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| Chauvet Cave | 
| Authors: Jean-marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel Deschamps, Christian Hillaire, Jean Clotte
Creator: Paul G. Bahn
Publisher: Thames & Hudson Ltd
Category: Book
List Price: $41.25
Buy New: $28.48
You Save: $12.77 (31%)
New (6) from $28.48
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 259472
Media: Paperback
Pages: 136
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.4
Dimensions (in): 11.9 x 10.4 x 0.6
ISBN: 0500282862
Dewey Decimal Number: 709
EAN: 9780500282861
ASIN: 0500282862
Publication Date: March 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New. Delivery is usually 5 - 8 working days from order, International is by Royal Mail Airmail
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| Customer Reviews:
Aurignacian Uffizi! February 11, 2008
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
High on my "bucket list" of places to visit before I die is Chauvet Cave, in the Rhone Valley of France. It won't happen, however; it would be easier by far to climb Everest or to plunge into the Marianas Trench than to gain access to Chauvet, which is restricted to a mere half dozen archaeologists by the government of France. There are very good reasons for the restrictions. Human activity in limestone caves is inevitably destructive; both natural features and artifacts are quickly degraded. This is hyper-critical in Chauvet because of its uniqueness and scientific significance. Fortunately, there are several glorious coffee-table books of photos of the cave and its art, as well as this more modest account of its dicovery and exploration. There is also a spectacular virtual tour of the cave on line, maintained by the French government.
When the cave was discovered by spelunkers in 1994, it had not been entered by humans or any other large mammals since roughly 22,000 BCE (or 12,000-14,000 years before the Creation of the Earth, according to Biblical fundamentalists). Yet to the astonishment of archaeologists, some of the art and artifacts in the cave were soon dated as even older, perhaps 15,000 years older, from the Aurignacian era, thus the earliest known cave paintings as well as the oldest known footprints of an anatomically modern human. Even more astonishing is the sophistication of the paintings, both technically and aesthetically. No words can describe the impact of seeing such skillful representations of horses, mammoths, rhinoceroses, elk, and cave lions, representations that seem as vivid and impressionistic as our own modern iconic images of the Wild. The Chauvet paintings are in no way "primitive" in comparison to the images in the caves at Altamira or Lascaut, yet they are thousands of generations older.
I've personally visited a dozen or more of the cave-art sites of France and Spain. Some of them are over-toured, yet a few of the best, like Peche-Merle, are solitudinous. Photographs and even moving pictures do little justice to the sensations of seeing the paintings and sculptures in situ. You can't just walk into the gallery and stand on a flat floor and see the stuff on the walls. These are real caves, narrow, cold, full of sharp spikes of rock and jagged corners - head-bangers, crawly holes, slime, and ankle-twisters. Likewise the artists didn't stand and sketch; they crept and crouched, and sometimes hid their images in the weirdest crevices! Whatever they were doing, whatever it meant to them, it was no casual graffiti; it was full of lost intention.
Jean Clottes, the author of this book and one of the chief archaeologists of Chauvet, writes lucidly and modestly about the project he heads, the history and significance of Chauvet, and the whole context of the presence of early modern H. sapiens in Europe. His text is not for specialists only; it's accessible to "armchair" archaeologists like myself, though I can't help regretting that my armchair is as close as I'll ever get to this first known masterpiece of human artistic impulse. Wouldn't a few million dollars or euros be more usefully spent on conserving and studying Chauvet than on building another freeway overpass or a fence to keep workers out of a country where work is needed?
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Wildlife, nature and the Environment
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