I'd been reading, of course. And examining the photographs, the
amazing images in great oversized books, some of which folded
out into panels a yard long. I'd learned new vocabulary, words
I certainly didn't remember from my college French classes more
than 20 years before -- fouiller, to excavate;
falaise, cliff; gisements, layers or beds. I'd
written careful, though no doubt error-studded letters of inquiry.
I'd been dreaming of animals, dreaming of caves. Then -- gasp
-- I'd somehow been granted permission to enter one of the greatest,
most significant Paleolithic cave art sites in the world: La Grotte
Chauvet. Its artwork has been conclusively, through repeated testing,
dated to more than 30,000 years before the present. How had this
happened to me? How marvelous!
We met in an unpaved restaurant parking lot in the mountainous
Ardeche region of southern France, shook hands and made introductions.
Then there were forms to sign: I would not wear jewelry into the
cave; I wouldn't eat or drink or spit -- crachat! --
in the world below; I would take no photographs, wear no backpack.
I'd dress in the coveralls and shoes provided. I would hold no
one but myself responsible for any injury, et cetera, et cetera.
I asked a few questions, and, of course, I signed the forms. Thereby
I became part of a select group. Only five people at a time can
enter the cave to work, in the company of watchful guides.
The archaeologist Jean Clottes would lead us; he's worked with
the images of Chauvet almost since the cave's discovery in 1994,
and he directs the research efforts there. Two others, Paule Rodrigues
and Charles Challveau, attended to all the technical aspects of
the trip. The other viewers were African rock art specialists
Alec Campbell, with his wife, Judy, and David Coulson, with his
wife, Deborah. And me.
As we made the sloping climb to the cliff, Deborah picked wildflowers
-- an offering she wished to leave at the entrance -- and told
me of her work as a landscape designer. The scholars chatted,
old acquaintances. I asked several questions of Paule and Charles.
Gently they both admonished Deborah when they noticed her bouquet:
These woods along the Ardèche river are a natural reserve,
and one mustn't disturb the plant life. "You cannot take them
back with you," Charles said.
But when we arrive at the entrance and she quietly places her
flowers against an outcropping of rock, no one scolds. Instead,
there's a flurry of preparatory activity. Charles and Paule unlock
the gate to a small alcove, adjacent to the cave itself, where
there's a little office with tables, various monitoring equipment,
a telephone. And, surprisingly, a coffeemaker. While the rest
of us are urged to make use of the woods, since there will be
no restroom breaks during the three-hour visit, coffee is brewed,
chocolate is set out, and soon we are having these light refreshments,
as if to fortify us with the world-traveled drug of caffeine before
our journey into darkness.
After this polite ritual, we suit up. We get coveralls, ingeniously
designed with a complex of zippers; we're also encircled with
climbers' belts, to be able to clip in with carabiners for the
descent, some 30 feet to the first chamber. At the entrance proper,
Charles unlocks a heavy metal door. In the cramped antechamber,
which seems to function as a sort of air lock, we take off our
own shoes -- boots, sandals, sneakers -- and rummage among a collection
of matching rubber shoes until we find some in our own size. We
wear hard hats with excellent lamps. We're ready for our transformation
underground.
The images in Chauvet Cave have changed many views of the nature
of Paleolithic art. First, they confound the notion that earlier
images must have been crude, with the real flourishing of technique
and mastery belonging to the Magdalenian period, roughly 18,000
to 11,500 years before the present. These paintings belong to
an earlier culture: the Aurignacian, an era in which, at its earliest
dates, two species of humans lived in western Europe, and especially
in the Dordogne Valley and isolated pockets in Spain. In what
researchers sometimes call simply the Transition, roughly 45,000-35,000
years before the present, Homo sapiens entered a landscape
already home to Homo neanderthalensis. The newcomers'
arrival seems to have spurred a sudden flurry of cultural change
among the indigenous Neanderthals, referred to as the Châtelperronian
period. The Neanderthals began to wear jewelry, and their tools
changed form slightly.
As far as we know, the Neanderthals didn't join their new neighbors
in the practice of cave painting. Only the persons who, generations
upon generations later, become "us," Africans, Europeans and their
descendants throughout the diaspora of empire and emigration,
were the artists who decorated the earth as well as themselves.
They left rich tableaus of engraved and painted bestiaries that,
sometimes, astonishingly, survived for millennia.
