Lascaux in brief
Lascaux is a cave system on a hillside above the Vézère valley, near the town of Montignac in the Dordogne. Its walls carry more than 600 paintings and many engravings, about 6,000 figures in all, and it is one of the best-known examples of prehistoric art in the world. The cave was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979, as part of the “Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the Vézère Valley”.
Discovery
On 12 September 1940, during the Second World War, a teenager named Marcel Ravidat was out with his dog, Robot, when the dog disappeared into a hole beneath a fallen tree. Ravidat enlarged the hole and returned a few days later with three friends, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel and Simon Coencas. They slid down into a chamber and saw, by the light of a lamp, paintings of huge animals on the walls.
They told their teacher, who brought in the prehistorian Abbé Henri Breuil. Breuil studied and recorded the paintings, and the cave was opened to the public in 1948.
The paintings
The animals are drawn in red, black, yellow and brown, from pigments made of iron oxide, manganese and charcoal, and applied with brushes, pads and by blowing powdered colour through tubes. Horses are the most numerous, followed by red deer, ibex and aurochs, the wild cattle that were the ancestors of domestic cows. Some of the aurochs in the Hall of the Bulls are five metres long or more, among the largest cave paintings known.
Several areas are known by name:
- Hall of the Bulls. The rotunda with huge black bulls and many horses and deer.
- Axial Gallery. A narrow passage with horses, bulls and the “Falling Horse”.
- The Shaft. A deep pit with a scene, unusual in the cave, showing a bison, a bird-headed man and a rhinoceros. Its meaning is much debated.
There are almost no images of hunting or of reindeer, which are common in the bone remains from the area, so the art does not simply show what people ate.
Age
Radiocarbon dates from charcoal and other material in the cave give an age of around 17,000 years, though estimates run from about 17,000 to 22,000 years ago, and some researchers think the cave was used over a long period. Exact dating of the paintings themselves is difficult.
Closing the cave
Up to 1,200 visitors a day entered in the 1950s. Their breath raised the carbon dioxide and humidity levels, and in the early 1960s green algae, then white fungus and black stains began to spread over the paintings. In 1963 the French minister of culture, André Malraux, closed the cave. Conservation work has gone on since, and the cave environment is closely monitored, with access limited to a few scientists and conservators.
The replicas
Lascaux II, a copy of the Hall of the Bulls and the Axial Gallery, opened in 1983 near the original cave. Lascaux IV, the International Centre for Cave Art, opened in 2016 with a full-scale replica of nearly the whole cave, built with laser scans and painted by artists using similar pigments.
Why it matters
Lascaux, with other decorated caves, shows that people had a rich visual and symbolic life many thousands of years ago, and that they made art in dark, deep places that were reached with lamps of animal fat. See also Chauvet Cave and Altamira.
Visiting
Visitors can see the replica cave at Lascaux IV in Montignac. The original cave is closed.
Sources
- Breuil, H. (1952). Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art. Centre d’Études et de Documentation Préhistoriques.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the Vézère Valley.
- French Ministry of Culture. Lascaux.