Chauvet Cave

The Chauvet Cave is located near Le Pont-d'Arc, a natural bridge of limestone in the Ardèche valley of southern France. Discovered in 1994, it is considered one of the most significant prehistoric art sites as it contains the earliest known cave paintings and other evidence of Upper Paleolithic life.

The cave and its paintings was first discovered on December 18, 1994 by a trio of speleologists: Eliette Brunel Deschamps, Christian Hillaire, and led by Jean-Marie Chauvet for whom it was named. Famous archaeologist Jean Clottes was contacted and immediately went to see for himself the cave paintings reported to be not only of the usual horses and aurocks but of lions and rhinos, animals not normally found in prehistoric cave art.

As well as the paintings and other human evidence they also discovered fossilized remains, prints, and markings from a variety of animals, some of which are now extinct. Sealed by rockfall for millennia, the contents of the cave were incredibly well preserved. To keep them this way, the cave has been kept closed with extremely limited access to only a few qualified researchers.

Image of Pont d'Arc over the Ardèche River
from Wikimedia Commons.

When Jean Clottes hiked to the cliff overlooking the Ardeche Valley and crawled through the narrow passage into the Chauvet Cave he was skeptical that the report he had received of the spectacular painted cave was for real. Could another cave containing beautiful prehistoric art really have been preserved all this time, only to be discovered in his lifetime? He feared a fake.

Image of Horses in Chauvet Cave
from Wikimedia Commons.

To Clottes' amazement, inside the cave there were indeed numerous genuine Ice Age paintings of a diverse selection animals: bears, mammoths, owls, a hyena and a leopard or cheetah, fighting rhinos, a pride of lions, four horse heads and another horse that appears to be walking straight out of the cave wall into the space of the cave. Lions hunt bison; rhinos appear in beautiful detail; outstanding cave bears are painted on the walls of the very cave where their bones litter the ground, paw prints are preserved in the ground and hollows reveal where they slept; there's even a bear skull carefully placed on a stone that had fallen to make an altar in the center of one chamber.

Image of Engraved Owl in Chauvet Cave
from Wikimedia Commons.

There are also a number of human hand prints on the walls, as well as some abstract and geometric forms. The only human images are black charcoal.drawings of the "Venus" figure - legs and genitals of a woman - and the "Sorcerer" - a figure that is half man and half bison. Their location on the same wall suggests a deliberate connection by the artists.

Cave Horses by carolmotsinger at Zazzle
Print from a mixed media painting in a primitive style.


Trois Frères Shaman by Duncan Eagleson at Zazzle

Interpretation of the motivation of the Chauvet Cave artists is not easy. Unlike other prehistoric cave paintings which generally show scenes related to the hunting lifestyle of the artists, many predatory animals are included here. Were these artists from an earlier era more concerned with observing all the animals in their environment, particularly the predators that might pose a threat? How could they have had more time on their hands to just paint for pleasure than their later descendants? Or were they, like it has been suggested later cave artists did, producing spiritual images, connecting to the spirits of the creatures they painted, and perhaps portraying shamanistic rituals in the painting of the "sorcerer"?

Here we have an artist's impression of how the shaman may have symbolically killed the lion painted in the cave representing killing a real lion in the future.

A Sorcerer Attacks the Image of a Cave Lion to Enable an Actual Kill Later

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In any case, whatever their purpose, and even if we never know it, they stand as truly spectacular works of art. These beautiful paintings were preserved for all this time, preserving the legacy of people previously thought to have lived lives too primitive, to have been too busy just hunting and gathering and fighting for survival, and with too little appreciation of beauty or too little skill to produce works of beauty to be such sophisticated artists. One look at these paintings though changes our conception of the very humanness of these people from so long ago. It changes our very understanding of what it means to be human, at least it does for me.

Copyright © Jennifer P. Tanabe, 2009.
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