Word: chauvet
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...clear from the start that the cave that park ranger Jean-Marie Chauvet stumbled upon in the south of France last year was a major archaeological find. Like the famous Lascaux cave nearby, the limestone cavern was covered with spectacular paintings from the depths of prehistory. This one seemed much older, though -- maybe 20,000 years, compared to 17,000 for Lascaux -- and it contained much more artwork, including images of animals, such as owls, panthers and hyenas, that had rarely if ever been seen on cave walls...
...quality of the paintings, however, as much as their great antiquity, that makes them so surprising. The artwork in the Cosquer cave is nothing more than the crude outline of a human hand. The Chauvet cave drawings, made 30 centuries earlier, are exquisitely rendered likenesses that use the caverns' natural contours to heighten a sense of perspective. The contrast suggests that the art of early man did not mature steadily in any simple linear fashion. Says Patrice Baghain, a regional director of the French Culture Ministry: "It throws the entire notion of progressive artistic development into question...
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...