Amir D. Aczel, page 16
We landed on the airstrip just a few miles from the rock, and a bus took me to my accommodations in a rustic makeshift village perched by the side of Uluru. The bed was simple, the room undecorated, and the available food was mostly sandwiches and pizza. Out in the middle of a desert, with the nearest town hundreds of miles away, I was thankful for a sandwich. I packed my small backpack and walked toward Uluru.
It was hot and dry, and the infamous Australian flies headed straight for my eyes, seeking moisture. This made it hard for me to walk, as I swatted my own face while continuing on a lonely road, getting closer and closer to the towering rock. Uluru is considered a holy place by the aborigines, and they try to discourage approach to, or climbing on, this rock. It’s a place of the spirits of ancestors. I walked around the mound for some hours. Then I entered the large hut center of aboriginal art.
Here and elsewhere in Australia, I inspected the many paintings and reproductions of art created by the ancestors of today’s aborigines. The art is very decorative: there are geometrical designs of many kinds, with repeating zigzag and circular patterns, and these dominate the art of the aborigines. There are paintings of animals and people—but these are all very different from the art of the caves.
The animals and the people show about the same amount of detail, and overall, this level of detail is far less than what we find in the Paleolithic cave art of Europe. There are many rock paintings in northern Australia, but they seem imprecise and dreamlike. In aboriginal art, we don’t find the realistic portrayal of animals that is common in European caves. Aboriginal artists do not avoid depicting terrain, and they don’t use the technique of overlapping animal figures that we typically find in caves in France and Spain. Aboriginal art is wonderful: it is expressive, decorative, often detailed, and meaningful to its artists and to the popular tribal traditions, which date back so many millennia. But this art does not seem to share much with that of the European caves.
Aboriginal art today is in transition. Australian aborigines have been practicing their unique art on the continent for many thousands of years. In fact, radiocarbon analyses of charcoal from rock paintings in northern Australia have helped scholars date the arrival of anatomically modern humans on the shores of Australia to at least 40,000 years ago (other methods date the arrival to 50,000 years ago). Britain began to colonize the Australian continent intensively around 1788, and waves of immigrants swept over this vast land, completely overwhelming an unprepared native population. With this influx, as well as the resulting worldwide popularity of aboriginal art starting in the 1930s, aboriginal art began to change. The themes depicted in present-day aboriginal art are thus an amalgam of traditional notions and new ideas imported from the outside world.3
It is important, therefore, to try to isolate what may be “pure” aboriginal art—that is, art that was produced within traditional milieus of family, tribe, and clan, with as little as possible influence from the outside. Only in this way can we try to effect any meaningful comparison between European cave art and tribal Australian art.
In 1841, Sir George Gray led an expedition to the Kimberley region of Western Australia, where he discovered aboriginal rock paintings. Later in that century, anthropologists joined the search for original art made by Australian natives before the arrival of Western colonists. This culminated in the key work of Ursula McConnel and A. R. Radcliffe-Browne.
The rock paintings at Kimberley are schematic depictions of anthropomorphic beings: they could be people, but they also resemble what some people would describe as “aliens”—oval faces; abstract, almond-shaped eyes; a schematic nose; and a halo over the head. Rock art from Kakadu National Park in Arnhem Land in northern Australia, which is believed to be about 30,000 years old—thus roughly the age of Chauvet cave—looks equally bizarre, abstract, and unreal. These are intricate geometrical designs that remotely resemble imaginary beings. Then, in Koonalda Cave in Northern Australia, strange lines were found that covered an entire cave wall, dated to about 15,000 years ago. What do these rock paintings mean?
Since everything in aboriginal life relates directly to tradition and tribal membership and structure, it is likely that these are depictions of fantastic stories from the Dreamtime oral history of Australia’s natives. Australian tribes follow a tradition of symbolism and structure: animals are believed to have souls, and the souls of dead ancestors are present in rocks and hills. The rock art is believed to represent stories from the Dreamtime tradition and perhaps the souls of dead animals or people. At any rate, the art looks decidedly different from that of the European caves.
