Word: lascaux
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...machinery may not be what introduced the fungus to the cave. Isabelle Pallot-Frossard, director of the LRMH, says that the presence of formaldehyde--used for decades as a foot wash to prevent fungal infections--may have killed off many other organisms present in Lascaux that might have prevented the explosion of fusarium. "The fusarium strains we found in the cave are extremely resistant to formaldehyde, unlike strains from elsewhere," says Pallot-Frossard. "It didn't come from outside, but had been there all along. All it needed was a slight modification in climate to take...
...Lascaux might have escaped history and its indignities if four boys rambling on a hillside just east of the Vezere River in southwestern France in 1940 had not decided to investigate an opening revealed by a fallen tree. Soon Abbe Henri Breuil, a pioneer in the study of Paleolithic cave art, arrived to inspect their extraordinary find. He theorized that Lascaux's broad galleries might indicate a magical or religious function for the drawings; Lascaux became known as the "Sistine Chapel of prehistory," and people clamored to see it. After the war, the La Rochefoucauld family, which owned the property...
...beginning of the 1970s, Lascaux had found a kind of stability. The crowds were gone, the lichens banished, and Jacques Marsal, one of the cave's boy discoverers, was in the cave almost every day, alert to even the slightest changes. Studies had determined that the cave could handle about five visitors a day for 35 minutes each, five days a week; that protocol was never exceeded for the next 30 years. Since 1983, the crowds that come to the region have had to settle for Lascaux II, a modern facsimile that gives them an inkling of the cave paintings...
Pallot-Frossard contends that the fungus has not caused irreversible damage to the paintings, but others disagree. Laurence Leaute-Beasley, a Franco-American who led art tours into Lascaux from 1982 to 2001 and formed the International Committee for the Preservation of Lascaux in 2004, says one knowledgeable visitor to the cave in April not only saw fusarium on the paintings but also noticed a grayish tinge to formerly black surfaces where growths had been removed. When the quicklime was removed from the cave over the course of last year, so too was what was left of the soil--which...
...Lascaux's keepers are no longer using chemicals to eradicate fusarium; gone are the antibiotic patches and the quicklime. Geneste sees a few tiny insect colonies as evidence that a new ecological balance is taking shape, and there is talk of reopening Lascaux next year to a carefully restricted numbers of visitors. But that won't be the test of whether Lascaux has imparted a lasting lesson of humility to its custodians. Whether that lesson sticks will be determined by future generations. It will be a terrible indictment of this one if it does...