But, she cautions, only one of the three archaeological characteristics is really helpful in illuminating the meaning of cave art. The way the paintings were made—that is, what tools were used, what minerals made the pigments, and so on—may be interesting, but it says very little about meaning, which is independent of the tools and materials the artists used. Looking for signs of use isn't especially helpful either, since paintings almost never show any sign of use whatsoever—although, she adds, that in itself is significant. If the art really had been used for hunting magic, it probably would show signs of being stabbed at with spears, or something similar. Then, too, the general scarcity of remains in the caves shows that they weren't used very often and that whatever ceremonies or events took place there were rare.
But the third focus of archaeology—the place where the art is found—is supremely important for trying to understand what cave art meant. A prehistoric man might accidentally have dropped a flint blade away from the place where it was made or used. Or water or even rodents might have carried it to a random location that had no connection to it. Such dislocations happen often and make dating and identification tricky or impossible. But we can be sure that the art in the caves remains exactly where the Paleolithic artists placed it. And, she says, it's the position of the paintings in remote parts of the cave, rather than what the pictures usually show, that suggests their magical or religious importance. Furthermore—and here is where Laming-Emperaire begins to sound like Max Raphael—it's not just the placement in the cave that is important for trying to understand the meaning of the art. It's also the placement of figures in relation to one another. The way a group is composed, the superimpositions, the way that one kind of animal is placed near or on another, the frequency with which that happens, and the way signs are placed near animals— all this can lead toward real understanding.
She then shows how this method of archaeological analysis, without resort to ethnology, could be applied to Lascaux. In practice what she did was draw diagrams of the cave walls using symbols she invented that look like arrows with a variety of different points. The symbols showed both the species represented and the direction it is facing. By studying the diagrams she began to see which animals were repeatedly grouped together and where the groups were located in the cave. Her most spectacular insight was in noticing the many parallels between two paintings in Lascaux: the scene of the Falling Cow in the Axial Gallery and the Great Black Cow in the Nave. “The central subject,” she writes, “is the same: a large black bovid advancing towards the back of the cave. On one panel the animal appears to be leaping towards a latticed sign; on the other, its two hind legs and its tail are entangled in three similar signs. One bovid is surrounded by some seventeen painted horses, the other by about twenty, both painted and engraved, some of which it masks completely.” The comparison goes on. Her careful inventories of each scene have opened the possibility that not only are these two paintings purposeful compositions involving many animals, they could also be purposeful compositions of the very same scene. If similar scenes appear in other caves, she says, with stereotypical characters always in the same relation to one another, “we would be it seems in the presence of the most ancient stories told by mankind that have come down to us.” And this exciting conclusion would be valid because it derived entirely from archaeology, not from ethnography. The scene in Lascaux and other caves of a man threatened by a bison could represent yet another ancient story.
She also perceived that certain animals were frequently paired and that the pairings were crucially important to the meaning of the art in a cave. In particular she noticed that bison always appeared near horses. She also saw that in deeper parts of the cave horses appeared near lions and that women were frequently associated with bison. She called for further meticulous study in Lascaux and in the other known caves that would inventory the common associations of animals such as that between bison and horses. But research mustn't stop there: “The study of the innumerable signs, some of which appear to be arrows while others have been interpreted as traps, is one theme of primary importance. The imaginary beings—monstrous or composite animals, hybrid humans with animal heads—constitute a smaller group but one even richer with suggestion.”
Such inventories would require long, tedious hours of taxing work, but they were the only way to come to a deep understanding of the art in the caves that was based on valid science. Even her admittedly brief and inadequate survey of Lascaux had allowed us “to proceed from the notion of a magical Paleolithic art to that of an art more complex and richer, charged with a new meaning.” Although she doesn't mention him in this instance, this is a direct attack on Breuil and the world where simple hunters hoped their paintings would work magic on their prey, as he and his contemporaries imagined. This audacious graduate student is saying it's time to leave the thinking and the methods of the past behind and march in the manner she prescribes into the future.
And, broadly speaking, that is exactly what happened. The goals and expectations are rather different, and the techniques, particularly those using computer graphics, are more sophisticated, but detailed inventories and comparisons like those she first suggested remain at the heart of the study of Paleolithic art. Even her charts filled with quaint, symbolic arrows for each animal survive as easily manipulated computerized drawings.
Most important, she convinced the scholarly world that came after her that Paleolithic art was not “primitive.” Nor did “primitive” people create it. Like Max Raphael, Laming-Emperaire thought the cave painters lived in a developed civilization with a long history and a vast mythology that grew from their probing and pondering the meaning of the world around them: “It is still too soon to determine the meaning of these themes [in the paintings and engravings]. They could be mythic and recount for example the origin and history of a certain human group in its rapport with the animal species; they could solidify a very ancient metaphysics and express a system of existence where each species, animal or human, has its role, and where the sexual division among beings plays a primordial role; they could be religious and bring supernatural beings onto the scene. They could be all ofthat at the same time—mythical, metaphysical, and religious—without the distinctions that we introduce among these different modes of thinking having great significance, and all applied at the dawn of human thought.” This, then, became her legacy and her great challenge to archaeology. “It's worth whatever effort it takes,” she wrote in the last line of La signification,“to unlock the secrets of this first Treatise on Nature.”