As interesting as aboriginal art certainly is, my research in Australia reinforced my belief that we should not try to interpret European cave art by what we find in other places on Earth or make comparisons with the customs and the art of living present-day societies. What happened long ago in the caves of Paleolithic Europe was a unique experience that never repeated itself in the history of our planet. This feeling only intensified my quest for the meaning of the mysterious art and signs.
Understanding the meaning of the art and the symbols in Cro-Magnon caves might shed light on more than the Cro-Magnons themselves. It may explain to us something about who we are, how we came here, and where we are going. But an explanation of these drawings, paintings, and signs continued to elude science.
19
Leroi-Gourhan’s Theory
I NOW WANT TO PRESENT THE ONE THEORY ABOUT European cave art that I believe holds elements of the actual truth about our Cro-Magnon ancestors and the way they viewed their universe.
The French archaeologist and prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan was born in 1911 and studied at the Sorbonne, where he wrote a dissertation on the archaeology of the north Pacific. He became aware of the prehistory of other regions of the world before addressing his native country’s cave art, brought to his attention by his student Annette Laming-Emperaire, whose contributions to his own theories he readily acknowledged in his books. After serving in the French Resistance in World War II, Leroi-Gourhan took up research positions in England, the United States, and Japan. In 1969, having written much about prehistory, he was appointed to the chair held earlier by Henri Breuil at the prestigious College de France in Paris.
Leroi-Gourhan attempted the first deep, systematic, and ultimately meaningful analysis of the mystery of cave art and symbols, building on Laming-Emperaire’s foundation of fresh, innovative thinking about this old problem. Leroi-Gourhan adopted her insight of not looking at specific paintings or signs in a cave, but rather considering the entire system. This enabled him to achieve concrete results in formulating a theory that I believe comes closest to solving the mystery of cave art.
Generations of researchers have looked at the signs found in prehistoric caves, searching for an alphabet or at least a set of decodable symbols that could convey something meaningful: “Walk fifty steps left and you will find a drawing of a bison,” for example. And this is why they all failed. The signs found in these caves are not words in sentences, and they do not combine to give a set of instructions or descriptions.
Leroi-Gourhan surveyed the previously reigning theories about the meaning of the signs in caves and pointed out that all such theories looked at the signs from an “ethnological” point of view of today’s societies. Thus, when a wounded animal is depicted (which happens relatively rarely—less than 10 percent of the time), scholars have imputed to this a kind of sympathetic magic. Similarly, the signs, rather than the animals, have been interpreted in a way that reflects today’s world. When wide “tectiform” signs were discovered, scholars who believed the magic theories took these signs as further evidence for their hypotheses by assuming that the wide signs were “huts” in which to detain animal spirits.1 Other signs were seen as magical traps for animals. And there were the usual assumptions about shamanism, where signs were taken to reinforce that theory.
But according to Leroi-Gourhan, these theories suffer from a bias of modern society and the way we view modern-day “primitive” societies. Prehistoric artists had a long history and traditions of their own before they came to their art, and we don’t do science justice by imputing to these artists the motives, lifestyles, and thought processes of present-day tribal societies in Africa, Alaska, or Australia.
The interpretation of the signs and their meaning by Leroi-Gourhan proceeds, according to him, in two main directions: first, the connection between the animals depicted in caves and the signs that accompany them; and second, a connection between the signs and sexual symbolism.
He noted that the signs are different from one another in a chronological way: the earliest signs are of a particular, archaic style; later signs show a development of abstraction; and the latest, Magdalenian, signs are yet more abstract. The signs, therefore, can be used as an aid or a method to confirm the dating of cave art.
