Ice age artistry. Artists working up to 32,000 years ago created these horses (left), an engraved owl (middle), and rhinoceri (right) on the cave walls.
Michael Balter
Science
Feb 12 1999: 920-922.
PONT D'ARC, FRANCE--Following an overgrown path in this mountainous corner of southern France, archaeologist Meg Conkey trudged from the edge of a vineyard, up a hill, and across a chalky cliff overlooking the Ardeche River. After a few more twists and turns, the path ended at a gray steel door cut into the cliffside. Beyond this door lay a collection of the oldest cave paintings ever discovered--an ice age art gallery that until recently had seen no human visitors for thousands of years. Conkey had been in many painted caves before. But nothing prepared her for her first glimpse inside the Grotte Chauvet after its caretakers unlocked the door.
Ice age artistry. Artists working up to 32,000 years ago created these
horses (left), an engraved owl (middle), and rhinoceri (right)
on the cave walls.
CREDITS: FRENCH CULTURE MINISTRY/DRAC RHONE-ALPES
After donning overalls and safety harness, she slowly climbed down three ladders to reach the cave proper. There a stunning menagerie of red and black rhinos, bears, lions, and horses leaped into the beam of her headlamp. As she moved into additional chambers, more and more images appeared, some seeming to emerge spiritlike from behind cracks and fissures in the walls. She stood transfixed before a magnificent charcoal sketch of four horses' heads, executed with a skill that would be the envy of artists today. "It's phenomenal," she says, recalling the awe she felt when she entered the cave late last year. "Who can draw like that?"
Although some of the paintings have been dated to as far back as 32,000 years ago, their preservation puts many younger cave paintings to shame. "The paintings are so fresh," Conkey says. "They look as if they were painted yesterday." Conkey, of the University of California, Berkeley, is one of a lucky few dozen to have set foot in the Grotte Chauvet since its discovery in 1994. Exploration of the cave was blocked for several years, tangled in lawsuits over land and photo rights and a squabble over scientific leadership (Science, 5 July 1996, p. 26). Now a crack team of prehistorians has at last begun work. Last year, two 15-day expeditions into the cave produced some of the first scientific clues about the paintings and the enigmatic artists who created them, and the team is now gearing up for its next expedition in May.
Archaeologists worldwide are dancing with impatience to know the findings, for these paintings have unparalleled potential to shed light on early artistic achievements. Already, the magnificent skill of their creators has shattered previous chronologies of the development of artistic sophistication and suggests that many techniques once thought to have been invented much later--such as shading and perspective--were already in use soon after modern humans arrived in Europe (Science, 20 November 1998, p. 1451). "The Grotte Chauvet is unique and of outstanding importance," says prehistorian Gerhard Bosinksi of the University of Cologne in Germany. "There are compositions that do not correspond to anything we have seen before."
The explorations, led by the charismatic Jean Clottes (see sidebar)--the French culture ministry's chief adviser on rock art--aim to make computer records of the images, as well as to scrutinize the cave floor for clues to who the artists were and why they painted. Clottes himself thinks some of the art represents the drug-induced visions of shamans but admits that the real reasons may never be known for sure. Indeed, although his team is analyzing the paintings with an array of high-tech methods, he and others say that the most telling clues may be those revealed by classic archaeology: foot- and handprints, hearths, and tools. "The irony of the Grotte Chauvet is that it is going to be the little things, the tiny, subtle kinds of archaeology, that will render the paintings intelligible," says Conkey.
Shortly after archaeologist-spelunker Jean-Marie Chauvet stumbled on the cave in 1994, researchers did a few sketchy studies, including radiocarbon dating of eight samples; the oldest date was 32,000 years ago, from a painting of a rhinoceros. These early dates sent shock waves through the archaeological community, because the paintings were as sophisticated as those in caves half as old, such as at Lascaux in the French Dordogne and Altamira in Spain. Clottes also began preparing an inventory of the artworks. But research was suspended when the legal problems arose. Although some legal proceedings continue, last year Clottes was finally allowed to begin work, with about $1.2 million from the French government for constructing walkways and other logistical expenses, and $175,000 for scientific explorations over the first 4 years.
So far Clottes is moving slowly and carefully, mindful of the need to preserve the precious artworks. Until the walkways are installed, the team has orders not to stray from the 50-centimeter-wide black plastic strips originally spread on the cave floors by Chauvet and his friends. And because environmental change could damage the paintings, Clottes has restricted the number of visits as well as the number of visitors, so that human body heat and respiration don't alter the cave's 13.5ºC temperature, 99% humidity, and 3% CO2 concentration, much higher than normal atmospheric levels.
To make maximum use of their brief sojourns at the Grotte Chauvet, team members alternate between studying paintings and other cave features and analyzing data at their temporary headquarters at a sports camp nearby. For example, after spending 1 day photographing the paintings with a variety of techniques, including infrared cameras to bring out red ochre-based paint, researchers spend the next day scanning photos into computers and combining the images. The photos are printed out and covered with plastic, and team members then reenter the cave to trace additional details onto the plastic. For now archaeological work is limited to the surface, so researchers photograph and examine pieces of charcoal, flint, and other worked stones they find on the cave floor.