We can't leave Laming-Emperaire without commenting on certain pages in La signification that can only be called peculiar. They contain her response to the thirty-one typed pages she received from Max Raphael. In them Raphael elaborated on his theory that the animals in the paintings represent the totems of various clans. Laming-Emperaire spends a whole chapter debunking totemism as an explanation, lumping it with hunting magic as a shallow theory with little basis. Nevertheless, she can't help but be impressed by Raphael's observation that many caves have a predominance of one species. Some such caves contain pictures of animals of both sexes while others show one sex only. And, aggravatingly, totemism offers a handy explanation for this phenomenon.
According to the notes Raphael sent her, the dominant species in a cave is the totem of a clan. The caves with only one sex of a dominant species were places the clan used for initiation. In caves with both sexes of one species, or with several species, the paintings are the symbolic history of the clans. The superimpositions of one animal over another, which were previously assumed to be accidental, instead show the victory of one clan over another. The conquering clan, having assured their possession of the cave, purposely drew their animal totem over the existing paintings of the totem of the defeated clan. At Lascaux, for example, the superim-position of large bulls and cows on a series of smaller horses in the Hall of Bulls just inside the entrance to the cave signifies the victory of the wild cattle clan over
the horse clan. The Falling Cow and the Great Black Cow, both of which obscure some of the surrounding horses, could memorialize the same victory. It was always a problem for the hunting-magic thesis that only 5 or 10 percent of the figures had wounds, spears, or arrows. But the theory of totems allows the wounds and weapons to be explained as representations of battles between the clans.
Laming-Emperaire immediately responds with “It is difficult to follow Raphael to these conclusions … The totemism thesis is adopted without real proof… The hypothesis of the historical meaning of the representations is similarly adopted without discussion.” But, she continues, there is something else to consider. In Raphael's manuscript one can find “some pertinent criticisms against the classical interpretations of cave art.” What about the fact, which “no one until now seems to have noticed,” that many caves have a dominant species or sex? “There is here a fact in contradiction to the theories of magic and demands to be explained. Why are there some caves with mammoths, some caves with horses, or some caves with bison? The question remains open.” Raphael's explanation, of course, is that they were clan totems. But, she insists, “This interpretation is probably doubtful.”
Why is she being so careful and so awkward? Well, in part it must be because it was 1962. Raphael had published his book in 1945, she had been in possession of his notes since 19 51—more than ten years—and now the fundamental idea in her book of seeing the art in the caves as whole compositions is uncomfortably close to the fundamental idea in his. But her discomfort could also be because the totemism theory cannot be dismissed as easily or as certainly as hunting magic. Near the end of La signification, as Laming-Emperaire ponders possible directions for future research, she returns to Raphael's perceptions again, but this time without attribution: “Was there a cave of bulls and a cave of mammoths, a cave of does also, or a cave of mares? That is not impossible. In that case it will be necessary to study the rapport that connects the dominant animal with the other figures. It will also be necessary to note, and perhaps to interpret, the total absence of certain animals in certain caves. Why are there for example neither mammoths nor reindeer in Lascaux? “
Of course, totemism would explain these facts quite easily— easily, yes, but not scientifically, since Raphael offered no proof for the belief in totemism or the existence of clans. And the great purpose and achievement of La signification was to advance a method for discovering the meaning of cave art that was scientifically valid in the strictest terms. Laming-Emperaire was bothered, intrigued, and perplexed by Max Raphael's observations, but his explanations had no place in her system. In fact, his ideas were its antithesis. Raphael was, after all, an art historian. Neither her daughter nor her sister can recall ever hearing Annette mention his name.
CHAPTER 7
The Trident-Shaped Cave;
Pairing, Not Coupling
A nnette Laming-Emperaire's thesis adviser, the person who loomed behind La signification from start to finish, was a man named Andre Leroi-Gourhan, who was only six years older than she was. He was indisputably a genius and his work made him as great a figure in prehistory as Breuil, who hated him. Leroi-Gourhan dominated archaeology and anthropology in postwar France in the same way that Jean-Paul Sartre dominated philosophy.
But because Laming-Emperaire was his student, and because the theories that Leroi-Gourhan developed in his voluminous publications are similar—some would say identical—to hers, there has always been an undercurrent of dark academic gossip that Leroi-Gourhan had swooped down upon his student's ideas and claimed them as his own.