The most important conclusion Leroi-Gourhan reached was: “All signs in caves are substitutes for human sexual representations.”2
According to Leroi-Gourhan, the systematic consideration of the totality of all signs in all prehistoric caves gives us certitude about this interpretation of the signs. One can clearly see here the progression through intermediary signs over time and can easily track the development of signs from realistic depictions to more and more abstract ones: there is an obvious continuity through time of this increasing abstractness.
Leroi-Gourhan thus made a crucial discovery about the cave signs. The signs belonged to two distinct groups: feminine signs and masculine signs. In early times, the signs were drawn realistically; for example, a sign might be the drawing of a vulva or even of a full female figure. In later periods, the signs were more and more abstract: they were stylized representations of human sexual organs. For example, the sign from the Pech Merle cave that looks like the letter Y was a stylized feminine sign. According to Leroi-Gourhan’s strict theory, every sign found in a prehistoric cave in Europe belongs to one of these two groups: male or female. Thus, a sign conveys either the meaning “female” or the meaning “male.” Thin signs are male; wide signs are female. The table on page 183 contains signs from caves in France and Spain, each classified according to Leroi-Gourhan as male or female.
Claviform signs are female not because they resemble a vulva but rather because they are an abstraction of the form of a woman’s body. The evolution of this sign can be seen in the figure from the cave of Pech Merle, included in the table on page 183. The complete table of all signs found in caves in France and Spain solved the mystery of the signs: every single sign falls into place within one of Leroi-Gourhan’s two categories.
Leroi-Gourhan classified the types of signs as follows:
Female Signs: Male Signs:
Triangles Barbed signs
Rectangles Short strokes (bâtonnets)
Lattice-shaped signs Dots
Tectiform signs
Oval signs
Claviform signs
Brace-shaped signs (these are between rectangular and claviform; they simplify the outline of a female figure)
Thomas Barron’s signs table.
The kinds of signs vary not only through time but also through space. Thus, there is generally a progression from realistic depictions of sexual organs to signs that are oval, for the female, and long, for the male; then the ovals become more abstract, and, also, signs based on the entire female form become claviforms. But throughout the environment surrounding the cave, there are clear associations as well. For female signs, for example, the region of a few square miles around the town of Les Eyzies-de-Tayac in the Dordogne has caves with an abundance of the tectiform signs. Thus, at Combarelles, Bernifal, Rouffignac, and Font-de-Gaume, one finds many tectiform signs. On the other hand, in caves of the department of Lot, that is, Peche Merle and Cougnac, which lie east of the area of Les Eyzies, there is an abundance of claviform signs. At Pech Merle, which was dated to several periods that spanned thousands of years of artistic work, one finds realistic depictions of the entire female form in its early period of around 20,000 years ago.
The philosophy of Laming-Emperaire and Leroi-Gourhan was that the decorated cave has a coherent, uniform structure that does not vary across this broad European landscape—from Spain to the French Pyrenees, to the Dordogne, and to Italy—or across the vast span of time: the 20,000 years separating Chauvet from Niaux. Each cave is a complete entity. This very specific structure dictates that each large decorated cave has a side area along which marginal art is displayed. Such art may well have been drawings or studies by novices; it is an area in which the artists practiced.
But the entryway to a typical cave has a very specific structure. There is an “indicative panel” at the entrance to the cave, which has signs on it. The signs found on this first panel as one enters the cave are masculine signs, according to Leroi-Gourhan’s classification. Here we usually find the following animals: ibex, stags, and sometimes horses. Passages leading out of the entry area repeat that masculine theme, and as one progresses into the cave, there may be depictions of dangerous animals: bears, lions, and rhinoceroses.
There are, at times, some humanlike figures—rough sketches, with no details, of what could be interpreted as human beings. Then there is usually a separating sign, in black or red: perhaps a set of dots or hand signs. This sign indicates the approach to the “deep gallery,” in which the principal works of the cave are found.
