Friday, March 25, 2016 [part 1] — Game of Caves

My appoint­ment at Gar­gas was for ear­ly in the after­noon, so I was able to have a pleas­ant and leisure­ly break­fast. In place of the stan­dard French baguette, there was a much more chewy local loaf known as qua­tre-banes, which I thought superb, per­fect with the fresh coun­try but­ter and jam. The cui­sine of Hautes-Pyrénees, like many oth­er aspects of its cul­ture, is more close­ly in tune with that of the Basque Coun­try and Cat­alo­nia than with north­ern France (and indeed, the slang expres­sion nordiste  is used by the locals with obvi­ous dis­dain). Beans and spicy sausages, coun­try soups, hard rather than soft cheeses, bread that you can get your teeth into. After break­fast, I still had plen­ty of time to reach the caves on foot. From Lom­brès, I walked down the road to the vil­lage of Aventig­nan (about three times larg­er than Lom­brès), then along a minor road to the cave’s recep­tion cen­ter, lit­tle more than 4km.

The road to the caves starting at Aventignan.

The road to the caves start­ing at Aventignan.

Only two cars passed me, and there was noth­ing much along the way but emp­ty fields until the hills and for­est start­ed. The weath­er was cool and over­cast. Often, when I’m walk­ing, music pops into my head in sur­pris­ing­ly com­plete form, and this time it was the Shepherd’s Song from Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne, sung in Old Occ­i­tan, the lan­guage of South­ern France before it was con­quered, re-edu­cat­ed, and reg­i­ment­ed by the nordistes. The dialect of the Auvergne was con­sid­er­ably dif­fer­ent from the Gas­con spo­ken in this region, but it nev­erlthe­less puts across the South­ern mood:

As gaïré dè buon tèms?
Dio lou baïlèro lèrô,
Lèrô lèrô lèrô lèrô baïlèro lô.

Pas­tré lou prat faï flour,
Li cal gor­da toun troupel.
Dio lou baïlèro lèrô,
Lèrô lèrô lèrô lèrô baïlèro lô.

Pas­tré couci foraï,
En obal io lou bel riou!
Dio lou baïlèro lèrô,
Lèrô lèrô lèrô lèrô baïlèro lô.

(“Shep­herd across the riv­er, your work there is hard. Look, the mead­ows here are in bloom. You should watch your flock on this side…. Shep­herd, the water divides us, and I can’t cross it”). Noth­ing at all like French. Incom­pre­hen­si­ble to all but a few sur­viv­ing speak­ers of the Old Tongue, but the melody con­veys such a won­der­ful sad­ness and yearn­ing that it would be under­stood emo­tion­al­ly in Tokyo. In fact, it resem­bles many Japan­ese folk melodies.

The forest approaching the caves.

The for­est approach­ing the caves.

I soon reached the recep­tion cen­ter, which boast­ed a café, which was closed, and a small muse­um. It was here that I con­firmed my reser­va­tion. A staff archae­ol­o­gist was busy explain­ing how stone-age tools were used to some chil­dren, so I chose to walk up to the cave entrance and wait there for Alexan­dre Gay, who was to be my guide into anoth­er world.

Now is the time to explain why I had picked this par­tic­u­lar cave. Oth­ers are more famous, more spec­tac­u­lar, and eas­i­er to get to. 

Grad­u­al­ly, most of the pre­his­toric art caves are being closed off from pub­lic view. The mere pres­ence of human beings is destroy­ing the cave art, because the increase in the lev­el of car­bon diox­ide caused by human breath­ing pro­motes the growth of a nasty green slime of bac­te­ria and algae on the cave walls. The famous art of Las­caux and Chau­vet have been near­ly destroyed, and these caves are now sealed off. The French gov­ern­ment has spent a for­tune cre­at­ing repli­ca “caves” for tourists. But I have lit­tle inter­est in view­ing these repli­cas. Good pro­fes­sion­al pho­tog­ra­phy and the appro­pri­ate tech­ni­cal reports will give me more infor­ma­tion, and no repli­ca can pro­vide the real­i­ty of expe­ri­ence I seek. Gar­gas is not one of the more famous ones, and it is not con­ve­nient­ly locat­ed. Unlike many of the caves, its exis­tence has been known for cen­turies, and in fact it has vis­i­tor grafit­ti from cen­turies past. Most of all, it has only a small amount of the ani­mal art that peo­ple asso­ciate with such caves. 

