The Cave Painters

by Gregory Curtis

  Both Leroi-Gourhan's background and his personality made him a maverick from birth, and as his life progressed he apparently decided to remain a maverick. His decision hurt his career, although that was difficult to perceive in France, where he had all the prestigious positions and honors anyone could dream of. His important works were widely translated into a variety of European languages as well as Japanese. But except for Treasures of Prehistoric Art, very little was translated into English, which was increasingly becoming the common tongue of archaeology and anthropology. Consequently he is almost unknown even now in the English-speaking world, and his influence on North American, English, and Australian archaeology has been negligible until very recently.

  He was born in 1911 in Paris and lost both his parents during World War I. His maternal grandparents then raised him and his younger brother. Very early on he adopted their name, Gourhan, as part of his own. He adored excursions to the museum of natural history with his grandmother, but he was indifferent about school, which he left at fourteen when his grandfather decided it was time for him to make his own living. He sold women's hats and hose and then worked in a bookstore. He read on his own, attended lectures in anthropology at the Sorbonne, and somehow attracted the attention of a kindly librarian, who took him under her wing. She directed him toward the books he should be reading, especially Les hommes fossiles {The Fossil Meri), by Marcellin Boule, a hugely influential book in its day by the man who was then the leading archaeologist in France. In 1928, when Leroi-Gourhan was only seventeen, this librarian, whose name is unfortunately lost, also introduced him to the director of the School of Oriental Languages. The precocious teenager became the director's secretary and began to take courses in the school. By the time he was twenty he had earned a degree in Russian. Three years later he received a second degree in Chinese and began working on a doctoral thesis on Siberian mythology.

  In 1936, when he was twenty-five, he married Arlette Royer, who would become a noted archaeologist herself. They left immediately for Japan, where they spent three years, studying in Kyoto some of the time and living among remote native tribes during the rest. He also traveled across Asia, especially in China.

  When the war forced the couple to return to France, Leroi-Gourhan retreated to the lower Pyrenees far to the south, where, dispirited, he considered buying a farm and raising horses. The farm became a forgotten dream, but he never lost his affinity for horses. He was short and slight and, although he was generally retiring, he had an intensity that was noticeable even at a distance. His hair was black and extremely thick and he was already wearing it in the crowning, swept-back pompadour that he would retain for the rest of his life. As the war progressed he became involved in the Resistance. He played down his exploits in later life, treating his encounters with German troops as nothing but comic anecdotes. But his brains, instinctive reticence, and unobtrusive demeanor must have been great advantages to the Resistance. His work was dangerous enough and valuable enough that after the war he was awarded both the Croix de Guerre and the ribbon of the Legion of Honor.

  His time in Asia provided fodder for his studied oddballness. He played a variety of exotic musical instruments while he sang in Russian, Chinese, or Japanese. He wore strange-looking hats from remote villages across the Orient. They contrasted with the checked shirts and jodhpurs he favored. At a dig, he would come roaring into camp in the morning on a horse galloping at full speed while he sat in the saddle playing bagpipes. For relaxation, he repaired spinets.

  His publications are too numerous and varied and his career too long—he died at seventy-five in 1986—to recount in detail. Discoveries and technological innovations since his death have made some of his work obsolete. Some of the rest is, at best, out of fashion. For instance, he believed that evolution implied progressive improvement and over the ages led up a scale toward humans, a belief that is a relic of the confident assumptions of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, in addition to his work on the painted caves, he left a significant legacy. Two of his ideas in particular are worth mentioning briefly. One is the chatne operatoire. This phrase, which sounds melodious in French, becomes the grim “operational sequence” when forced into English. In either language the idea behind the phrase is disarmingly simple but has become a powerful analytic tool. He conceived of the chatne operatoire in the 1950s as he watched experiments by prehistorians who were trying to recreate the methods by which Stone Age people had made their various tools from raw pieces of flint. This operation, in which progressively smaller and finer pieces are broken away from a large rock, was first called a “reduction sequence.” But the idea of manufacture by reduction, which usefully explained the production of stone tools, didn't apply at all to other types of manufacturing where, as in basketry, each step in manufacturing involved adding something.

