Cave Art in France

Home | Category: First Modern Human Art and Culture

Bison in Niaux

There are 120 prehistoric caves in France. Only 23 are open to the public. Seventy of these caves are in the Niaux cave complex (55 miles south of Toulouse) in the Pyrenees. Two thirds of the of all the know prehistoric artworks was produced in Perigord. The Dordogne region and the Dordogne River are in Perigord, a rural area famous for foie gras and truffles and medieval villages. Many of the caves are operated by the French Ministry of Culture. Those that are open to the public are carefully regulated. The visits are kept brief and are strictly controlled to protect the art.

Les Trois Frères (30 miles northwest of Niaux) contains spectacular drawings, including the famous "sorcerer," a man with owl eyes, wizard beard, horse's tail, handlike paws, antlers headgear and a reindeer skin. In 1912, three boys exploring an area where the Volp River went underground between Enterre and le Tuc d'Audooubert in the Pyrenean foothills discovered Les Trois Frères caves. In addition to the paintings the boys found fantastic sculptures of bison.

Other caves of note include La Magdalaine Cave, with images made between 15,000 B.C. and 10,000 B.C., including a nude woman; and Cougnac Cave, with an impressive red ibex. Peche Merle features a line of lines of red dots lead to a decorated chamber with huge red fish (a pike) in the body of one horse, horses with human hand prints, Another chamber has eight abstract female and mammoth images. Font-de-Gaume Cave (near Eyzies-de-tayac) contain 15,000-year-old paintings and engravings, including one of a little horse.

On a visit to one cave in the Dordogne region, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in The New Yorker: “ Grotte des Combarelles, is a long, very narrow cave that zigzags through a limestone cliff. Hundreds of feet in, the walls of the cave are covered with engravings—a mammoth curling its trunk, a wild horse lifting its head, a reindeer leaning forward, apparently to drink. In very recent times, the floor of the Grotte des Combarelles has been dug out, so that a person can walk in it, and the tunnel is dimly lit by electric lights. But when the etchings were originally created, some twelve or thirteen thousand years ago, the only way to gain access to the site would have been to crawl, and the only way to see in the absolute dark would have been to carry fire. As I crept along through the gloom, past engravings of wisent and aurochs and woolly rhinos, it occurred to me that I really had no clue what would drive someone to wriggle through a pitch-black tunnel to cover the walls with images that only another, similarly driven soul would see. Yet it also struck me that so much of what is distinctively human was here on display—creativity, daring, “madness.” And then there were the animals pictured on the walls—the aurochs and mammoths and rhinos. These were the beasts that Paleolithic Europeans had hunted, and then, one by one, as with the Neanderthals, obliterated.: [Source: Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, August 15, 2011]

Cave Paintings with Hand Stencils and Prints in France

Lauscaux

1) Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave (c.30,000 B.C.): In total, the cave contains 12 red ochre hand prints, 9 hand stencils and some 450 palm prints — mostly on the Panel of Hand Stencils in the Gallery of Hands. In the Panel of the Red Dots, a cave painting discovered close to the cave entrance, there is a cluster of large dots, roughly in the shape of a mammoth. The dots were made by dipping the palm of the right hand into red paint and then applying it to the wall.

2) Cosquer (c.25,000 B.C.): Part of the prehistoric art which decorates this cave consists of 65 hand stencils, dating back to Gravettian culture.

3) Pech Merle (c.25,000 B.C.): This Upper Paleolithic shelter is famous for its polychrome mural known as The Dappled Horses of Pech-Merle, which itself contains a number of stencilled hand prints.

4) Gargas Cave (c.25,000 B.C.): Located in the Hautes-Pyrenees, not far from the rock shelters at Niaux and Trois Freres, the cave contains rock engravings, artifacts, paintings andmobiliary art from the Mousterian to the Magdalenian, including numerous 'negative hands' created in red ochre or manganese, using a stencil technique. In addition, there are some 200 handprints, mostly of the left hand. Some of them are lacking one or more fingers, due either to ritual amputation or frostbite.

