Chauvet Cave

Chauvet Cave is a renowned archaeological site in southern France that is known for its prehistoric cave paintings. Its full name is Chauvet-Pont d’Arc Cave. The cave system, which was discovered in 1994, was named a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site in 2014. The paintings are about 36,000 years old, making them among the world’s oldest-known cave paintings. They predate other paintings found in France at the Lascaux Cave system. Researchers believe the Chauvet system was used for religious or ritual purposes and was not inhabited by humans. The region is home to yet another famed example of cave art, a collapsed shelter known as Abri Castanet that is just six miles from Lascaux. The Castanet paintings were determined to be about 37,000 years old and created by people who lived in the rock shelter.

Background

In 1994, three French speleologists, or scientists who study caves, were exploring limestone gorges of the Ardèche River in eastern France. The group included Jean-Marie Chauvet and his friends Eliette Brunel and Christian Hillaire. They followed a current of air and entered a narrow crevice. It became so tight that they had to chip away limestone with hammers and awls to continue forward. Brunel was the first through and discovered a chamber. When they swept the beams of their flashlights across the walls, the explorers viewed multiple vibrant Paleolithic paintings. The first wall of red ocher drawings depicted a mammoth and a lion with red dots around its snout like a spray of blood. In the center of the chamber was a fire pit.

The scientists were aware of the Lascaux cave paintings in central France and knew those paintings had been damaged by mold, fungus, and other contaminants after the caves were opened to the public. Many of the Lascaux paintings were irreparably damaged. The three kept the discovery secret, notifying only the regional authorities. Within a month, a steel door had been installed to close the opening, and only small groups of scientists have been permitted access to the caves each year since then in an effort to preserve the paintings.

Overview

Radiocarbon analysis was performed on the charcoal used on the walls at Chauvet. The charcoal was made using pine wood. Most of the paintings are about 36,000 years old, but another group of humans arrived about 5,000 years later and added more paintings. The entire collection of art spans 10,000 years of human history. Artists only stopped adding paintings when they could no longer access the caves after a rock fall closed off the main entrance. This sealed the rooms off, and because the interior climate remained stable, the paintings were preserved in pristine condition.

Chauvet Cave is actually a series of six chambers that span 1,300 feet (400 meters). The chambers contain more than a thousand paintings. In addition, artists carved figures into some areas of the walls. Many animals are depicted in the cave art. These include aurochs—an extinct species of ox—as well as bears, bison, mammoths, rhinos, and wild cats, including many lions. Many of these animals, such as mammoths and lions, would have been extremely difficult and dangerous to observe, yet the paintings are so lifelike they could only be rendered after direct observation.

The drawings are anatomically accurate and the artists took pains to use colors and shading to add depth and dimension to the images. Still other panels depict anthropomorphic lions with profiles that are clearly human, leading researchers to speculate the artists may have felt empathy with the predators. Other panels include lionesses pursuing bison and portraits of wild horses. The artists took advantage of the irregular surfaces of the stone walls, positioning their subjects so as to add three-dimensionality to the animals. Other paintings include relief outlines of the artists’ hands, which were probably made by spitting red pigment around the hand as it was pressed against the rock wall. Researchers believe images of animals dominate the chambers because they represented power to early humans, and painting them may have been an attempt to tap into that power by capturing their spirit.

The deepest chamber, called the End Chamber, contains the most skilled paintings. A 36-foot (11-meter) long panel drawn in charcoal depicts sixteen lions on the right. They are leaping into the panel to chase a herd of buffalo. On the left side is a pack of racing woolly rhinos.

The artists had left other evidence of their lives in the chambers. In some areas, their footprints remained in the soil. Someone had placed part of a bear’s skull on a pedestal that resembled an altar. Archaeologists have discovered paint brushes made of horse hair, flint points, and other tools the artists used in their work. Paleolithic people left imprints on the walls where they pressed their fingers against the stone in what researchers believe may have been a ritual to connect to the supernatural powers within the rock. The bones of hundreds of bears, wolves, and other animals littered the floors.

Researchers had to change their theories of human evolution after the discovery of the Chauvet paintings. They had believed that imagination and artistry developed far later, but the mastery of the material at Chauvet upended this timeline. Neanderthals were still the dominant species at the time, and Homo sapiens’ leap forward as an imaginative species may have shifted the balance of power. Neanderthals later became extinct, while Homo sapiens continued to paint in a similar consistent artistic style for 25,000 years.

In 2010, film director Werner Herzog debuted a 3D documentary about the Chauvet paintings called Cave of Forgotten Dreams. The film is one of few ways the public can access the caves. Technicians spent about seven hundred hours laser scanning the cave to collect data to build an exact replica of the cave. The replica, which is almost the size of a football field, opened to the public in 2015. It is called the Caverne du Pont d’Arc and is located about three miles from the original. Artists copied the cave paintings onto synthetic resin that was applied to the walls and created bones and other objects found in the chambers.

Bibliography

“The Art of the Chauvet Cave.” Bradshaw Foundation, 2011, www.bradshawfoundation.com/chauvet/chauvet‗cave‗UNESCO‗world‗heritage‗site.php. Accessed 29 Sept. 2020.

Bell, Julian. “Dreams from Underground.” The New York Review of Books, 9 June 2011, www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/06/09/dreams-underground/. Accessed 29 Sept. 2020.

Cohen, Jennie. “Prehistoric French Artistes Painted Earliest Wall Art.” History, 14 May 2012, www.history.com/news/prehistoric-french-artistes-painted-earliest-wall-art. Accessed 29 Sept. 2020.

Cooper, Barry. Paleolithic Politics: The Human Community in Early Art. U of Notre Dame P, 2020.

“Decorated Cave of Pont d’Arc, Known as Grotte Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, Ardèche.” World Heritage Convention, 2014, whc.unesco.org/en/list/1426. Accessed 29 Sept. 2020.

Hammer, Joshua. “Finally, the Beauty of France’s Chauvet Cave Makes its Grand Public Debut.” Smithsonian, April 2015, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/france-chauvet-cave-makes-grand-debut-180954582/. Accessed 29 Sept. 2020.

Neuendorf, Henri. “Scientists Unlock the Mystery of Chauvet Caves Paintings in France.” ArtNet News, 11 Jan. 2016, news.artnet.com/art-world/chauvet-cave-paintings-404753. Accessed 29 Sept. 2020.

“Venus Pendant.” Ministry of Culture, archeologie.culture.fr/chauvet/en/mediatheque/venus-pendant. Accessed 29 Sept. 2020.