's Cave and the humanoid from Pin Hole Cave. So
why no cave art? Belgium is equally rich in occupied caves, and
considerably richer in portable art, but likewise had no cave art. It
seemed simply to be an accepted fact of Ice Age studies that cave art
stopped in Normandy, and there was nothing further north. It was a
phenomenon of France, Spain and Italy. The United Kingdom had 'nul points'.

There had been two false alarms in the past which did not help matters -
and nor did the portable engraving of a horsehead from Sherborne which
divided opinion for decades until finally proven a fake a few years ago.
The first claim came in 1912 when the already eminent abbé Henri Breuil
from France, and WJ Sollas from Britain, declared in /The Times/ of 14
October that ten wide red parallel horizontal painted stripes in the
cave of Bacon Hole on the coast of South Wales were 'the first example
in Great Britain of prehistoric cave painting.'

Breuil later admitted that the age of these stripes could not be fixed,
and in any case they quickly faded, and are now reckoned to have been
entirely natural, or marks left by a Victorian sailor cleaning a paint
brush.

False discoveries

As for the second claim, I still remember vividly the moment when, in
January 1981, I spotted in my local branch of WH Smith the new issue of
the /Illustrated London News/, bearing on its cover the words 'Cave Art
Discovery in Britain: Exclusive Pictures'. My reaction, of course, was
'Damn, I wanted to do that!' (or words to that effect). I was somewhat
puzzled and relieved when I opened the magazine and saw the photographs,
because I could see nothing that looked like any cave art with which I
was familiar.

And sure enough, when specialists went to the cave - Symonds Yat in the
Wye Valley - they found absolutely nothing but natural marks. The
principal claimant, a mysterious Canadian called Tom Rogers, rapidly
vanished from the archaeological scene; while the /Illustrated London
News/, which had so rashly published its 'exclusive' without any
verification, printed a grudging retraction, and soon ceased to cover
archaeology altogether. So that episode was very damaging - not least
because, once the ILN had cried wolf, any future claim for British cave
art would need to be rock solid.

Over the next couple of decades I tried to expand and improve my
knowledge and experience of Ice Age cave art. It seemed obvious to me
that - short of finding a new cave, or a new chamber in a known cave -
no paintings from the period were likely to be discovered in Britain.
They tend to be quite visible, and somebody - speleologist, tourist,
owner - would surely have spotted them by now.

Obscured by light

But as far as I was aware, nobody with an experienced and practised eye
had combed the British cave sites looking for engravings, which can be
notoriously difficult to see, even when one knows they are there. Since
engravings are usually incised with the light coming in from the side,
to avoid the shadow of the artist's hand obscuring his or her view, they
often require lighting from the side to be seen clearly. Frontal
lighting can render them quite invisible. And it takes experience to be
able to differentiate natural cracks from engraved lines.

Some years ago, I met Sergio Ripoll of Spain's Open University. A
leading specialist in cave art, Sergio comes from one of Spain's
foremost archaeological families, and his father Eduardo has also been a
major figure in prehistoric art studies for decades. I think I have
developed a pretty good eye for cave art, but Sergio has the keenest
eyes I know, as well as a lot of luck, which is equally important. We
made plans that one day we would explore some British caves together to
try and find Ice Age engravings. But time passed, and we could never
settle on a period when we were both free.

The catalyst was the founders' and benefactors' feast at Keble College,
Oxford, last November, to which I was invited by Paul Pettitt, with whom
I had recently written a paper for /Antiquity/ in which we expressed
serious misgivings about the reliability of the very early dates for the
art in Chauvet cave. That evening I told Paul of my unfulfilled plans to
explore some caves, and he immediately offered to deal with the
logistics, contacting the relevant cave owners and fixing a timetable
and itinerary. All three of us would be free a few days before Easter.

By pure chance, and for practical reasons, it was decided that we would
begin our survey at Creswell Crags, on the border between Derbyshire and
Nottinghamshire. And so it was that, on the very first morning of our
search, on 14 April this year, we found engravings in not one but three
caves.

Some apparently non-figurative marks were first found in Robin Hood's
Cave, and other marks - plus a possible animal head - in Mother Grundy's
Parlour. However, it was in Church Hole Cave that we hit the jackpot,
despite having almost decided not to check that site, since its 19th
century excavations had revealed primarily Middle Palaeolithic
occupation albeit with some Creswellian material above.

Inside the cave

In Church Hole we first found a pair of deeply engraved enigmatic motifs
on the wall which looked to us like two bird figures, possibly a crane
and a bird of prey. But then Sergio made our greatest discovery so far.
It was a large figure of a goat - clearly a male from its proportions -
which bowled us over not only by its size (about 57 cm long) but also by
the beauty of its head.

The body was mostly obscured by scratched graffiti, some dating to 1948.
But by some miracle the graffiti - whose creators had doubtless not seen
the animal figure - missed the head, which remains pristine. When not
lit from the side, it is virtually impossible to see, which explains the
fact that we were probably the first people to notice it since the Ice Age.

The one positive aspect of the graffiti was that, being very bright and
sharp, they provided a stark contrast to the darkly patinated lines of
the animal figure, a crucial proof that the goat is far older than 1948
and could not possibly be a modern fake. Our initial assessment is that
this is a figure of a male ibex, and its style suggests a date of
12,500-12,000 years ago.

What are the implications of this discovery? Quite apart from the fact
that we have discovered the oldest rock art known in Britain, this
country has at last been added to the distribution map of decorated Ice
Age sites in Eurasia. At a stroke, the most northerly known decorated
cave leaps 280 miles (450 km) from Gouy, near Rouen, to Creswell Crags
in Derbyshire. But this should not cause too much of a surprise - as
mentioned above, portable art of the period was already known here, and
Britain was physically linked to the continent at this time.

Ibex in Britain

The subject matter is more surprising, since ibex have never been known
in this country, and their remains are extremely sparse in Britain's
archaeological material from the Ice Age. But we know from the location
of countless flints, fossils and seashells throughout western Europe
that people in this period were highly mobile, moving great distances,
often seasonally, and would thus have been familiar with many different
regions.

In addition, discoveries in the past 20 years of open-air Ice Age rock
engravings have made it clear that caves and rock-shelters were not the
only surfaces to be decorated. Artists were also adorning rocks along
rivers, on plateaux, on mountainsides, and so on. In short, people were
surrounded everywhere by rock art, including, no doubt, in southern
Britain, even though none of it is likely to have survived the rigours
of our climate.

So this helps explain how the rules and canons of Ice Age art came to
span such vast sweeps of space and time - from Portugal to the Urals,
over at least 20,000 years - and makes it easy to understand why the
Creswell ibex is quite typical of the genre. In technique and style, and
in its proportions, this figure would be equally at home in a French or
Spanish cave, and had it been found there it would be acclaimed as a
world-class image. The fact that this is 'British' art is meaningless in
a sense, since it forms part of a geographic continuum. But nevertheless
it arouses a certain amount of national pride - /we/ have cave art too.

And of course, it is a classic phenomenon in archaeology that once
something has been looked for, and been shown to exist, it starts being
found elsewhere. It is a fair bet that more cave art will soon be found
in Britain, and there is every hope that a major decorated cave - or
perhaps several - awaits discovery by some lucky individuals in this
country. A new chapter in British prehistory has now been opened.

Paul Bahn is a freelance archaeologist and writer, and a specialist in
prehistoric art