But Gar­gas specif­i­cal­ly has fas­ci­nat­ed me since I ran across Claude Bar­rière & Ali Sahly’s L’art par­ié­tal de la Grotte de Gar­gas in a two-vol­ume Eng­lish trans­la­tion pub­lished by Oxford’s British Archae­o­log­i­cal Reports. In the many years since I read it, the cave has haunt­ed me. There are many ways in which it is pro­found­ly dif­fer­ent from oth­er pre­his­toric cave sites. First, and for­most, are its hands. Hand sten­cils, formed by plac­ing a hand against a stone sur­face and then spray­ing pig­ment onto it by con­trolled spit­ting — a slow process, but very pre­cise — are scat­tered through­out Europe, and can also be found in Africa, Indone­sia, Aus­tralia, and South Amer­i­ca. But Gar­gas has far more than any oth­er site. In fact, it accounts for half of all the hand sten­cils in Europe. The sig­nif­i­cance of the hand-sten­cils is unknown. They exhib­it great pecu­liar­i­ties. Many of them appear to have fin­gers miss­ing. This trig­gered var­i­ous the­o­ries based on anthro­po­log­i­cal par­al­lels, such as the cus­tom in some places of chop­ping off a fin­ger to sig­ni­fy mourn­ing of a deceased loved one. Oth­ers sug­gest­ed that fin­gers were being lost to frost­bite. But the num­ber of sten­cils at Gar­gas show­ing miss­ing fin­gers far exceeds the prob­a­bil­i­ties of these kinds of expla­na­tions. For­tu­nate­ly, some­one even­tu­al­ly demon­strat­ed that one needs only to bend a fin­ger under­neath one’s hand while spray­ing the paint to achieve the “miss­ing fin­ger” effect. Hand sten­cils of this type are much, much old­er than most of the fig­u­ra­tive art that is known in pre­his­toric caves. The famous ani­mal paint­ings at Las­caux were made around 20,000 years ago, and are asso­ci­at­ed with the Solutre­an archae­o­log­i­cal cul­ture [archae­ol­o­gists des­ig­nate sim­i­lar com­plex­es of arti­facts as “cul­tures”, but this should not be tak­en to mean a “cul­ture” as nec­es­sar­i­ly an eth­nic enti­ty]. The art at Altami­ra is between 17,000 and 13,000 years old, and is asso­ci­at­ed with the Mag­dalanean cul­ture, and the images at Trois-Frères are push­ing to the edge of the Neolith­ic. Gar­gas con­tains some ani­mal art, and it too dates from around 15,000 years ago and is iden­ti­fi­ably Mag­dalanean. But the hand-sten­cils at Gar­gas date from more than 27,000 years ago, and are asso­ci­at­ed with the Gravet­t­ian cul­ture. This was before the last Glacial Max­i­mum. It is impor­tant to remem­ber that when the best rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al art was made at Gar­gas, the artists were near to work done by artists who were near­ly as far back in time from them as they are from me.

Visitor photography is not permitted at Gargas. This and the next photos come from technical papers

Vis­i­tor pho­tog­ra­phy is not per­mit­ted at Gar­gas. This and the next pho­tos come from tech­ni­cal papers

The hand-sten­cils at Gar­gas are very sim­i­lar to ones found across the plan­et in Sulawe­si, Indone­sia. Recent re-dat­ing using “U‑series” Uranium/Thorium dat­ing tech­niques have con­firmed that these were made 39,900 years ago. As in Europe, Asian hand-sten­cils tend to pre­date ani­mal art by sev­er­al thou­sand years at the same loca­tions. The idea that art “orig­i­nat­ed” in Europe is long aban­doned from seri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion. Pari­etal art in Aus­tralia, Asia, and Africa can be dat­ed to the same time depth, or earlier. 

