Cosquer was the first of three crises that entangled Jean Clottes during the 1990s. They arrived in rather quick succession and each one fed into the next so that each succeeding crisis was bigger than the last. The second crisis was Jean's involvement in Chauvet, a cave that proved to be even older and more spectacular than Cosquer. The third occurred when Jean turned from description, dating, and classification—his great strengths as a lifelong dirt archaeologist—and attempted to reveal the meaning behind the art.
Jean first heard of Chauvet through a telephone call to his home in Foix on December 28, 1994. Interrupting a long-planned Christmas family holiday, he left that very day to drive east for two to three hours through the mountains to Vallon-Pont-d'Arc, the site of the discovery. There he met Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel-Deschamps, and Christian Hillaire, the three spelunkers who had made the discovery. The next day they led him into the cave. Eliette had brought red wine from her own vineyard for them to drink in celebration of the new discovery after they had returned from their descent.
“Oh, but I'm here to verify the authenticity of the paintings,” Jean Clottes said. “I'm expecting to see some fakes.”
But Eliette promised him that they would be in the mood to drink the wine. And they were. In their book about the discovery, Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave, the three spelunkers say, “We saw that he was profoundly moved by the extraordinary beauty of the paintings and engravings.” Evidently Jean had been speaking from his own experience when he told me of the overwhelming effect seeing a cave like Les Trois-Freres or Chauvet for the first time can have on even experienced prehistorians.
He had seen almost immediately that the paintings were genuine. The floor of the cave was littered with the bones of cave bears, their footprints, and even traces of their claws. Thanks to the precautions the spelunkers had taken from the first, the floor of the cave had no shoe prints, which fakers could not have avoided making, especially in front of the painted panels. Examining the paintings with a magnifier, he saw that apparently solid lines often had small gaps caused by erosion while others, like the paintings in Cosquer, were covered with mineral deposits or calcite. All ofthat, and much other evidence besides, convinced him that they could drink Eliette's wine with clear consciences.
The cave is in a mountainous region in south-central France called the Ardeche. The entrance, near the top of a cliff, overlooks the Pont d'Arc, a natural stone arch over the Ardeche River that attracts hordes of vacationers each summer. The three discoverers had been a spelunking team for many years and had already discovered a few minor painted caves. Their leader, Jean-Marie Chauvet, was a park ranger and had just a year before been named the custodian of the known painted caves in the region.
On December 18 they had been exploring along the crest of the cliff when at the end of a declivity they felt a draft of cool air, often the sign of a cave. They pulled away rocks until Eliette, the smallest of the three, could squeeze partially through. She found herself looking down from the roof of a large chamber. She shouted and the echo seemed to return from endless depths. They dug out the hole some more and descended thirty feet by a chain ladder. Once on the floor of the cave, they began moving forward slowly. Eliette suddenly let out a cry. “They have been here,” she said, and pointed to the two lines of red ochre illuminated in the beam of the lamp on her helmet. Slowly, following in one another's footsteps so as to disrupt the floor as little as possible, they passed through chamber after chamber whose walls were covered with magnificent paintings and engravings. They found human footprints as well and a bear skull placed on a rock like an altar.
When they emerged three hours later, it was midnight. They blocked the entrance as best they could and walked down the cliff in silence, absorbed in their thoughts. Back home they finally relaxed and broke out some champagne. They had just experienced their greatest day in twenty years of exploring caves.
On December 24 they returned with three friends with whom they had decided to share their secret. Jean-Marie Chauvet brought rolls of plastic to lay on the floor to protect it. They discovered more galleries, including the one leading to the most important chamber, the Sähe du Fond, with its powerful paintings of lions and rhinos. Finally, having run out of plastic, they crawled just to the entrance of a vestibule where they could see three red bears painted at the back. But the floor was covered with bones and they turned back and left the cave after spending seven hours underground. They returned again the day after Christmas with more plastic and then on December 28 announced their discovery to the regional Administration of Cultural Affairs. That was when Jean Clottes got his call.