  Leroi-Gourhan realized that neither reduction nor addition was the important point. Each was a discrete step in a process that began with raw materials and human intelligence and proceeded by short but distinct steps to the end results. Re-creating the chatne operatoire, which in practice means entering each step into an analytical grid, is a tedious process that, like the tedious process of creating the inventory of paintings in a cave, can produce great discoveries and insights.

  The laws of nature impose the earliest steps in the sequence. An arrowhead can't weigh ten pounds, so a piece of rock nearer to the appropriate size needs to be chipped away from a larger one. This step, dictated by natural laws, is the beginning of every stone arrowhead. But as the operations continue, each one becomes less determined by universal natural laws and more determined by the choices of the fabricator. These choices are determined at first by culture and finally by personal preference. That is why arrowheads from different tribes can look completely different, even though they were manufactured to perform the same function, and why arrowheads made by different individuals within the same tribe can look different in particular details.

  Following the chain from the raw material outward shows exactly the moment when cultural differences begin to appear. Following it from the outer ends back inward, especially together with a vast number of charts from a variety of cultures, can show what tools and other manufactured objects that appear to be quite different really have in common. The chatne operatoire has been a fundamental idea in French anthropology and archaeology since the 1960s, and it finally spread into Great Britain and the United States in the 1990s.

  Leroi-Gourhan made another permanent contribution by rotating the axis of an archaeological dig by ninety degrees. He had realized for many years that this rotation was necessary, but he couldn't carry it out until his dig at Pincevent, the open-air site near Paris where more than fifty of his students dropped their own work and rushed to join him.

  Breuil and his contemporaries dug straight down in relatively small but sometimes deep pits. They recorded what they found in every layer. Leroi-Gourhan thought such digs were almost worthless. Instead he thought the digging should proceed horizontally in a series of thin slices across the whole area. He explained his purpose by an analogy with a cake that had several layers of icing and “Happy Birthday!” written in cream and buried somewhere among the layers. “If you cut through vertically,” he said, “as was still widely done at this time, you can read nothing at all. All you see are the little bits of cream on the slice of cake, nothing more. You've got to cut horizontally if you want to see the inscription. Prehistoric terrain is exactly the same. If you want to find what men have had to say, you must proceed layer by layer.”

  Just as with the chatne operatoire, this simple idea produced profound results. It exposed all the features of a Paleolithic site— fireplaces, postholes for dwellings, discarded bones, broken tools. Those features aren't there by chance but rather by the innumerable choices made by the inhabitants. Thus, as Leroi-Gourhan said, “the very fact of casting a used object off has meaning.”

  His work in Pincevent became the model in Europe for excavating an open-
air site. The archaeological team labored on wooden planks supported by cement blocks that made a grid about a foot above the archaeological level. Sometimes a single square meter required a full week's work by three or four hardy students who lay on their bellies on the planks for hours on end as they slowly picked dirt away from the remains.

  The excavation began in 1964, but it was twenty years before Leroi-Gourhan published a complete account of the discoveries at Pincevent. He was careful to distinguish between the archaeological facts and the conclusions he drew from them, but his account becomes as clear a picture as we have of daily life among the people who made the paintings in the caves.

  Several dozen families, perhaps a hundred people or so, would come to Pincevent year after year as part of a nomadic cycle 11,000 to 12,000 years ago, in the final era before the practice of painting in caves disappeared. They arrived in late July or early August and remained until the beginning of winter, living in tents of various designs. Some tents were circular like tepees. Each tepee had a round fireplace in the doorway and faced northeast so that the back of the tepee was to the prevailing winds. A few tents had three openings and three fireplaces. The two openings on the ends faced east while the single opening in the middle faced west. This arrangement made it easier to create a large common area inside the tent. People ate around the fireplaces and tossed the bones outside the tent. The bones formed a fan-shaped scatter pattern beginning at the entrance and remained there on the ground for eons until the young archaeologists working with Leroi-Gourhan found them.