The number of animals in the cave’s main gallery may vary from two to several dozen, and they tend to be larger than in other parts of the cave. Here we find the main theme of the cave. Most frequently, from a statistical point of view, the theme is the coupling of the two main animals: a bison and a horse. Or it could be a very similar coupling: an aurochs (since the aurochs, a type of wild cattle, is similar to a bison) and a horse. Here we also find, in association with the pair or pairs of animals, signs belonging to both categorizations by sex, placed together.
Around the periphery of the main composition of a bovine and a horse, we find the marginal animals that accompany the main composition of the cave. These tend to be ibex or various kinds of deer, but sometimes, as in the case of Pech Merle or Trois Frères, we find humanlike figures in the periphery. There could also be lions here and rhinoceroses.
One of the best examples of the central composition of a decorated cave is the famous ceiling of Altamira. Here, about twenty bison are arranged around the central figure of a horse. Near the largest bison of the group are placed one masculine sign and a set of “claviform” female signs. In the peripheral area around the main animals, there are a female deer, engraved humanlike forms, two boars, and an ibex.
Every cave has this principal theme, which plays out and may repeat itself in various parts of the cave other than the main gallery. At times, a secondary theme—different from the main theme—is represented as well. In a way, this art form is like a symphony, with themes and variations on the themes that repeat themselves throughout the entire composition.
The particular composition that is based on the pairing of an aurochs and a horse is very common and is found at Lascaux, Gabillou, Ebbou, La Passiega in Spain, and in other caves. This theme is often repeated in a different form of the same idea: the bison-horse pair. There are variations of these concepts in different caves. The Pech Merle cave, for example, is characterized by a somewhat different theme. Here we find the predominant motifs of aurochs-mammoth and bison-mammoth. Thus, the mammoth here is the male symbol, and the aurochs and the bison stand for the feminine idea.
The caves of Niaux, Le Portel, Altamira, Castillo in Spain, and Trois Frères, among the principal caves, have the main theme of bison-horse and a secondary motif of aurochs-horse.
According to Leroi-Gourhan, the repetitive patterns one finds in the vast majority of Franco-Cantabrian caves provide strong evidence for his hypothesis that what we are seeing is an underlying ideology of a religious nature.3 We are unable to truly comprehend the deep essence of this belief system based on the incomplete record provided to us by the cave art discovered thus far. But we can at least grasp something about the underlying philosophy that must have motivated these grand artistic themes so many millennia ago.
Leroi-Gourhan argued that the main concept of animals being associated with sexual symbols repeats itself in mobile art that has also been found outside the Franco-Cantabrian region, in locations that range from Russia and Eastern Europe all the way to the cave of La Pileta near Gibraltar, where mobile art has been found. This is evidence of an ensemble of ancient traditions that perhaps predates Cro-Magnon art itself and that may have matured over millennia before these ideas were expressed in art. These traditions have apparently fed into the entire artistic tradition of Paleolithic Europe.4
All art, according to Leroi-Gourhan, follows the trend of being born, maturing, and then disappearing. What is so remarkable about European cave art is that it has absolutely no known antecedents. It simply appeared on the European continent at some point around 32,000 years ago or earlier, and it flourished over millennia before suddenly vanishing without a trace at the end of the Paleolithic period, a few thousand years before the arrival of agriculture in Europe from its origins in the Middle East.
Leroi-Gourhan thought that cave art followed a trajectory that began with a slow start, a great period of fecund creation, during which much of the important cave art was produced, and then experienced a steep decline at the end of the Paleolithic period. France and Spain were “privileged,” he wrote, since this was where the artistic activity took place. Although central Europe had its own abundance of natural caves—even deep ones, as in France and Spain—only France and Spain, and to a lesser degree Italy, enjoyed the creation of artworks in deep caves during the Paleolithic era. Many examples of mobile art were found in regions of central Europe as well, but, mysteriously, there was no cave art in these areas at all.