Upon seeing Chauvet, Jean confessed later, he was struck “like a thunderbolt” with the determination to be the one who directed the study of the cave, and he began his campaign to get that appointment. First of all, since he was the one who authenticated the cave for the Ministry of Culture, he wanted to avoid any problems like those that had plagued the study of Cosquer. He suggested to the minister of culture that some dozen or so specialists in cave art be invited immediately to see the cave. Jean sent a list of names with that of Denis Vialou, his main antagonist from Cosquer, at the top and included several others who had joined Vialou in the ruckus. These visits all occurred on February 7, 1995, and resolved any doubts there may have been. In fact, Vialou was so impressed with the cave that he tried to take it away from Clottes. He requested that the right to make the scientific study of the cave be awarded by a competition. After months of preparation, both Vialou and Clottes presented their proposals to an international jury of nine archaeologists, who then retired to consider. On May 31, 1996, they reported that they had voted nine to nothing in favor of Jean Clottes.
Jean led the study of the cave from 1998 until 2001, when Jean-Michel Geneste took over. He had always been part of the team studying Chauvet and had previously been the administrator of Lascaux. The basic plan and procedures that Jean Clottes proposed in 1995 were still in place when I stayed with the team for a few days in the fall of 2004.
Fortunately, the cave is located not far from a rustic athletic camp that is overrun in summer but often empty in spring and fall when the team meets to go into the cave. The camp has cement dormitories with spartan rooms that contain four cots. Each room opens onto an outdoor walkway. Toilets and showers are clustered here and there along the walkway. We ate at a long table in an immense common room, and the meals, prepared by a wiry, tough-looking chef, were spectacular. One night we had boar's head stew.
One of the great agonies of archaeology is that you cannot both excavate a site and preserve it. Excavation is destruction. That is why there is such anger toward archaeologists who excavate a site and then delay publishing their results for years. The site is ruined and now the information from it has been reburied in some professor's filing cabinet. That's also why there has been only one very limited test excavation at Chauvet. There will not be another for many years. Jean Clottes's plan was based on methods for studying the cave that would yield results yet still preserve it in nearly perfect condition for the future. First, that meant preserving the climate inside Chauvet by studying the cave for only two weeks in May and October. Limiting the time people were in the cave would allow the climate to reassert itself during the long months Chauvet remains empty. Also, the floors were to be preserved at all costs. Before work could begin the technicians working for the Ministry of Culture installed metal grids along the exact route the three spe-lunkers had laid out with their rolls of plastic. Large areas of the cave remain unstudied, although they look very interesting from a distance, because the protective grids on the floor don't yet extend that far.
The main work being done, which will take many more years to complete, sounds simple enough—listing, recording, and reproducing all the art on the walls of Chauvet. Leroi-Gourhan's punch cards are long gone, but their spirit endures in inventory forms that must be completed for each piece of art on every wall, whether it is an animal painted in full figure in
the midst of a herd or a faint line on an otherwise empty wall. The inventory includes the location, the size, the height from the floor, the theme (“animal, sign, trace, human, composite, undetermined”); the species of animal (“horse, bison, aurochs, ibex, red deer, reindeer, mega-ceros, feline, bear, mammoth, rhinoceros, undetermined”); the “technology” (“painting, drawing, stumping [that is, making a series of dots with a wad of moss or hide], engraving, scraping, finger tracing”); the nearest figure; the signs of deterioration (“calcite film, superimposition, obliterated, eroded, corroded, other”); the color (“black, red, yellow, brown, other”); orientation; profile (“left, full face, right”); and various other details. All this information goes into a computer database.