6) Roucadour Cave Art (c.24,000 B.C.): Stylistically similar to the parietal works at Pech Merle Cave, the art at Roucadour Cave includes a number of vivid negative hand paintings.

7) Abri du Poisson Cave (c.23,000 B.C.): France In addition to its best known item of Gravettian art — namely, the bas-relief limestone sculpture of a salmon — this rock shelter has a single legible hand stencil.

8) Bayol Cave (17,000 B.C.): The sole handprint from the French rock shelter Bayol II (Collias II), situated near the Pont du Gard aqueduct, is thought to have been left by a very small child.

9) Lascaux (c.17,000-13,000 B.C.): In addition to its prehistoric engravings and beautiful animal paintings, Lascaux also has a very small number of hand stencils.

10) Font de Gaume Cave (c.14,000 B.C.): In addition to its magnificent bison frieze, the cave has a total of four hand stencils.

11) Rouffignac Cave (c.14,000-12,000 B.C.): This vast underground cave complex is filled with over 250 prehistoric cave drawings, as well as abstract symbols and signs, and a number of hand prints.

12) Cougnac Cave (c.14,000 B.C.): The Magdalenian art here includes three human figures and about 50 hand stencils, as well as numerous fingerprints in black and red.

13) Les Combarelles (c.12,000 B.C.): This centre of Magdalenian art, has over 600 drawings of animals, but only one legible hand stencil.

Abri Castanet

Michael Balter wrote in sciencemag.org: “Since 1994, the year of Chauvet's discovery, a team led by archaeologist Randall White of New York University in New York City has been working at the Abri Castanet, a rock shelter (a shallow cave usually at the base of a cliff) in southern France's Vezere valley. Originally excavated in the early 20th century, the Abri Castanet has long been considered one of the earliest modern human sites in Europe, with occupation layers dated back to nearly 40,000 years ago. [Source: Michael Balter, sciencemag.org, May. 14, 2012 ^=^]

Cave art sites in southern France and northern Spain

White's excavations have uncovered considerable evidence of symbolic and artistic activity at the site, including hundreds of pierced snail shells apparently used as ornaments and three limestone blocks adorned with engravings, including one the team interprets as a vulva. But the blocks, which came from the shelter's collapsed roof, were impossible to date because they do not contain the kind of organic matter necessary for radiocarbon analysis.

“In 2007, however, the team began excavating another large block that had fallen from the roof and directly onto a segment of the cave floor once occupied by prehistoric humans. As White and his colleagues broke the stone slab into sections and lifted them out, they discovered that the underside had been engraved with another vulva-like image (see photo). When they sent the bones of reindeer and other animals from the cave floor to the University of Oxford's radiocarbon dating lab for analysis, the dates clustered tightly between 36,000 and 37,000 years ago. And because there was no accumulation of sediments or other deposits between the archaeological layer and the stone slab, the team argues that the painted cave ceiling must be at least as old as the bones. ^=^

“That would mean that the artworks at Abri Castanet are also at least as old as those at Chauvet, White and co-workers conclude in a paper published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Because these images of vulvas are very different from the charcoal and ochre drawings at Chauvet, the team thinks that regional differences in artistic traditions were already established in Europe by that time, even at sites like Chauvet and Abri Castanet that are only a few hundred kilometers apart. ^=^

“One key difference, White says, is that whereas the paintings at Chauvet are hidden deep within that cave and away from living areas, the depictions at Abri Castanet were on the rock shelter ceiling right above the spaces where prehistoric humans slept and ate, making them a kind of everyday and public art. ^=^

Art at Abri Castanet and Abri Blanchard

aurochs at Abri Blanchard

Abri Blanchard and Abri Castanet are rock shelters that sit along a cliff face in the Castel Merle Valley, just beyond the small commune of Sergeac, in the Dordogne region of France, which is famous for early modern human sites. Art there has tended to show up primarily in specific sectors of the sites. Marcel Castanet’s and White’s excavations have yielded several blocks with geometric engravings and a few paintings, done with black manganese and red ochre, of animals, such as bison. An engraved block found at Abri Castanet bears a hole called an anneaux, which archaeologists believe was used for stringing reindeer hides in order to close off the rock shelter.

