Lascaux: Amazing and Frustrating

 

 

 

Perhaps you’ve heard this story before. In 1940, 18-year-old Marcel Ravidat was walking his dog near the village of Montignac, France. The pooch found an uprooted tree that proved to be the entrance to a cave. Ravidat returned with three teen-aged
friends and scrambled some fifty feet underground into a chamber filled with ancient art.  That alone wasn’t all that remarkable; the Dordogne Valley was filled with caves and quite a few of them have prehistoric paintings on their walls and ceilings. We explored such a remarkable small cave in Cougnac the previous week. But the cave in Lascaux surpassed anything found before. There were more than 600 paintings and etchings made 17,000-22,000 years ago. Most were of animals–aurochs, bison, bovines, large cats, deer, horses, rhinos–plus several mysterious figures, including indecipherable geometric designs and a human figure with a bird-like head and an erect phallus.

 

Lascaux was open to the public from 1948 to 1963, when it was closed to the public because the breath of visitors caused mold and other visible damage to the paintings. UNESCO listed it as a world heritage site in 1979, which prompted the French government to display a travelling replica of one hall, which was dubbed Lascaux II. Lascaux III expanded upon Lascaux II, but in 2016 Lascaux IV opened on site, a full 3-D recreation of the entire cave. No, you can’t see exactly what Ravidat and his friends saw in 1940, but the recreation is so well done that you can imagine their amazement. It looks and feels like a cave, unless you accidentally brush a stalagmite and feel its synthetic surface. It’s a great way to preserve the original cave from further damage and is better lighted than “authentic” caves.

 

That’s the good news; now for the bad. Lascaux is a guided tour that is designed to give visitors information in their native languages. It’s also designed to shuffle as many people as possible through the cave as quickly as possible. Read: No dawdling. You are then ushered into a corridor with four theaters spotlighting various aspects of Lascaux from discovery to preservation to ongoing scientific studies. The films are well done, but chances are that if you are with a tour group you won’t get to see more than ¾ of one of them before your guide hustles you into a gift shop selling all manner of tchotchkes such as horse stuffies and coloring books to keychains, picture books, postcards, and garish t-shirts. Frankly, I found the touring experience so frustrating and distasteful that I began to identify with cave paintings of herds of buffalo.

 

At the end of the proverbial day you will come away with more appreciation for the skill of ancient artists, but probably no wiser on what it all meant. For instance, one theory that is mostly discredited by the visual evidence is that the ancients used the images as a form of imitative magic; that is, hunters threw spears at them in hopes that a magic force (called mana) would inhabit those spears in a real hunt. A relative lack of chipping on the rocks makes that less likely. Those figures strongly suggest that the art is the point. But the why is left up in the air. Why Lascaux? Was it a ritual or religious center? What’s the current theory on who made these images? Explanations of “early man” tell us little. Does that mean homo sapiens or Neanderthal sapiens? (The latter is probably more likely, but not a particularly strong marketing piece!) Could Lascaux have been little more than an ancient art gallery? A school for making art?

 

I suppose that, for me, I wondered why there was so much effort to effort to convince us of the quality of the art. We can see that it is expertly done given the imprecision of available tools. What’s wrong with admitting that Lascaux remains cloaked in mystery? Or at least highlighting competing theories. There are other ancient sites–Skara Brae and Stonehenge come to mind–where ambiguity and uncertainty are embraced. I think also of the pyramids of Giza, where periodic new finds put the sites back in the news. In short, Lascaux IV is a nice job of re-creation, but falls short in presentation. If I ever return to the Périgord, I shall seek out smaller caves to avoid both the crowds and what feels perilously close to Disneyfication of ancient history.

 

Rob Weir