Chauvet Cave

Latitude:
44° 23' 15.4 N
Longitude:
4° 24' 50.61 E
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Images

Image of Chauvet Cave by Chance

The Chauvet horses by Cro-Magnon peoples 31000 BP (Aurignacien)

Image credit: Cro-Magnon peoples 31 000 BP (Aurignacien) - Photo PD by Wikimedia Foundation
Chance
Chance Feb 21, 2011

Articles

Chauvet Cave

Chauvet-Pont d’Arc cave art 10000yrs older than thought

thesweetcheat
thesweetcheat Apr 13, 2016

“Some of the world’s oldest prehistoric artwork, located in the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc cave in southeastern France, is actually 10,000 years older than previously thought, researchers said Tuesday.

The red and black cave drawings contained in the cave are more than 30,000 years old, according to a radiocarbon dating study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed US journal.”

More here:

rfi.my/20ACLug

Chauvet Cave

Don’t fall for a fake: the Chauvet cave art replica is nonsense

danielspaniel
danielspaniel Apr 15, 2015

Picture this. Visitors to the Vatican arrive in St Peter’s Square and are shepherded into a modern reception centre cleverly hidden under Bernini’s colonnades. After looking at a display on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes, they are filtered into a full-scale replica, with a ceiling that is a giant photograph of the famous artwork.

rest of article: theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2015/apr/15/chauvet-cave-art-replica-is-nonsense

Chauvet Cave

Bear DNA is clue to age of Chauvet cave art

thelonious
thelonious Apr 20, 2011

“EXPLORING a gorge in south-east France in 1994 for prehistoric artefacts, Jean-Marie Chauvet hit the jackpot. After squeezing through a narrow passage, he found himself in a hidden cavern, the walls of which were covered with paintings of animals.

But dating the beautiful images – which featured in Werner Herzog’s recent documentary film Cave of Forgotten Dreams – has led to an ugly spat between archaeologists. Could the bones of cave bears settle the debate?”

More:

newscientist.com/article/mg21028093.900-bear-dna-is-clue-to-age-of-chauvet-cave-art.html

Miscellaneous

Chauvet Cave
Cave / Rock Shelter
tjj
tjj Jan 9, 2019

Extract taken from a superb novel by Edward Docx ‘Let Go My Hand’.

We can see nothing – absolutely nothing. So black is the darkness that I swear I can hear the shape of the walls, taste the taste stone, smell the water that has passed through from the Earth from above.
‘Now’, he says. ‘Now look with your eyes. Friends, look!’
Gradually, gradually, a light grows. Like a hallucination. Like a red shape behind our eyelids. So that we think we’re mad. Or reborn from the womb. But it widens and it spreads so that the opposite wall starts to shape itself, the light growing sharper and brighter, sharper and brighter. We see ochre hand prints; the human mark. We see strange red patterns and dots; human signs. We begin to see the outlines of animals – the beasts. The human mind, the human imagination, the human signature. And now the light starts flood the wall and we see that these animals crouch and creep and crawl this way and that all around us – lions, hyenas, panthers, cave bears. The light brightens still further. There is an owl daubed in white paint. We sense the finger that smeared the surface of the wall on that day thirty thousand years ago. There is rhino notched and scored in black. We see the artist has chosen a certain place on the wall where the shape of the rock serves his purposes. We see a heavy-haunched bison painted in sweeping flowing lines. We sense the human being standing back and admiring his artistry in a flicker of his torchlight. We see the curved flourish of the antlers of a reindeer. We see head after head of black-drawn horses, each on the other’s shoulder, as if caught in the instant of the herd’s fierce gallop, their black eyes somehow still alive.
We are silent. Dad’s voice is full of wonder: ‘I’ve wanted to see this all my life’, he says.
I get this feeling the opposite of sickness – the feeling that these paintings are being sucked inside me and that they will somehow live there for ever and ornament my soul.
‘This is it,’ Dad says. ‘The beginning’. His voice has the hushed tone of long yearning met – as though he has been trying to get to this moment ever since he was born. As though now that he apprehends the beginning, he might understand the ending. ‘This is the best we can know it, boys. The dawn of a distinctly human kind of consciousness.

Miscellaneous

Chauvet Cave
Cave / Rock Shelter
Chance
Chance Feb 21, 2011

The Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave is a cave in the Ardèche department (7) of southern France that contains the earliest known cave paintings, as well as other evidence of Upper Paleolithic life. It is located near the commune of Vallon-Pont-d’Arc on a limestone cliff above the former bed of the Ardèche River.

Discovered in 1994, it is considered one of the most significant prehistoric art sites.

The cave was first explored on December 18, 1994 by a group of three speleologists: Eliette Brunel-Deschamps, Christian Hillaire, and Jean-Marie Chauvet, for whom it was named.

On top of the paintings and other human evidence they also discovered fossilized remains, prints, and markings from a variety of animals, some of which are now extinct. Further study by French archaeologist Jean Clottes has revealed much about the site, though the dating has been the matter of some dispute.

Link

Chauvet Cave
Cave / Rock Shelter
danielspaniel
danielspaniel Mar 25, 2011
Guardian.co.uk

Werner Herzog on Cave of Forgotten Dreams: ‘The awakening of the modern human soul’ – video.

Werner Herzog investigates the ‘proto-cinema’ of the 32,000-year-old paintings inside France’s Chauvet cave – the subject of his film Cave of Forgotten Dreams – and discusses his project with Cambridge University archaeologists.

Topics

Extract from novel by Edward Docx 3

Jan 2019

Sites within 20km of Chauvet Cave

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