Despite such restrictions, these early studies have already gleaned some fascinating results. The initial radiocarbon dates and the stylistic unity of the paintings and drawings suggest that human visitations to the cave might have occurred over a relatively short period, perhaps several thousand years at most. Other archaeological evidence supports this chronology, including the stratigraphy of animal bones and artifacts in a sunken part of the cave floor where successive layers of the cave's history are revealed. The stratigraphy also suggests that the cave was visited by bears before, during, and after human use. Indeed, says Clottes, the widespread traces and paintings of bears raise the possibility that the artists entered the cave while the animals were hibernating there. Researchers have found 55 bear skulls together in one chamber, suggesting that bears may have had special significance to the human occupants--although Clottes says it is too early to be sure that humans put the skulls there deliberately. This idea might find support if further radiocarbon dating shows that the bear bones and paintings were contemporaneous.
The team has also found traces of ancient hearths, says archaeologist Jean-Michel Geneste, Clottes's deputy on the project and curator of the Lascaux cave. He wants to understand how the hearths were used--for cooking, warmth, light, or preparing charcoal for drawing. The bear traffic disrupted many hearths, but he found one well-preserved hearth under a vault too low for bears to go. In a natural depression in the cave floor, heavy pieces of flat white limestone had been arranged around a charcoal fire. There were few signs of animal bones, suggesting that this was probably not a cooking fire. "The floor of the cave is black and gray," Geneste says. "If you want to light an area, you need reflectors, and perhaps that is what the white stone was for."
The team hopes that it will eventually be able to correlate this kind of information with the paintings and so begin to understand their meaning. "The signs of activity on the ground should be complementary to what we find on the walls," Geneste says. "The idea is to make a link between the two."
Other members of the team are using the paintings to try to get a glimpse of the artists themselves. For example, the Grotte Chauvet paintings clearly vary in quality. So it's possible that the cruder images were made by young apprentice artists, like those who may have left the children's footprints seen at other prehistoric rock art caves. At Chauvet, two large arrays of large red "dots" not far from the present-day entrance of the cave, studied by prehistorian Dominique Baffier of the Laboratory of Prehistoric Ethnology near Paris and independent archaeologist Valérie Feruglio, may bolster that idea.
Hands across time. Ancient palm prints (left) reveal the
placement of the hands that made them (right).
CREDITS: DOMINIQUE BAFFIER AND VALÉRIE FERUGLIO
These dots are clearly palm prints, with small notches and lines on their edges--traces of fingers and thumbs. Thus the prints record the size and placement of the artists' hands. Baffier and Feruglio photographed the prints, scanned the images into a computer, and then superimposed computer-simulated images of hands onto them, allowing intelligent guesses about who made the images and how they were standing when they did. One panel of 48 dots appears to have been made by a woman or a child, while another panel of 92 dots seems to be the work of a fairly tall man, says Baffier.
Conkey says the idea that adult artists were passing on their craft to their children is "reasonable" and might offer another explanation for what was going on in the caves, in addition to Clottes's shamanistic theories, but no one really knows. Indeed, over the past decades, a number of theories about the meaning of cave art have come into vogue and then fallen from favor. Cave paintings were once thought to represent "hunting magic" to help ice age hunters catch prey, then were interpreted as signs of social divisions, with some animals representing men and some women. More recently, prehistorians have grown reluctant to place their bets on any single interpretation. "We've had blanket explanations for a long time," says Conkey. "I don't think you're going to be able to explain [cave art] ... with only one sort of hypothesis."
Even when it comes to understanding the individual paintings, there are more questions than answers. For example, the cave's dozens of depictions of rhinos, which were common in Europe at that time, amount to more than three times the total found in all of the hundreds of other painted caves known on the continent. Clottes speculates that the unusual abundance of rhinos, mammoths, and lions compared to later caves may reflect early religious beliefs that changed, much as Christian beliefs have shifted over the past centuries. Randall White, a cave art expert at New York University, agrees that this interpretation is plausible. "It would not be surprising to see different belief systems over time," he says. But it could also reflect regional differences among the Ardeche and other areas, White adds.
Clottes admits that getting into the minds of the artists in this fashion ultimately goes beyond science. "Judging from the images alone, it is impossible to know what part the rhino played in the [artists'] beliefs. ... Imagine a future archaeologist visiting the ruins of 200 European churches: How would he guess from the nativity scenes that the mother was a virgin, or that the people with wings were angels?"
Still, Clottes hopes to find new clues when the team reenters the cave this spring. Top priority is an intensive new round of radiocarbon dating of paint pigments, charcoal, and bear bones to shed light on the relationship between humans and the ubiquitous bears and place the Grotte Chauvet more firmly in the chronology of other painted caves. After this funding cycle ends in 3 years, the team will prepare a report on the cave, a tome sure to find avid readers among prehistorians searching for clues to the life of the ancient mind. Clottes warns that some of Grotte Chauvet's mysteries may remain forever unsolved, but he has high hopes that many questions--including Conkey's "Who can draw like that?"--will one day be answered.