A cave sealed by its own cliff
Chauvet Cave lies in a limestone plateau above the Ardèche river in southern France, near the natural rock arch of the Pont d’Arc. Its galleries cover about 8,500 square metres, a little more than the area of a football pitch. People used it during two long phases of the Ice Age; then, around 20,000 years ago, a rockfall closed the entrance.
That collapse is the reason the cave is so well preserved. Sealed caves keep an almost constant temperature and humidity, and nothing disturbs the floor: no animals, no rain, no later visitors adding their own marks. When the cave was opened again, it held more than 1,000 images on its walls and about 4,000 remains of animals on its floor, including the skulls of cave bears.
18 December 1994: three cavers find a way in
On 18 December 1994 three speleologists, Eliette Brunel-Deschamps, Christian Hillaire and Jean-Marie Chauvet, were exploring the cliffs near Vallon-Pont-d’Arc. They found a narrow passage, cleared it and dropped into a cave no one had entered for some 20,000 years. The cave took the name of one of them, Chauvet; its official name is the Grotte Chauvet-Pont d’Arc.
The discovery was followed almost at once by protection. The cave was closed to the public, with access limited to researchers, and inside it stainless-steel walkways keep visitors off the floor, which still carries prints and traces.
What the rockfall saved
The images are mostly animals, and an unusual choice of them. Next to horses, bison and aurochs, the painters drew dangerous species rarely seen in other caves: mammoths, bears, cave lions and rhinoceroses. They used shading, combined paint with engraving and placed animals so that the bumps of the rock give them volume. There are also red dots, signs and hand stencils.
The floor matters as much as the walls. It carries bones, hearths and footprints, among them the trail of a child, about eight years old according to the prehistorian Michel-Alain Garcia, who wiped a torch on the rock as he walked. Charcoal from those torch marks has been dated to about 26,000 years ago, thousands of years before the rockfall shut the cave.
How the drawings were made
The painters prepared their walls. In many places they scraped the surface clean before drawing, removing the soft outer layer of the rock so that the lines would stand out. The black came from charcoal, made by burning wood, mostly Scots pine.
Then came the technique that made Chauvet famous. To shade an animal, the artist drew a charcoal line, went over it again and spread it with a finger or a tool, so that the colour faded from dark to light and the body seemed to have volume. A related method, stump-drawing, pressed pigment onto the wall and smeared it with the hand or a piece of hide. On hard limestone the artists also engraved thin lines with flint, while on soft, clay-covered walls they traced lines with their fingers. Shading of this kind had not been recognised in cave art before Chauvet was found.
Is it really 36,000 years old?
Here the agreement ends. The Chauvet team has dated charcoal from the drawings and the floor many times; in 2016 a model based on 88 new radiocarbon dates placed most of the black drawings between about 37,000 and 33,500 years ago, with a second, later phase of visits. UNESCO’s description gives 30,000-32,000 years “BP”, in radiocarbon years, which become older once they are converted into calendar years.
Not everyone accepts these dates. Paul Pettitt and Paul Bahn argued in 2015 that the art looks like much later cave art, compared it with dated styles and animal remains elsewhere, and warned that dating charcoal shows when the wood burned, not when the line was drawn. Others have proposed that most of the art is far younger. The Chauvet team replies that several independent lines of evidence point to the same early phase. The debate has not closed.
Either way, Chauvet changed the picture of prehistoric art. If its drawings are as old as the team says, some of the most skilled cave art in Europe comes from the very beginning of the tradition, not from its end.
Where to see it
The original cave is closed to the public. Since 25 April 2015 you can see its drawings in a full-scale replica built near Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, which reproduces the main panels. It opened as the Caverne du Pont d’Arc and is now called Grotte Chauvet 2. UNESCO added the cave to the World Heritage List in 2014.
Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Decorated Cave of Pont d’Arc, known as Grotte Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, Ardèche” (1426).
- Quiles, A. et al., “A high-precision chronological model for the decorated Upper Paleolithic cave of Chauvet-Pont d’Arc”, PNAS (2016).
- Pettitt, P. and Bahn, P., “An alternative chronology for the art of Chauvet cave”, Antiquity (2015).
- Archaeology Magazine, news brief on the child’s footprints at Chauvet (1999), reporting M.-A. Garcia.