Anoth­er thing that is unique about Gar­gas: It is the only Euro­pean cave in which art co-exists with clear signs of human habi­ta­tion. In the famous caves in the Dor­dogne, for instance, there are caves near­by that were inhab­it­ed, but the art-caves were func­tion­al­ly sep­a­rate enti­ties. At Gar­gas, all the art is inside the cave, well beyond the lim­its of nat­ur­al light, and had to have been made and seen by portable illu­mi­na­tion (prob­a­bly fat-lamps sim­i­lar to the ones used by the Innu­it), but there was con­sis­tent, long-term habi­ta­tion at the cave mouth. Why Gar­gas should be unique in this way remains a mystery.

16-03-25 BLOG Hands 2small16-03-25 BLOG Hands 3small

A small group gath­ered below the cave entrance, at a place with a fine view of the val­ley below. M. Gay arrived, and after a brief talk led us into the upper cave. It is now only acces­si­ble through a locked door. For about an hour, Alexan­dre led us through about 500 metres of gal­leries. The upper cave is nar­row and wind­ing, but does not require any spe­cial skill to pass through. It con­tains some of the fig­u­ra­tive art. The nat­ur­al fea­tures of this cave, includ­ing a vari­ety of rock pil­lows, sta­lagtites and sta­lag­mites, cre­at­ed an appro­pri­ate atmos­phere of sus­pense as we pro­gressed. We came at last to an arti­fi­cial tun­nel that had been con­struct­ed to con­nect the upper cave with the lower.

The low­er cave is much big­ger and wider and con­tains the two main cham­bers and a small side-cham­ber called the Cham­bre du Camarin. Most of the cave art is here, includ­ing all of the hands. There seem to be at least three phas­es of devel­op­ment in the fig­u­ra­tive art. Ani­mals rep­re­sent­ed include Bovi­dae, Bison, Mam­moth, Hors­es, Ibex, and pos­si­bly birds. For the most part, it con­sists of etch­ings into the stone, some­times com­bined with paint­ing. This is the sort of thing that does not come off well in pho­tographs, and only see­ing the real thing in situ con­veys its artis­tic qual­i­ty. I was not pre­pared for the emo­tion­al pow­er of this art, hav­ing long assumed that it must be infe­ri­or to the famous stuff. At one point, we were asked to crouch on the ground to look up at one engrav­ing that could only be viewed from this angle.

But is the hands I was most inter­est­ed in. They had come to rep­re­sent, for me, a direct con­nec­tion to oth­er human beings across a vast gulf of time. And despite all the prepa­ra­tion for the event, the real­i­ty of it drained me emo­tion­al­ly. They are not mere­ly pret­ty, but shock­ing, in some­thing like the way that the ghost­ly shad­ows of vapor­ized humans on the walls of Hiroshi­ma are shock­ing. These are not arti­facts, like the ani­mal draw­ings, the mobile art, or the lith­ic finds. They are shad­ows of human beings, of real peo­ple who thought and felt and loved and hat­ed and cried and died. Their pres­ence in the cave was pal­pa­ble, as if they were por­traits of my own fam­i­ly on a bed­room dress­er. And these peo­ple strug­gled to stay alive in a way per­fect­ly famil­iar to me — the hunt­ing of large mam­mals in a cold cli­mate, much like the world that still exists in north­ern Cana­da. It is not very long since I spoke and shared a whiskey or two with peo­ple who would have rec­og­nized the inhab­i­tants of Gar­gas as “folk just like us.” 

Gay has devot­ed all his life to the Gar­gas caves. He had an appoint­ment to attend to, so we agreed to meet on the fol­low­ing day at his home pour un apéri­tifHe con­ve­nient­ly lives in Loubrès, a short walk from the fro­magerie. It was a con­ver­sa­tion I eager­ly looked for­ward to.

But what to do next? It was still mid-after­noon, and I might as well see some of the coun­try­side. M. Uchan had men­tioned that there was a medieval church or some sig­nif­i­cance, and some roman ruins anoth­er four kilo­me­ters to south. This would put me in the val­ley to east of the one Lom­brès was in, sep­a­rat­ed by a wall of steep, forest­ed hills. The topo­graph­i­cal maps indi­cat­ed that there was a foot­path over the hills, in fact a frag­ment of the medieval trail of pil­grim­age known as El Camino de San­ti­a­go. There seemed to plen­ty of time to find this trail, cross the hills, find the Roman bridge that was sup­posed to cross the lit­tle riv­er Larise, and then make my way back to Lombrès. 

The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.

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