Tag Archives: Prehistoric Art

La Grotte de Font de Gaume, and La Grotte de Rouffignac, France

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Day 39, Friday, October 6, 2023

This morning we are on our way to Le Grotte de Font de Gaume.  Autumn is arriving here. These trees are the most colourful we have seen so far.

Fonte de Gaume is the only prehistoric site  with polychrome cave paintings that is still open to the public in France.  It became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1979.  I forgot to take photo on the way up to the cave…I think I was excited about the upcoming tour.  This photo is from one of the tourist information brochures. There are more than 200 painted and engraved figures in Fonte de Gaume organized into compositions in the four main sections of this 120 meter long cave.  We visited all but the narrowest section in the Diverticule teminal and the short cave on the right of the entrance.

These drawings outside the cave give a hint of what we will be seeing inside.

The entrance to the cave is the cave on the right, we do not go into the other one.  Our guide was wonderful, he conducted the tour in English with a lovely French accent and he was very passionate and knowledgeable about prehistoric art and this cave in particular.

The paintings date from around 17,000 BC, during the Magdalenian period.  Many of the cave’s paintings have been discovered in recent decades. The cave’s most famous painting, a frieze of five bison, was discovered accidentally in 1966 while scientists were cleaning the cave!  No photos in the caves…so these pictures are from postcards and brochures.  Believe me, they in no way convey the beauty and grandeur of what we saw.

A very realistic engraving of a horse’s head.

There are many bison in the cave.  Our guide points our details and gives information about the paintings and engravings.  We are able to stand so close to these amazing paintings.  I am often standing in the same spot that the prehistoric artist who made this artwork stood.  Can you imagine?  It still gives me goosebumps just thinking about it.

Our guide saved the best for last.  He had each of us squat down so we could look up into a small hollow in the wall of the cave…and there was the left handprint of the artist.   A man or woman had signed their work, before there was even the concept of a signature…and there it was, just inches away. It was an incredible, emotional moment.  

If you would like to see a video of the inside of the Grotte de la Font de Gaume click on the link below.  If you then copy and paste this link into Google chrome you can translate the video into English.  It  takes a bit to figure out how to navigate and see the different paintings but it gives a good view of the inside of this cave.  It is very narrow in places, and we have to almost turn sideways to get through parts of the cave without touching the walls. http://font-de-gaume.monuments-nationaux.fr/

This second link shows the part of the video where you can get a better look a the paintings.  http://font-de-gaume.monuments-nationaux.fr/fr/entree/carrefour/suite/les-bisons-polychromes/

On the way to our last cave, La Grotte de Rouffignac, we pass several buildings that are built right in to the cliffs, and very close to the road.  Some look empty but many are still in use.

The roads also have a lot of overhanging rocks.

We get to the Rouffignac Cave early.  There are no online tickets, just first come first served. We find a pretty little picnic area beside the cave and have our lunch before walking up to the cave to wait for the 2:00 opening.  I found prescription glasses in a case near where we had our lunch.  Turns out they belong to one of the guides that works with school groups.  She lost them a few days before so she was very happy to get her glasses back.  My good deed for the day!  But somehow I forgot to take photos where I could.  The first photos here are courtesy of Perigord.com.

This is the entrance to the cave where we line up…we are first in line at this UNESCO World Heritage Site.

This cave is enormous, with almost 8 kms of caverns and tunnels on three levels.  We ride an electric train as our tour goes a kilometre into the caves.  It is also very cold, it seems colder than the 13 degree temperature of the caves we have already visited.  Perhaps because we are just sitting still? The first artworks we see are engravings…some of them were made by the artist using his fingers to mark the soft stone.  Rouffignac is famous for its Mammoths.  158 mammoths that have been found on the walls of this cave, this is 30% of all mammoth representations in prehistoric cave art.  Yet, curiously, there have been few mammoth bones found in this area. We also see cave bear claw marks all over the walls.  The parallel vertical lines below this mammoth are from a cave bear scratching his claws on the cave walls.

There were a lot of cave bears in this cave.  We pass through numerous hollow round areas.  These beds were made by cave bears to hibernate in the cave during the cold winters.  Cave bears were extinct long before the artwork on these walls was made…good thing!

These photos of the cave’s black line drawings are from postcards.