This is the kind of seething, divisive feud that French academics find irresistible. The accusations have been repeated so often that Leroi-Gourhan's supposed theft has lately come to be considered an incontrovertible truth in certain circles. But to learn what really happened, it is necessary only to look at what the two people involved, Leroi-Gourhan and Laming-Emperaire, said at the time. The decisive moment for Leroi-Gourhan occurred in 1957 when he entered a cave named Le Portel in the foothills of the Pyrenees just northwest of Foix. For ten years he had been thinking about writing a book on prehistoric art. He had visited various caves from time to time, but now, “having assimilated the available literature”—as he calmly described what would be years of work for most people—he had begun to work in earnest. His original intention was simply to write the text for a book of photographs that would illustrate the history of European prehistoric art, although he did intend for his text to break new ground. He thought that Breuil's work, for all its brilliance, had left a gap. The abbe in describing a cave would often construct a chronology of the works in that one cave, but he had failed to create a systematic synthesis that included all the known art. That's what Leroi-Gourhan originally intended to do.
At Lascaux and Altamira, as well as at other caves he visited, he had expected to see chaos, with works scattered here and there as successive generations of hunters had arrived, made their paintings, and left. He thought he was going to have to work out the dating of the successive waves. Instead he was impressed by the unity within the caves. His interest in dating problems faded quickly, replaced by a fascination with the cave as a whole.
That was his state of mind as he entered Le Portel. This cave is located near a mountain pass. It's shaped like a trident, with the present entry at the end of a long, narrow tunnel that forms the staff. Where the three prongs meet the staff, there is a large chamber where the prehistoric entrance was probably located, although it is now covered with fallen rock. The paintings in Le Portel are well preserved on the whole, but it was their arrangement that struck Leroi-Gourhan with special force. Again and again two different species were grouped together, in particular bison and horses. At the original entrance there was one bison and one horse. There was one bison and one horse in the large room at the base of the three prongs. One of the prongs contained eight bison and one horse; a second prong contained practically the mirror image of this distribution—nine horses and one bison. Breuil had written a detailed study of Le Portel, and Leroi-Gourhan made his own exact diagram while he was in the cave. As he studied the two analyses, his impressions began to crystallize that there was some kind of order reflected in the arrangement of the figures.
At the very time when Leroi-Gourhan was visiting and puzzling over Le Portel, he was also, in his capacity as professor of ethnology at the Sorbonne, directing Annette Laming-Emperaire as she wrote La signification. And, as we have seen, her whole point was that the arrangement of figures in a cave is the key to the meaning of prehistoric art. Laming-Emperaire defended her thesis in 1957, the same year that Leroi-Gourhan visited Le Portel. As the director of her thesis, he would have been aware of every detail of her ideas. Only months later, in 1958, Leroi-Gourhan published three papers in a single issue of the Bulletin de la Societe Prehis-torique Frangaise. They were titled “The Function of Signs in the Paleolithic Sanctuaries,” “The Symbolism of Large Signs in Paleolithic Rock Art,” and “The Distribution and Grouping of Animals in Paleolithic Rock Art.” They contained the essential elements of his theories, which were very close to the ideas Laming-Emperaire had just expressed while defending her thesis. Her La signification appeared in 1962. Leroi-Gourhan's Prehistoire de Vart occidental, which contained the full elaboration of his thinking, followed in 1965. In each case, his work followed hers, and the substance of the pernicious gossip is the claim that Leroi-Gourhan never acknowledged this indisputable fact.
But he did. Here's just one example. In Treasures of Prehistoric Art he begins a chapter titled “Groupings of Animal Species” by emphasizing his debt to her: “The groupings of animal figures of different species is certainly one of the most characteristic features of Paleolithic art—a feature which was entirely overlooked until Mme. Laming-Emperaire published her work.” There could hardly be a more direct acknowledgment of her work than that. (There is a more detailed discussion of their relation in the notes.)
“All theory,” Andre Leroi-Gourhan
said, “is a piece of a self-portrait.” That statement is more revealing than it might appear, since Leroi-Gourhan was opposed to theories all his life. Perhaps his opposition came in part from his reluctance, famous among his adoring students, to reveal himself by exposing even a small piece of a self-portrait. One student remembers, “[He] was extremely reserved, voluntarily silent. And, when he spoke, it was almost always about things without great importance rather than those things he truly held in his heart.” Frequently he would talk about oddities of zoology or botany, subjects he particularly liked. It was extremely entertaining, but it was a verbal smoke screen as well.
He spoke slowly and softly and was normally so shy that he avoided his colleagues. Nevertheless, he was a charismatic teacher who inspired devotion in his students. “Listening to him,” one recalled, “you were captivated in an exciting intellectual adventure.” A proud dirt archaeologist, he spent several months each year in the field. In the morning he proposed new ideas and hypotheses about the work and what they were finding. Anyone could comment or disagree. In the evening, students could sit with him at dinner, a kind of egalitarianism that was rare in French academic life at the time. Once students discovered him, they stayed with him. In 1964 a quarry operation uncovered an open-air Stone Age site, subsequently called Pincevent, not far from Paris. The site would quickly have been destroyed had not Leroi-Gourhan, overcoming his shyness for once, rallied his students. More than fifty dropped what they were doing to join him at Pincevent to excavate the site. This created such a sensation that after four months Andre Malraux, then the minister of culture, bought the land for the state.
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