Nikhil Swaminathan wrote in Archaeology magazine: “Some of the art is found on slabs that were part of the ceilings of both shelters, but much appears on freestanding plaques, including the engraved aurochs found this summer at Abri Blanchard. The plaques were found with their engraved surfaces facing down, but because their illustrations follow the edges of those blocks, White says, the stones were unlikely once part of the roof. He adds that, according to Marcel Castanet’s notes on his excavations at Abri Castanet, several other engraved and painted blocks were found with their decorated surfaces turned toward the ground. “One working hypothesis is that there is, for lack of a better word, ritual deposition of these things,” says White. He notes that three-quarters of the engraved blocks were at the northern end of Abri Blanchard. “What it confirms is that these places where there are engravings are perhaps special places within the site. There may be concentrations of them,” he continues. “I think that’s raw material for thinking about the context in which art is being done and seen.” [Source: Nikhil Swaminathan, Archaeology magazine, January-February 2013]

New excavations at Abri Blanchard in the mid 2010s, according to Archaeology magazine, have uncovered a limestone block engraved with a series of dots and the image of an aurochs, a wild ancestor of modern cattle. Pieces of bone found with the artifact were radiocarbon dated to 33,000 years ago, the period when the Aurignacian people, Europe’s first anatomically modern humans, made the first representational artwork. In addition to the aurochs tablet, the research team reanalyzed 38 engraved limestone blocks that had been found at Abri Blanchard between 1910 and 1912. One of those tablets was decorated with a feline figure that was drawn using the same distinctive technique that an artist used for a painting of a feline at Chauvet Cave, about 200 miles away. While some techniques are shared between such early artistic sites, there are interesting differences, too. Randall White of New York University says, “Each region had its own particular medium of expression: engraving in southwestern France, miniature sculpture in Germany, and deep cave painting in southeastern France.” [Source: Zach Zorich, Archaeology magazine, May-June 2017]

Niaux Cave

Niaux horse

Niaux Cave Complex(55 miles south of Toulouse) is regarded as one of the three great prehistoric caves along with Lascaux and Chauvet Cave. Situated in the Pyrenees, it is a huge complex that spreads out over a kilometer into the Earth from the entrance gallery. It contains 70 prehistoric caves with art dating back to 14,000 years ago.

In a high-domed chamber are images of bison, horses, ibex, deer and fish. A bison is partly obscured by calcite deposits. Amidst the 90-year-old graffiti and dripping stalactites in the 15-meter-high, 40-meter-in-diameter Black Room are mysterious marking and prehistoric paintings of an ibex and two 2-foot-long and six-inch-high bison with sexual organs placed in human not animal positions. Guides believe that the figures were drawn by different artist. There are markers made of dots, slashes, arrows and lines at all the entrances and exits of the galleries that appear to point the way. Some are red. Some are black. Some look like bar codes or symbolic flames. There are also paintings of horses.

Describing the Black Room Judith Thurman wrote in The New Yorker, “Scores of animals were painted in sheltered spots on the floor, or sketched in charcoal on the soaring walls: bison, stags, ibex, aurochs, and, what is rarer, fish (salmon) and Niaux's famous “beared horses” — a shaggy, short-legged species...All the creatures are drawn in profile with a fine point, and some of their silhouettes have been filled in with a brush or stumping cloth. I looked for a little ibex, twenty-one-inches long...described to me as the work of a perfectionist, and one of the most beautiful animals in the cave. When I found him he was so perky that I couldn't help laughing."

The entrance to Niaux is on the slopes of the Pyrenees. Footprints of ancient children still exist. Magdalenian man, the inhabitants of the caves, are believed to have lived at the entrance and used torches to venture to the roomier caves where the paintings were located, for "religious and mystical experience." The entrance was used as shelter in the Bronze Age.

