Word: chauvet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Your article gives the impression that the cave paintings will ``greatly enrich our picture of Cro-Magnon life and culture.'' They will not. As you noted, there are numerous problems in interpreting art. While the Chauvet images may be great art, they reveal very little about ancient societies. Rather, our knowledge of these cultures has been generated by a century of painstaking excavation and research. From these efforts, we have constructed a relatively sophisticated picture of the behavior of pre- and early-modern human societies. Cave art provides little more than an impressive visual supplement to this. I wonder whether...
...thousand years ago is the knowledge amassed and handed down to us from earlier generations. People in prehistoric times laughed, loved, mourned, thought and created. Do not underestimate them, for they were not too different from us. Those who were alive at the time of the rock paintings in Chauvet were probably as clever as many of us living today. Their lives, although on the average shorter and much harder than ours, must have been rich with emotions and experiences...
...history of art must be rewritten to acknowledge the brilliant artists who elegantly transformed the appearance of creatures into an abstraction of red spots in the Chauvet cave...
...about 10,000 B.P. (before the present)-cover a much longer time span than what has come afterward. Southwestern European cave painting, only the most familiar expression of ancient creativity, was done over a period of at least 10,000 years. And when Paleolithic people first crawled into the Chauvet cave to daub the walls with images of rhinos and bears, nearly half of all art history was already over with...
...discoveries like the one at the Chauvet cave, and more intensive study of existing sites, are constantly giving archaeologists more information to work with. Also, dating techniques are becoming more refined. It used to be that scientists needed to test a large sample of paint to pinpoint its age. And, says anthropologist Margaret Conkey, "no one was willing to scrape a bison's rump off the wall." Now it takes only a tiny sample. French prehistory expert Arlette Leroi-Gourhan estimates dates by using pollen particles preserved on cave floors...