Word: lascaux
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This is a story about three kinds of culture: the cultural heritage of Lascaux's art, the stubborn mold that threatens it and the arcane and insular culture of French bureaucracy that diffuses responsibility for what went wrong. But it begins and ends with the beauty and mystery of the Lascaux cave. "It's so spectacular that it boggles the mind," says Jean Clottes, one of the world's foremost experts on cave paintings. "When I first saw it, I cried...
...restorer Rosalie Godin was overwhelmed for a very different reason when she was urgently called to Lascaux in August 2001 by France's Research Laboratory for Historical Monuments (LRMH). "It was as if it had snowed in the cave. Everything was covered in white," she says. Two of the cave's caretakers, Bruno Desplat and Sandrine van Solinge, had raised the alarm when they discovered that white filaments, first spotted in isolated parts of the cave months before, had spread over much of the interior in a matter of days. Desplat, who lives next to Lascaux and has devoted more...
...that he or the cave's curator, the prehistorian Jean-Michel Geneste, could have been entirely surprised. The previous spring, workers had finished installing a $28,000 air-conditioning system beneath the stairs leading down to the cave. The new machine represented a major change in the way Lascaux's delicate balance of temperature and humidity had been regulated for more than three decades. The old system, installed in 1968 after years of minute studies of the cave's climate, relied on Lascaux's natural currents to pass air over a cold point and ensure that water condensed there, like...
...pull air toward the cold point. The intrusive approach scandalized those who had worked so hard to figure out a more modest solution to earlier problems in the cave. "Our idea was always to be as parsimonious as possible," says Pierre Vidal, a retired researcher who worked in Lascaux for decades. "This thing seemed more like a central air-conditioning system...
...appearance of the mold soon after the new apparatus was put in place in April 2001 suggests it was not up to the task of maintaining Lascaux's equilibrium. By the end of that year, Geneste ordered the fans taken out altogether. "If we knew then what we learned later, we wouldn't have installed that machine," says Alain Rieu, the director of conservation for the region of Aquitaine, which ultimately signed off on--and paid for--the work. "But the old machinery was in a bad state of repair, and we all decided unanimously that we couldn't take...