  Nearly all the bones came from reindeer, practically ioo percent. The remaining few belonged to hares, horses, mammoths, and wolves. There are no bones at all from bison, wild cattle, stag, roe deer, or antelope, even though their remains are found in every other Paleolithic dig. Why didn't the people at Pincevent eat those animals? That remains a puzzling mystery.

  In addition to reindeer and the other animals, the hunters ate eggs (eggshells turned up inside one habitation), birds, fish, and a variety of leaves, roots, grains, fruit, bulbs, and mushrooms. They probably also ate insects. They dragged whole reindeer back to camp, where the reindeer were butchered. Horses, though, they butchered in the field and brought only the meat to camp. Although there was an abundance of game, the people at Pincevent broke every bone open to get at the marrow inside. Some of the marrow they probably ate almost raw, as one might do today with a roasted leg of lamb. They probably used other broken bones to enrich bullion they made from water heated by stones taken from the fireplace.

  The fireplaces consisted of a circular or oval basin dug into the ground and bordered with flat rocks. The heat caused pieces of the rocks to break off. The larger pieces were then used to line the basin, while the smaller ones were thrown aside. The people at Pincevent used shoulder blades from reindeer to shovel ashes.

  Some of the fireplaces contained only remnants of charcoal produced by burning wood. There were no bones or other debris from cooking or eating, so the fireplaces must have belonged either to a smokehouse or—why not?—a steam bath. Native tribes in cold climates from Finland to Canada pour water on hot rocks in enclosed places to make steam. That's an analogy from ethnology, but the universality of the practice in northern regions makes it convincing.

  The hunters also made fireplaces in the open, away from any dwelling. The fireplaces consisted of a circle of rocks with no basin at all. One of these flat fireplaces was quite large. Presumably it was used for heating flint, bone, wood, or bark so the materials could be worked more easily. Another, smaller, flat fireplace was stained red with ochre. This suggests it was the scene of some ritual, or, as Leroi-Gourhan wrote more precisely, “One of these flat fireplaces saw acts unfold that resulted in the spreading of ochre on the ground.” But for all the clues about Paleolithic life the fireplaces provide, we still don't know how the hunters made fire.

  The hunters arrived at Pincevent carrying an array of finished tools made from flint foreign to the immediate region. That means the hunters must have stopped somewhere to replenish their tools immediately before arriving at Pincevent as part of their yearly migration. They also made tools at Pincevent, however, using local flint. They made knives, blades that they fitted into batons of wood or antler to make a mace, graters, scrapers, awls with a point fine enough to pierce a pearl, and a variety of delicate needles. The needles, which are identical in form to needles today, imply that they could fashion elaborate clothes, which they would have needed, living in a cold climate. But, regrettably, everything made of fur or leather disintegrated long ago. They worked sitting around the fireplace and tossed their scraps, their mistakes, and their broken tools out among the bones.

  Here and there the researchers found various seashells that had been pierced for stringing on necklaces or on clothes. The shells were fossils that the hunters found in the course of their migrations or that they traded for with other communities. Across 20,000 years—from 30,000 to 10,000 years ago—these shells fascinated prehistoric people. Their value as decoration, Leroi-Gourhan thought, “must have been doubled by a symbolic value.” At Pincevent the researchers often found them with fragments of fool's gold, other fossils, and strange spheres of flint carved into the shapes of apples and cherries. They have no apparent meaning, but they must have been simple curiosities, stakes or markers in games or gambling, or instruments of magic.

  Finally, there is a residue of ochre around the periphery of the domestic fireplaces. The hunters used this mineral—iron oxide— in a variety of ways, including, of course, to make red pigment for painting in caves. The color red can stand symbolically for blood, fire, or, in the largest sense, for life itself. Some have proposed that the hunters spread ochre on the floors of their dwellings in order to sanctify them. At Pincevent, though, the ochre is thickest in places where the remains from working flint are also the densest. The ochre deposit built up progressively over time as the tool working proceeded. That means that, although they may have used ochre to sanctify the ground, they also used it regularly for routine tasks such as tinting the shaft of a spear or coating their skin. It might also have been a preservative.

