Word: lascaux
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
DIED. MARCEL RAVIDAT, 72, Sunday spelunker and mechanic; of a heart attack; in Montignac, France. During an outing in 1940, Ravidat eased down a hole in the ground and made a discovery that transformed humanity's memory of itself-the Lascaux caves, with their remarkably preserved 18,000-year-old images of brilliantly colored creatures at full gallop. In later years, Ravidat served as a Lascaux guide...
...find the newly discovered cave paintings artistically far below those of Lascaux and much less vivid. Something is wrong. In my opinion they are false...
These were functional images; they were meant to produce results. But what results? To represent something, to capture its image on a wall in colored earths and animal fat, is in some sense to capture and master it; to have power over it. Lascaux is full of nonthreatening animals, including wild cattle, bison and horses, but Chauvet pullulates with dangerous ones-cave bears, a panther and no fewer than 50 woolly rhinos. Such creatures, to paraphrase Claude Lavi-Strauss, were good to think with, not good to eat. We can assume they had a symbolic value, maybe even a religious...
...profuseness of Cro-Magnon art? Why did these people, of whom so little is known, need images so intensely? Why the preponderance of animals over human images? Archaeologists are not much closer to answering such questions than they were a half-century ago, when Lascaux was discovered...