Niaux Cave Complex is one of the few prehistoric caves in Europe open to the public. Three chambers with paintings and markings are accessible. In the 1960s, a narrow tunnel was drilled into rock to give easier access to the caves. Only 35,000 people are allowed to enter the caves each year. Groups are limited to 20 people. There is 45 minute break between each group to allow painting-damaging carbon dioxide to circulate out. Once in the chamber with the paintings the guide instructs the visitors to turn off their flashlights and a single beam of light is shown on the caves 11,000-year-old images of bison and deer.

Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the Vézère Valley

Megaloceros from Lascaux Cave

The Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the Vézère Valley are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. According to UNESCO: “The Vézère valley contains 147 prehistoric sites dating from the Palaeolithic and 25 decorated caves. It is particularly interesting from an ethnological and anthropological, as well as an aesthetic point of view because of its cave paintings, especially those of the Lascaux Cave, whose discovery in 1940 was of great importance for the history of prehistoric art. The hunting scenes show some 100 animal figures, which are remarkable for their detail, rich colours and lifelike quality. [Source: UNESCO World Heritage sites website =]

“Located in a limestone plateau of the Ardèche River in southern France, the property contains the earliest-known and best-preserved figurative drawings in the world, dating back as early as the Aurignacian period (30,000–32,000 BP), making it an exceptional testimony of prehistoric art. The cave was closed off by a rock fall approximately 20,000 years BP and remained sealed until its discovery in 1994, which helped to keep it in pristine condition. Over 1,000 images have so far been inventoried on its walls, combining a variety of anthropomorphic and animal motifs. =

“Of exceptional aesthetic quality, they demonstrate a range of techniques including the skilful use of shading, combinations of paint and engraving, anatomical precision, three-dimensionality and movement. They include several dangerous animal species difficult to observe at that time, such as mammoth, bear, cave lion, rhino, bison and auroch, as well as 4,000 inventoried remains of prehistoric fauna and a variety of human footprints.” =

Lascaux Cave

Lascaux Caves is one of the world's most famous prehistoric caves. Consisting of one great chamber and two passageways, it is located near Sarlat on a hillside in Montignac, in the Dordogne region of southwest France. The 17,000-year-old painting are rendered with great skill, incorporating the contours of the caves and displaying some of the first known use of perspective, a technique that was not rediscovered until the Golden Age of Greece, as well as shadowing, highlighting, stenciling, and Pointillism. The artists used powdered colors, brushes and stumping clothes and spit pigment out of their mouth. Based on the hand prints left in the caves, the artists including males and females of all ages and even babies. After Picasso visited the cave in the 1950s was he reportedly emerged and exclaimed: "We have invented nothing." Miró once said, "Painting has been in a state of decadence since the age of caves."

Joshua Hammer wrote in Smithsonian Magazine: “ Lascaux Cave in the Dordogne region of southwestern France was...discovered by serendipity: In September 1940, four teenage boys and their dog stumbled across it while searching for rumored buried treasure in the forest. The 650-foot-long subterranean complex contains 900 of the finest examples of prehistoric paintings and engravings ever seen, all dating back around 17,000 years. [Source: Joshua Hammer, Smithsonian Magazine, April 2015] The cave was discovered during the Nazi occupation of France. The four boys were given flashlights by their schoolmaster who was told that caves in the areas might contain prehistoric paintings. After finding the paintings by climbing through a hole revealed by a fallen tree, with their dog Robot, the boys swore one another to secrecy. Later they informed their schoolmaster, who had to squeeze into a narrow passage to see the cave. Later still a 24 hour guard was placed at the entrance. One of the four boys worked for many years as a guide to the caves.

Chauvet Cave

20120206-Chauvet cave lions 22.jpg
Chauvet cave lions
On Christmas Eve, 1994, three spelunkers — Jean-Marie Chauvet and his friends Elitte Brune and Christian Hillaire — made one of the greatest archaeological discoveries ever inside a cave near Pont-d'Arc in the Ardéche region of southern France, an area popular with cavers. The cave is officially named Chauvet-Pont d’Arc. [Source: Jean Clottes, National Geographic, August 2001]

What the spelunkers found was Chauvet Cave, named after one of its discoverers."Tears were running down my cheeks," Jean Clottes, France foremost expert on cave art, said of his first glimpse of the paintings. "I was witnessing one of the world's greatest masterpieces...I was so overcome...It was like going into an attic and finding a da Vinci. except that the great master was unknown."