But the inventory is merely the beginning. The art needs to be copied as well. Making copies is a long, often tedious process. In that way it is very much like an archaeological dig. And, like a dig, it is absolutely essential because, strange as it sounds, it is impossible to see the art merely by looking at the wall. The intense concentration copying requires reveals signs and images that were invisible before. Michel Lorblanchet, a distinguished prehistorian with considerable artistic talent, made copies in a cave named Pergouset. He had visited the cave more than twenty times, often with colleagues, and thought he knew it well. But when he began to make his copies, he discovered numerous animals and signs that hadn't been seen before, including a vulva some eighteen inches across that, once seen, becomes the first thing anyone notices on the wall. Lorblanchet worked in the cave for three years making copies. His copies show twelve horses, three reindeer, three mountain goats, one stag, a bison, an auroch, four undetermined animals, sixteen signs, the vulva mentioned above, and twelve undetermined traces. Years earlier, when Leroi-Gourhan visited the cave, he saw only an isolated mountain goat, a horse, and a bison. What Lorblanchet was able to see compared to what Leroi-Gourhan saw is the difference between copying and merely looking.
Copying the art in the caves began with Breuil making paintings and tracings. The tracings in particular remain important resources for prehistorians and appear frequently in books and papers. It is far easier to decipher the art, especially when there are many works overlaying each other, by studying tracings rather than the cave wall itself. However, when Breuil made mistakes, as in drawing a second tail for the lion in Les Trois-Freres instead of a human arm and hand, an unfortunate amount of erroneous scholarship has appeared because of it.
Breuil made his copies by putting tracing paper directly on the cave wall, a method that would horrify a modern scientist, who would touch a wall only for a special purpose such as extracting a sample of paint for radiocarbon dating. Jean Clottes's proposal specifically said, “The tracings are planned so that there will be no direct contact with the wall.” And today the reasons for making copies have grown more complex. The goal is not only to reproduce the art but also to analyze the component parts of the piece, to study the techniques of the artist, and to learn, when possible, how the painting or engraving was made stroke by stroke. It was this method that permitted Norbert Aujoulat in his book on Lascaux to determine the unvarying order of strokes by which the artists painted a horse.
Several members of the team at Chauvet are both trained archaeologists and gifted artists. One, Gilles Tosello, might be the equal of Breuil. The method of making copies at Chauvet begins with a photographic print that is precisely the same size as the art itself. The copyist takes the photograph and sheets of clear plastic into the cave. Usually he or she sets up a tripod with a clamp to hold a drawing board and a lamp, then works standing directly in front of the cave wall, often for hours on end. After covering the photograph with a plastic sheet, the copyist looks at the wall and begins to draw just one part of what is there. It could be just the color red in the painting or just the black. The features of the wall itself are copied as well, so some plastic sheets will show bear scratches if there are any, or only the bumps and hollows in the wall, or just the cracks. Although the clear sheet is on the photograph, the photograph is really only a template. The copyist is trying to reproduce what is on the wall, not just color in, say, all the red in the photograph. There could be some dozen or more plastic sheets before the copy is finished.
Through the use of Photoshop, which many archaeologists at Chauvet can manipulate like wizards, the plastic sheets are entered into Macs connected to oversize screens. Now the images of the painting and the wall behind it can be manipulated any way a researcher needs. For example, isolating the various elements of the painting can reveal the order of the steps the artist took to produce it. Also, when there are superimpositions of one painting on another, the paintings can be studied individually or together and in either case stroke by stroke. The superimpositions look random, but this careful study turned up one case in Chauvet where the superimposition was planned. The artist had left a gap in the line marking the belly of one animal. The line showing the neck of the superimposed animal goes right through that gap.
The study of another, more complex painting produced even richer results. One of the most beautiful paintings in Chauvet shows four horses that seem to be running behind a strange herd of aurochs and rhinos. Just below the horses, two large rhinos face each other. This whole creation, though beautiful, is confusing, too. Why are these animals all together? Were they put there just by chance or is there some hidden order guiding the choices? The technique of carefully copying layer by layer has revealed the steps by which this painting was created.
