Yesterday, we were so thrilled by our exposure to Cro-Magnon art at Lascaux that we lined up today for more cave paintings, this time at Rouffignac... still part of the beautiful Dordogne region. Today's paintings can't claim to be the gallery of the professionals... just a mixture of line drawings... part chiselled into the gallery wall... part painted with magnesium oxide. Today's paintings were done 3,000 years after Lascaux... Cro-Magnon people were living at the mouth of the cave... still living off Reindeer... animals that never received recognition inside the art galleries.
The cave system at Rouffignac is extensive... over 8 klms on three levels. The crazy feature of Rouffignac art is that the drawings do not start until over 1 klm into the cave. While Lascaux art featured the horse, Rouffignac art gives centre stage to the hairy mammoth... a rare subject in other Palaeolithic galleries... in fact, about a third of all mammoth representations are in Rouffignac. Why Rouffignac prehistoric artists chose the mammoth is even more surprising... because mammoth bones are rarely found in South-Western France. This obviously adds mystery to the cave’s ornamentation.
The quality of the art was not as good as Lascaux... you could see where mistakes had been made and where attempts were made to make corrections. The artists crowded the gallery where the cave at the top level ceases... each artist seeking bragging rights as to having the drawing most deep within the cave... the quality at the end of the gallery fell away somewhat. There was one sequence of ten mammoths that were choreographed into a larger scene... but generally, each figure seemed to stand alone.
Another feature is evidence of bears using the cave... claw markings on the walls... and numerous inundations of 'nests'. Bears, also, were going over 1km into the cave to give birth to their young... it may have been warmer... perhaps safer... to travel that far in. The cave bears ceased using the cave long before Cro-Magnon people came along.
As we rode the train 1km to the start of the galleries, we imagined the tension felt by young Cro-Magnon boys undergoing initiation rights (if indeed they did this)... many generations after the painting had been completed... imagined the young boys stumbling through the dark... being shown scratchings on the walls made by monsters unknown... falling into bear nests... passing cathedrals over 15 meters high... and squeezing through openings difficult to pass... seeing this all through the light of burning sticks... pretty scary stuff. When their tensions had exhausted them... the young boys would be shown drawings handed down from their dreamtime... mysterious giant mammoths... hair falling from shoulders down to the ground. The witch-doctors would certainly have their attention at this point. Such excitement... the soft life hanging around mummy could not compete with a trip to the back of the cave.
The area around Rouffignac has provided many of the Cro-Magnon skeletons upon which scientific conclusions of their build and culture have been based. The Basque people of France and Spain claim to be direct descendants of the Cro-Magnon people... good luck, if you want to prove them wrong.
This part of the world is so pretty... to also have the area with unique paleological history seems excessive in terms of an equitable distribution of blessings.
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