At Chauvet, the painters would not have lived beside their Neanderthal
cousins; the artwork dates just a few thousand years too late
for that. But the images preserve aspects of another world, all
the same. A surprising number of woolly rhinos, rare elsewhere
in Paleolithic art, are depicted throughout the cave. The great
curves of their impressive horns are clear trumpet-flourishes
of power and strength. Many mammoths are placed in positions that
seem to trace the cave's periphery, as if they reside ever in
the distance. Some pictures may be of insects: strange, alien
images that turn no eyes outward to regard the visitor, unlike
the mammals that animate the walls.
Into the cave
All along the way, we mark our passage aurally, with oohhh
and look! (all the guests today are English speakers).
Stopping to gaze around or up or down, I sometimes brace my knees
against the possibility of tumbling off the metal walkway that's
been laid down to protect the nearly pristine floor, on which
we move, single file, from room to room. If the guides notice
this kind of teetering, they rein us in with words, as well: Attention
or Mind, now. Jean directs our gaze deeper into the Bear
Chamber, where a cave bear skull has been set atop a square rock,
the canines pointed downward, two once-living stalactites of enamel
on this apparent altar. Or is it just where the children amused
themselves, picking up bones and rocks, while the adults were
at work? Both possibilities seem easy to imagine.
At some point in time, other visitors to the cave marked their
way with torch wipes, rubbing the burning surface to knock off
ash and renew the flame -- and perhaps if the way was unknown
to them, to leave signs of the route back up and out. This seems
to be what happened about 27,000 years ago; a torch wipe appears,
for instance, on a film of calcite that has, like a cataract,
dulled part of a painted panel in the central Hillaire Chamber.
None of the artwork has been dated to the same time as that carefully
dated carbon, so it seems very likely a visitor, or party of visitors
-- like us, perhaps -- came through the caverns, torchlight flickering,
some 3,000 to 5,000 years after the artists first illuminated
the walls.
As we make our way inward, I notice these shadows of ancient
fire, these sooty smudges that mark somebody else's passage through.
Someone stopped, paused, there. And, like me, the Someone
gazed at the Panel of Horses, their muscular necks, the way each
head tilts at a different angle, like a line of living animals,
bobbing and tossing their heads in the wind.
Pleistocene culture was static for the most part. Its technology,
imagery and ways of life all persisted with only gradual change
for thousands of years. Even so, whoever stepped into the chambers
and looked, with surprise and delight, or perhaps with fear, at
the painted figures leaning from the walls, from the darkness,
from the inner depths of earth and stone, must have marveled at
the scene. Who could have done this? Perhaps the caverns
had stood empty, the people who used them having moved on. Or,
as we say euphemistically, passed on, killed, perhaps, by a bad
winter of sickness, an earthquake, some world-shaking event that
disrupted their inhabitation of the handsome limestone Ardeche
valley with its cold, fast river and the caves above. Perhaps
a hundred generations or more passed before someone found the
chamber and ventured in to see.
But whoever it was, the Someone I'm imagining came from the
same world, the same glacial landscape, as the one depicted on
the inner walls. For us, it is quite Other. We pause before an
owl, carved in clean, sure lines on a low-hanging stone, so that
it seems to be perched upon nothing, upon the ancient, unchanged
air of the cave. We stare at a panel of rhinos -- rhinos! In Europe!
-- the outlines of their horns repeated in a pattern that could
indicate, some scholars think, motion, or perhaps the sense of
a herd, bristling their dangerous points. I suppose we all think
about the disappearance of the living animals from the landscape,
as we gaze at the images that rise up, out of the dark, as we
draw near.
Sometime, many thousands of years ago, the cave was closed by
a collapse of the cliff. Long after the dust had dissipated, plants
had grown up and people, whoever they might have been, then, living
along the beautiful Ardèche River, had forgotten all about
the tumble and roar, as well as what was sealed behind the barrier
of stone and soil. Long, long afterward, the cave continued to
hold its painted relicts of the Pleistocene. That's one reason
the images are so undamaged. They've been preserved with limited
air exchange, little variation in temperature as the world outside
warmed and chilled and warmed again. And of course, for millennia
there were no visitors to carve their names over the painted animals
or hold aloft their sooty torches or spit (!) or in any other
way intrude on the geologic sanctuary of the cave.