First, a cave bear made scratches on a blank wall. Nevertheless, this space was chosen for painting. Then an artist or artists engraved a rhino facing left in front of a mammoth facing right. The rhino's haunches are right over the bear scratchings. These engravings are more than eight feet from the floor and have little detail. Presumably they were made with a pointed stick or bone or some other extended tool that enabled the artist to reach eight feet but did not allow any fine work.
The lower parts of these engravings were effaced when an artist—the same one? another?—scraped the soft surface of the rock away to create a clear, hard, white area for painting. The scraped area bent around a corner in the wall so that a small part was almost at forty-five degrees to the major portion. The artist now painted five small animals—two rhinos, a deer, and two mammoths—in black on the major portion of the wall. Next, lower on the wall, came the two great rhinos facing each other on either side of the curve in the wall. Whether these are two males fighting or a male and a female in a courting ritual isn't clear.
Then an artist, perhaps a different one from the one who painted the five small animals and the facing rhinos, painted three magnificent large aurochs on the major part of the scraped area. They face left and have imposing curved horns that sweep forward. Last, the same artist who painted the aurochs painted the four horses. They also face left but are on the part of the wall around the corner from the aurochs.
The paintings of the four horses developed in at least two steps. The artist painted two horses one behind the other and then paused to scrape the wall below the outermost horse ‘s neck. This pause is provocative. Does it mean the artist began with the idea of painting only two horses, then had the inspiration to add a third and fourth? Or did the artist, thinking of four horses from the beginning, have second thoughts for a moment before proceeding? In any event, the artist painted the third horse, then again scraped away the rock surface below its neck before painting the fourth and final animal.
The aurochs and horses, while similar, are each individuals as well. They have different expressions, different eyes and ears, different proportions of their heads and necks, and different postures. The whole force of the painting moves from right to left around the corner and across the wall connecting the leftward rush of the horses with the similar leftward movement of the aurochs. The step-by-step copies have revealed that what at first appeared to be a random assemblage of animals was in fact a planned composition, at least as far as the horses and
aurochs are concerned. Although the horses were the final animals painted, the artist had reserved space for them from the beginning. And the analysis also reveals the artist's stops, starts, and pauses as the composition developed.
The Chauvet team work in an outbuilding built especially for them near several outdoor basketball courts. After breakfast each day they are there, bent over the large screens of their Macs as they consult with one another about how to proceed with the day's work. A hard rain the first morning I was there caused much discussion about who was going to the cave and who wasn't. I couldn't understand what difference the rain made, since it wouldn't be raining inside the cave. All but one chose to remain at camp and work on the computer renderings.
A day later, when I climbed up to the entrance of the cave, I understood. From the nearest parking area, it's a brief walk through a vineyard to the base of the cliff. Then it is a long, hard hike along a narrow path of mud and stones through a forest up the cliff. Rain would make this trek uncomfortable and perhaps even dangerous, since the path is narrow and slick, and the drop-off is often sheer. While some tools like tripods can be left in the cave, the archaeologists carry everything else—art supplies, cameras, and most especially food, water, and wine—back and forth in backpacks each day. From the parking lot by the vineyard the trek up the cliff takes about thirty minutes.
The path ends at the tiny Cave of the Winch. It got its name because shepherds used to put up sheep there for the night and installed a winch to bring up hay. A row of metal bars like a prison cell spans the cave's broad opening. Some scientific equipment as well as two microwaves and some other kitchen equipment and supplies are stored behind the bars. In front there ‘s a long picnic table on a patio where the team eat at midday. From here you can see the Pont d'Arc far below. It is a large, natural stone bridge that looks elegant as it arches over the river. Science can explain how natural forces created this unusual formation, but it remains affecting. It's easy to think of it as something created by a great and mysterious power, which I suppose the forces of nature are. Perhaps the ancient hunters chose to paint in Chauvet because the cave offered a sight line to this rare feature on the landscape.
The Cave Painters Page 19