Chauvet Cave is regarded as more impressive and beautiful than Lascaux cave by people who have seen both. Chauvet contains stone engravings and paintings with 420 animal figures. Some paintings are 35,000 years old paintings, some of the oldest cave paintings known to science. The images are almost twice as old and more than twice as large as the images in Lascaux and Altamira.

DNA Helps Scientists Decode Dappled Horse Paintings

Nikhil Swaminathan wrote in Archaeology magazine: “Genetic material from the bones and teeth of wild horses, some of which died more than 20,000 years ago, has answered a longstanding debate about some Paleolithic cave artists: Were these ancient painters realists, depicting the natural world they saw around them, or did they portray more imaginative representations? [Source: Nikhil Swaminathan, Archaeology, Volume 65 Number 2, March/April 2012 =/=]

“One of the paintings in question, The Dappled Horses of Pech-Merle, in a cave in southern France, is a nearly 25,000-yearold depiction of horses with spotted coats. While spots are seen in many modern horses, they were believed to be a product of later domestication and thus would not have coexisted with humans in the Paleolithic. =/=

“That belief turned out to be wrong. An international team of scientists examined ancient DNA from predomesticated horse remains found in Europe and Siberia. The team found gene variants common to domesticated spotted horses in more than 20 percent of their samples. Though the finding doesn't rule out some ancient creative license, the artists could have seen spotted horses in the wild. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers report, "At least for wild horses, Paleolithic cave paintings were closely rooted in the real-life appearance of the animals."” =

Late Magdalenian Engravings from 14,000 Years Ago

Eric A. Powell wrote in Archaeology magazine: The people of the Paleolithic Magdalenian period in Spain and France created great works of figurative art such as the Lascaux cave paintings, which realistically depict a rich variety of wildlife. But scholars have long believed that around 14,000 years ago, that dramatic artistic tradition came to a sudden end. People of the succeeding Azilian period were thought to have completely stopped making animal figures, and instead focused their creative energies on etching and painting abstract designs on pebbles. But the recent discovery of 45 engraved stone tablets along with Early Azilian tools at a rock shelter in Brittany has shown that, in fact, some Azilian people carried on the artistic tradition of their Magdalenian ancestors. [Source: Eric A. Powell, Archaeology magazine, July-August 2017]

dappled horses at Peche Merle

“University of Nice archaeologist Nicolas Naudinot led the team that unearthed the engravings and says they resemble elaborate Magdalenian depictions of horses and a kind of wild cattle known as an aurochs. One bull is even shown with rays emanating from its head, the only such example of a “shining” animal known in prehistoric European art. Naudinot says the rays were added some time after the original head was carved, because the bull’s horns were reengraved over the lines. “The prehistoric people wanted the rays to be in the background,” says Naudinot, who speculates they could be a rendering of the, or perhaps they were simply symbolic abstractions, similar to the ones later Azilian people would carve on pebbles.

Associated Press reported: More than 50 cave etchings thought to be around 14,500 years old have been found in the northern Spanish town of Lekeitio. Bizkaia regional official Unai Rementeria announced the discovery in a press conference Thursday, saying the etchings were a "treasure of mankind," and "of exceptional technical quality and visibility." He said experts have praised the etchings as the "most spectacular" in the Iberian peninsula. Among the figures carved into the stone surface are horses, bison, goats and, for the first time, at least two lions. The region of Bizkaia neighbors the region of Cantabria, home to the famous Altamira cave paintings, Spain's most prized prehistoric cave art site — also known as the Sistine Chapel of Paleolithic Art. [Source: Associated Press, Oct. 15, 2016]

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Nature, Scientific American. Live Science, Discover magazine, Discovery News, Ancient Foods ancientfoods.wordpress.com ; Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated May 2024