I hold a map in my pocket, though I can't see well enough to
study it. It's the work of Yanik Le Guillou, a neatly drawn chart
labeled with the names that have been given to each location.
The Megaloceros Gallery (named for the image of a giant Pleistocene
deer, long extinct), appears on the page like a yellow peninsula
extending north by northeast (though, underground, who can tell
direction?). A torch wipe marks the entrance to what, in the actuality
of the cave, is a tunnel, a downward-sloping passage that will
take us to the End Chamber. Someone marked the way, once, there;
here, we shuffle single file and share a flashlight, passing it
up and down the line, with which to examine more closely some
of the carvings just inches away. Charles and Paule are exquisitely
attentive here. One must not touch the walls, mustn't put out
a hand to steady oneself or to pause, leaning against the stone,
to look. Attention, attention.
The End Chamber
We won't be able to stay long in the End Chamber. The oxygen
level, at this low, remote cove within the cave, is also low,
and our guides will monitor our time here precisely, hurrying
us out when we've overstayed out limit. Because of the lower oxygen
ratio, the Aurignacian artists couldn't burn wood on site to prepare
their charcoal pigments. Instead, they used the Megaloceros Gallery
like a preparatory antechamber, and as we slowly descend the slope
I see several small piles of burned wood -- tiny artisan's hearths.
I breathe in. I can smell it! At first I can't believe
it's really the scent of char from 30,000-year old fires, but
we haven't been here long enough for lightheadedness to set in
and play tricks on me. Later I'm assured that yes, it wasn't my
imagination. I would, indeed, have been able to smell those old,
ghosted bones of long-dead fires. Yes.
I haven't touched the walls. I haven't slipped or stumbled or
spat or in any way violated the surfaces of rock and clay that
hold the ancient artwork. But in the End Chamber, as I gaze at
the black or gray-black images along the walls -- the mammoth
with the rounded feet, like balls; the panels of lions; the rhinos;
the bison heads, lined up along an angle of the stone like gargoyle
flourishes on a building's corner -- I keep breathing in the air
that's touched by hints of soot. Rarified air, ancient air.
It's me who is changed, changing; hidden, invisible, our bodies
are taking in these transubstantial tokens, images, aromas, volatiles
that enter us here in the dark world. Our group examines, exclaiming,
the strange "sorcerer" figure on a stalactite. It seems to be
a wooly, curly headed bison, dangling an impossibly tiny leg from
the left shoulder. The lower, tapering shape of the stalactite
presents what is obviously a woman's vulva, with her thighs, as
well, which become in the composition tiny, vestigial-looking
legs. The combination of bison and woman calls to mind the theory
of André Leroi-Gourhan, who, in the mid-20th century speculated
that Pleistocene symbolism was built upon binary thinking: like
the world of French nouns, a great system of masculinity and femininity,
the bison represents the feminine principle, the horse the masculine.
I wonder about the nomenclature for this figure. It's been referred
to as the "bison-man," though, if there's any merit to Leroi-Gourhan's
system, whatever transformational, shamanic or simply metaphoric
power the image presents could even better be considered feminine.
Interestingly, the stalactite hangs a few yards away from a
niche in the cave wall with a scalloped top that holds a charcoal
drawing of a horse. From the metal walkway, if you pause at a
certain spot (and, as directed, we all do), the animal seems to
be emerging from the edge of the cave into a "chamber" -- the
niche -- distanced by perspective. A few more steps and the entire
figure is in view, framed handsomely by the recess in the stone.
It's a horse like those I've seen reproduced from Lascaux or Altamira:
a huge, bulging chest and belly, nearly bursting with visual vitality.
There they are: the horse, the bison. The yin and the yang of
the prehistoric world, as some scholars suggest.
"Imagine," says Jean Clottes, "if a shaman sat there, how the
rock would frame him. He'd be facing the sorcerer, the horse at
his back." The animals on the wall seem all the more dangerous
when I envision a priest, or a shaman, surrounded with such animate
power.
Too soon, it's time to go back. It's disorienting to turn around
on the metal mesh walkway and head slightly uphill through the
Megaloceros Gallery. As we emerge, I turn again to see the torch
wipe. It seems to me, after the impressive images, a nearly personal
sign, almost like a hand raised in greeting or farewell.