We disembark from the train at the Grand Plafond, or the Large Ceiling (I think it sounds better in French). The ceiling is covered with drawings of mammoths, bison, horses, woolly rhinoceros, and ibex.   The artist had to lie on his back to create this incredible collection of drawings as there was not enough room to stand.  The floor has since been lowered so that visitors can access this area.  I am amazed at how fresh and vivid the drawings are.  I don’t really know how to explain the impact these drawings had.  They were so realistic, they looked as though they could have been drawn recently instead of 15,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age by Magdalenian hunter-gatherers.   I was surprised to see that almost everyone in the group turned towards our guide when he started talking and they stopped looking at the drawings!  Really?  Couldn’t they have listened but keep looking a the artwork above our heads? It seemed such a waste to be standing here and ignoring these ancient drawings.  One very interesting drawing of a mammoth showed its anal flap. Sorry, no photo of that one. Yes, this is a flap that covers the mammoth’s anus to keep it warm.  Only someone who had very close contact with a mammoth would know about this detail.  This fact was used to help authenticate these drawings, as they were thought to be modern fakes when they were first discovered..

This is the last cave we will be visiting here.  We loved all of them!

L’Abri Cap Blanc and the Grotte des Combarelles, France

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Day 37, Wednesday, October 4, 2023

We visit two prehistoric sites today. This morning we tour the Cap Blanc rock shelter.  It is a masterpiece of prehistoric sculpture from the Cro-Magnon/Magdalenian Era.  The path to the site is pretty with lots of moss covered trees.

This is the building that was built to shelter the site.  It goes right up to the cliff face so that the sculptures are protected inside.

Today it is the only frieze of prehistoric sculptures in the world to be shown to the public.  And we are able to visit!  The red line is about where the frieze and the museum building is located.

Of course, no photos are allowed. I buy a postcard so that I have a photo of the frieze, although it does not do it justice at all.  There is absolutely no substitute for standing in front of this  prehistoric sculpture which brings together horses, bison and deer.

The skeleton on the ground is a replica of the one that was found when the owner of the site dug down to build a wall to protect the site in the early 1900’s.  It is a female, approximately 5’1″ tall and between 30 and 35 years of age.  The owner of the site sold the original skeleton to a museum in Chicago where it still resides.  It was first thought to be a young girl and the Chicago Museum called this skeleton Magdalenian Girl.  Only later were scientists able to determine more accurate information about this skeleton, which has been carbon dated and is 30,000 years old.  The frieze was made over 15,000 years ago, another 15,000 years after this woman was buried here.  She was found in a fetal position with three large flat stones carefully placed over her body.  A spear head was found with the body but there is no way to know if that was the cause of her death or not.  The farmer who found this did not know anything about how to preserve information at an archeological site.

Here is a close up of one of the horses heads. I am amazed at how naturalistic they are, and the details that remain are amazing.  Unfortunately the bottom half of the frieze was carved in a softer limestone and has eroded so the legs of most of the animals are no longer visible. When the original site was discovered in 1909 part of the overhang had fallen down and dirt had built up so that most of the sculptures were covered. There was quite a lot of damage done to part of the frieze when it was being uncovered.  Pick axes were used to move the rock and dirt that had fallen down over the years and parts of the frieze were actually broken off by the very people who were trying to uncover it.  There were also notes made about the frieze being painted red, but the people who uncovered it decided to wash all the dirt off of the frieze and in doing so they washed off the red colouring!  Hard to believe, but archeology did not become systematic and disciplined in its approach to excavation until after the 1920’s.A scientist reconstructed the features of the skull that was found here.  I think she is quite beautiful and yes, much like a modern woman.  The jewellery is from an area near here but ti was not found with this skeleton.  Magdelenian man, or Cro-Magnon man is regarded as the closest ancestor to today’s humans.  

We have lunch in a little nearby village with a pretty little river and watch a heron try to catch its lunch.  You can just make it out near the centre of the far river bank.

Huge limestone cliffs tower over the village…

and there are houses and buildings still in use today that are built right into the cliffs.

After lunch is a short drive to the Grotte des Combrelles.  Grotte is cave in French. Inside the entrance building there are some drawings of the etchings in this cave. There are more than 800 rock engravings dating back to the era of Magdalenians, including 300 mammals, 52 stylized human figures, abstract signs and half a dozen sexual symbols.

The entrance to the cave used to be used by a farmer to keep his animals before the entrance to the rest of the cave was discovered.

There are two entrances to the cave but only the one with the gate is accessible by the public.  

It is a long, narrow winding cave, 235 meters in length with no side channels.  A maximum  of seven people at a time are allowed in the cave because there just isn’t room for more than that to see the engravings in each location.  As it is we have to snuggle up so that we can all see the engravings pointed out by our guide.  This photo of a bison was in the office. The engravings are not always easy to see.