  Although the remains at Pincevent were waiting to give this picture of prehistoric life, none of the results that are so evocative—the scatter of bones and flint, the arrangement of fireplaces, the spread of ochre—would have yielded their secrets if Leroi-Gourhan hadn't tipped the axis of excavation. Digging straight down would have found some artifacts but severed them from everything nearby, everything that could give them meaning.

  When he went into the painted caves, Leroi-Gourhan made extensive drawings and notes that he then transferred to long index cards with tabs and holes punched at strategic places. He created a punch card index for each cave, section by section. This permitted him, in those days before computers, to run a metal needle through a stack of cards and extract, say, every example of a horse and bison painted together or a female figure found next to bison, and so on. He could also find where the paintings were located—that is, examples of horses at the entrance of caves or in their depths. His cards still exist in various archives and private collections. They are ingenious, but even though they date only to the 1950s, they have an almost Paleolithic air. In fact, if a Stone Age artist somehow obtained long index cards and wanted to make his own study of the caves—an admittedly unlikely supposition—he might have devised a similar system. We are often less removed from those times than we imagine.

  Today, no one would use a stack of punched cards for work that a computer can do more quickly and accurately. But the method Leroi-Gourhan originated, drawing on the work of Max Raphael and Annette Laming-Emperaire before him, is fundamental to the way archaeologists study caves today. The field is dominated by elaborate statistical studies, by stroke-by-stroke re-creations of the way the artists painted, and by considerations of the position of the paintings relative to one another and to their locations in the caves. That is his legacy, and it is more important, more vibrant, a
nd more illuminating even than Breuil's. Nothing can replace Breuil's beautiful painted copies. Nothing can replace his thousands of tracings and sketches. And nothing can replace the example he set for dedication and sheer hard work. But no one now thinks about the caves in the way Breuil did. A modern scientist explores a cave thinking like Leroi-Gourhan.

  Statistics were fundamental to Leroi-Gourhan's work. In preparing to write Treasures of Prehistoric Art, he visited 66 of the 110 sites that were known at the time, where he recorded 2, 188 different animal figures. He counted these by species—610 horses, 510 bison, 205 mammoths, and so on. Then he counted them according to where the figures occurred in the caves and found that the results were, as he put it, “extremely clear cut.” He found that 91 percent of the bison, 92 percent of the oxen, 86 percent of the horses, and 58 percent of the mammoths occur in the central portions of the caves. Ibex and stags were what he called “framing animals.” Ibex tended to be on the periphery of the central compositions, while stags appeared near the entrance and at the back of caves. But, oddly, 12 percent of the horses occur at the entrance or end of a cave instead of stags. Leroi-Gourhan would create little games of suspense as he approached the remotest part of a cave. “Will there,” he asked himself, “be a horse?”

  Then, following the lead of Laming-Emperaire, he made a statistical tabulation of all the possible combinations of animals and found that the paintings fell into two groups, each one consisting of a complicated network of relations among animals, human figures, and signs. And the key to understanding cave art was to see how an animal from one group was paired with an animal from the other. The classic and most frequent pairing was the one Laming-Emperaire first noticed: the bison associated with the horse. (He referred to this as “pairing” rather than “coupling” because “there are no scenes of copulation in Paleolithic art.” He repeats this assertion several times in Treasures of Prehistoric Art. His delicacy here might be in reaction to Breuil, who not only didn't like him but also disagreed with his conclusions and accused him of having a “sexomaniac obsession.” About ten years later the archaeologist Jean Clottes showed Leroi-Gourhan the engraving on a flat stone of a Paleolithic couple having sex. Leroi-Gourhan looked at the engraving for a long moment and said, “Well, I have written that there are no sexual scenes in Paleolithic art. Now there is at least that one.” “He was like that,” Clottes told me once. “Evidence was evidence and he would accept it.”)