Footprints
On the way out, Jean gestures toward the northwest reaches of
the cave, an area called the Chamber of the Crosshatching. We
peer into the distance while Charles shines a powerful flashlight
beyond the reach of our own headlamps. The area is inaccessible
to us, but the research team has found footprints there -- most
likely those of a child, a pre-adolescent about 4 1/2 feet tall,
most likely a boy, based on the shape of his feet. He seems to
have come alone into the cave and walked about with his torch,
deliberately marking his way with torch wipes -- some of the very
ones I have been noticing and which have been carefully dated
by the researchers. The trail of prints seems to deliberately
avoid some low spots, as if they were filled with water, though
no such pools exist today.
It's touching to imagine him moving alone through the great,
decorated space, taking care that he won't get lost and pausing
repeatedly before the same images that have had us alternately
gasping and silent. Perhaps he was alone all day, engaged in the
kind of meditative play that is quickly disappearing from modern
versions of childhood, regimented into team sports or lessons
or time with virtual opponents from video games. Perhaps he was
singing to himself or telling himself a story when he came across
the entrance to the great cave.
Some researchers have speculated that the very flourishing of
art and culture which we see in the Upper Paleolithic, what some
call the Representational Revolution, is itself the result of
childhood play. That is, of a longer childhood in which both solitary
pretend play and what has been called "complex social pretend
play" -- imaginary games with friends -- are allowed to flourish.
In this view, the artistic upwelling of millennia ago does not
emerge from any "practical problem-solving," to use Gregory Currie's
terms. Instead, it is the cultural unfolding, the maturation of
imagination, in a world where children had been able to engage
in more extended, more complex and ultimately more creative play.
Peter Carruthers suggests that pretend games, the animating sparks
of childhood, allow the mind training in "relevant and interesting"
ideas, possibilities, alternatives.
Even more intriguing, David Lewis-Williams speculates that artwork
became a cultural force of exclusion, a way to differentiate the
us of Homo sapiens -- the people who are not
only clever or smart but spiritual, imaginative -- from the Others,
the Neanderthals, the Infidels of another era. According to Lewis-Williams,
the neurological structure of the anatomically modern human brain
allows us all experiences of altered consciousness -- the hallucinations,
the visions -- that we perceive as spirituality, and that we standardize
through the protocols and rituals of the world's various religions.
Neanderthals, he suggests, with their different evolutionary neural
development, could have lacked this form of insight; a lack that
is suggested by the paucity of their creative art. If he's right,
this is the dark side of the aesthetic revolution that decorated
the Pleistocene landscape. It's the earliest hint of the hurtful
purposes -- religious wars, pogroms, exterminations of witches
or heretics -- to which spirituality has been put.
The boy who walked into Chauvet may have imagined himself in
any of an interesting array of identities as he moved from room
to room, talking out loud, perhaps, to himself or to some imagined
companion. But it's also possible he wasn't quite alone. Close
to his own tracks are those of a canid -- a wolf or a large dog
-- that may have accompanied him. The researchers can't yet be
sure: They haven't found a place where the prints are superimposed,
one upon the other, a pattern which would show that they walked
together, that afternoon, perhaps it was, or early evening, some
26,000 years ago. It's possible the trails are unrelated, recording
visits that occurred days or years or centuries apart. But it's
also possible -- imagine it -- that the tracks are intermingled
traces of a joint visit.
Studies of the canid prints show they're not quite wolf-like;
the length of the middle toes seems more in keeping with the proportions
we know today in dogs. But the earliest domestication of the dog
we've known before now dates to only 14,000 years ago. If all
these conjunctions hold up: that the torch marks that have been
definitely dated were made by that Paleolithic child; that the
two traveled together, beast and boy; and that the beast had,
in the language of Rudyard Kipling, become First Friend, no longer
the Wild Dog of the Wet Woods . . . Well. It's an astonishing
If.
Imagine it: Under the images of the untamed gaze of ancient
animals, there in the Pleistocene reaches, deep underground, are
hints of our own age, glimpsed, in the barefoot trail over mud
and clay, in the black and ochre tints on the walls. The way in
-- deep, beautiful and, don't forget, also terrible -- and then
back again.
Elizabeth Dodd directs the creative writing program at Kansas
State University. Her most recent book is Prospect: Journeys
& Landscapes, winner of the William Rockhill Nelson Award
for nonfiction.
(January 2006)