One of the best known engravings is the Drinking Reindeer.  There are some abstract signs and several human representations.  The humans are incomplete, they do not have heads, females are often represented by torsos or engravings of vulvas. Animals featured in the cave are horses, bison, aurochs, cattle, bears, reindeer, mammoths, ibex, antelopes, cave lions, rhinos and even the odd fox and fish. We only have time on our hour long tour to see the most prominent engravings, and part of the cave is not open to the public, but it is an amazing experience to stand just inches away from these engravings.  It gives me goosebumps to think that I am standing in the same spot as the artist who made these engravings thousands of years ago.

Back at our apartment Bob decides to taste the ingredients from our gift package.  Unfortunately, the foie gras with walnuts just isn’t very appealing.  It kind of looks like cat food and neither of us like it at all.

Lascaux II, Parc de Thot and Lascaux IV, France.

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Day 35, Monday, October 2, 2023

The Lascaux Cave contains one of the most outstanding displays of 20,000 year old prehistoric art in the world and it is a UNESCO World Heritage site.  We were very lucky to get tickets to visit Lascaux II.  We had completely forgotten about needing to book ahead but thankfully it is not high season and we were able to get tickets for an English tour of the cave.  The Lascaux Cave was discovered on September 12 1940 by 18 year old Marcel Ravidat when his dog Robot investigated a hole left by an uprooted tree that had fallen over in a storm.

Of course we are visiting a replica cave. It was the first replica cave in the world when it opened in 1983 near the site of the original cave…however there are still no photos allowed.  The original cave was closed in April, 1963. The continuous flow of visitors (1500/day) and the carbon dioxide and human breath began to degrade the prehistoric paintings in the decorated cave.   Lascaux II is an exact replica of the two main chambers of the cave. This short video has a segment with a walk through the cave by torch light. This is what we experienced at Lascaux II.   We were standing in a dark cave, with only a flickering torch to illuminate these 20,000 year old cave paintings.  It was an amazing experience.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWUUiFxbEE4&t=87s

I manage to do a couple quick drawings while in the cave, but the lighting is poor and I decide to enjoy the experience and forget about trying to draw.

We visit Parc de Thot which is a small zoo with animals that are similar to those drawn in the caves…bisons, wolves, deer, and bulls.  There was an interesting short film and some displays in their building. It was a nice place to have our lunch but that was about it.

This display shows the different techniques that were used to make the cave paintings and engravings.  I was surprised to learn that paint brushes, pencils (pieces of pigment attached to sticks}, stencils and a primitive sort of airbrush were all used 20,000 years ago!  The artist would blow pigment from his, or perhaps her mouth onto the walls of the cave, sometimes even using a hollow bone for more accuracy.

This display shows one of the cave paintings…

and then uses black light to show all the engraved lines that are difficult to see.

After we ate our lunch I did a bit of drawing and Bob did a bit of reading before we left for Lascaux IV.In 2016, a new replica, Lascaux IV, was opened to replace Lascaux II. It is adjacent to the original cave and offers an even more authentic experience than Lascaux II, with changes in air pressure, along with a series of atmospheric cave scents and sounds. Once again no photos allowed however there is an interpretive area that has more replica displays and we can take photos there.

These displays are just as well done as the paintings in the cave..

It is nice to have a bit more time to really examine some of the the paintings up close and in better light.

They are spectacular, and photos do not come anywhere near ot capturing this incredible art that was created 20,000 years ago by Cro-Magnons, who were the first early modern humans.

This stag is particularly beautiful with its magnificent set of antlers.

This is one of the first figures we see when we enter the cave.  It is called ‘The Unicorn’ even though it has two horns.  It is an animal drawn from the imagination of the artist and did not actually exist.

There is a deep shaft that has the only depiction of a human, although it does have the head of a bird.  This is also in the interpretive area as it would be impossible to climb down the shaft in the replica cave.  Here we can walk in at the bottom and look upwards to see the paintings.

This gives some idea of the size of these paintings.  This is one of the largest animals in the Lascaux caves.

I like this bull.  It is the one I drew in Lascaux II.

This display showed the engraved lines of this bull.  Giving the bull two heads was used to portray movement.

Leaving the interpretive area we walk down this long corridor which has several theatres with more information on Lascaux and the history of the discovery of the caves.  There are over 150 prehistoric sites in this area.The last room we entered had huge animations which travels across three walls and sometimes over the floor and ceiling as well.  I particularly liked this one which shows mammoths from the Rouffignac Cave, which we hope to visit later this week. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2yv2ydzsJ0

We are the last people to leave and they lock the doors behind us after we walk out.  It was a great day.