Lascaux

Lascaux is the reason no major painted cave found since has been opened to the public, and the sequence by which it was ruined is worth setting out, because every step was a reasonable response to the previous one.

Four teenagers entered the shaft in September 1940. The cave opened to visitors in 1948. By the early 1960s about twelve hundred people a day were going in. Their breath raised carbon dioxide and humidity, electric lighting supplied energy, and green algae, the maladie verte, spread across the paintings, while calcite deposits began to veil them. Andre Malraux, as minister of culture, closed the cave on 17 April 1963.

Then the treatments began. Biocides and antibiotics were applied to control the algae, and the cave was stabilised with an air-conditioning system. In 2001 the system was replaced, and the works involved in installing it disturbed the equilibrium; Fusarium solani, a white fungus, spread rapidly across floors and walls and resisted repeated treatment. From around 2007 black stains appeared, caused by fungi of the Ochroconis group that were, in part, feeding on the residues of the chemicals used against the earlier outbreak. Each intervention created the conditions for the next problem. The cave is now monitored under tight restriction and entered by very few people for very short periods.

Facsimiles were built instead: Lascaux II in 1983, reproducing the two main chambers a couple of hundred metres away, and Lascaux IV in 2016, reproducing effectively the whole cave.

On what the paintings meant, the honest answer is that we do not know, and the confident readings have failed in sequence. Hunting magic, the idea that painting an animal secured it, collapsed on the evidence: the species painted are largely not the species these people ate, and reindeer, which dominate the food refuse, are almost absent from the walls. The reading that reached the public instead, associated with David Lewis-Williams, treats the caves as records of shamanic trance, with the geometric marks as entoptic phenomena seen in altered states. It has been sharply criticised (notably by Helvenston, Bahn, Bradshaw and Chippindale), on the grounds that it generalises from modern ethnography on other continents, that the neuropsychological model it borrows does not say what it is taken to say, and that it is close to unfalsifiable.

What survives all of it is modest and solid. Around nineteen hundred images, made over a long period, deep underground, at real cost and risk, to a shared and stable set of conventions. People kept coming back and doing it the same way. That is a great deal to know and it is less than a meaning.

A dog looking for its owner led four teenagers into Lascaux, and the paintings they found are still dated to well over ten thousand years before any written language existed.

Found by following a dog

In September 1940, four local teenagers, most often named as Marcel Ravidat and his companions, followed Ravidat's dog into a hole exposed by a fallen tree near Montignac, and discovered the painted cave system by climbing down into it with a makeshift lamp, an entirely accidental find that predates any organised archaeological search of the hillside.

What is on the walls

The cave's most famous chamber, the Hall of the Bulls, depicts large aurochs, horses and deer in mineral pigment, painted with a scale and confidence that surprised early researchers unused to attributing such technical skill to Palaeolithic artists. A separate, more obscure scene deep in a shaft depicts a bird-headed human figure apparently falling before a wounded bison, one of the few explicitly narrative or human scenes in the entire cave, and one of the most debated in terms of what it depicts.

A conservation history of one problem replacing another

As this entry's companion article covers, opening the cave to the public in 1948 introduced algae growth from visitor breath and lighting, and each subsequent technical fix, closing the cave, adjusting climate control, introducing new treatments, tended to produce its own new form of damage rather than a clean resolution, a cycle that eventually led to the cave's permanent closure to the public.