Chauvet Cave - The cave paintings and rock art of Chauvet

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Chauvet Cave

The cave paintings and rock art of Chauvet

The Chauvet Cave is located near the Vallon-Pont-d'Arc in the Ardèche region of southern France. The Cave Paintings of Chauvet date to 30,000 to 32,000 years ago. In the Chauvet Cave hundreds of animal paintings have been found making Chauvet Cave one of the world's most important rock art sites.

Chauvet Cave Through the Mind of a Sculptor

Visit to the Chauvet Cave in 2001 by John Robinson

River in spat

We trudged down the path in the pouring rain back to the cars and drove into town. The daylong downpour had changed the river in to a surged mass of brown waves ferociously tumbling through the Arch. It was an awesome site, and a complete change from the serenity of the sun lit morning's scene only 36 hours ago.

Vallon Chauvet Museum

On the way back to the hotel I stopped in at the town’s Chauvet Museum which shows the video made by the original discoverers of the cave. I thought it was very good but somehow completely missed the unique atmosphere of the cave. It was a bit like taking a shower wearing a raincoat!.

Dinner at the camp

That evening Jean asked us out to dinner at the Research Centre. We had a wonderful evening with the team, meeting the different scientists, all experts in their own field. Thanks to Valerie Feruglio translating for me, I was able to have a long talk with Michel Phillipe, the Bear Man. He has now recorded 172 bear skulls, 53 of which are strewn around the floor of the Altar chamber.

Bears

Michel talked about how the bears would have gone into the dark cave as winter set in to give birth to their cubs, which would have been tiny, each only about eight inches long and weighing three lbs. The mothers would suckle them through the winter on fat rich milk as they lay in the pits they had dug, many of which can still be seen on the floor of the cave today. Over the winter months the cubs would have grown to about two feet long and weighed around twenty lbs.

They would have moved around in the dark, and like their mothers they scratched the walls. At the entrance of the Holy of Holies you can clearly see the scratches made by their little sharp claws. Michel has found in the cave tiny bones of cubs who died before escaping into the light.

	Cussac Cave After dinner we were given a slide show of the engravings that have recently been discovered at the Cussac Cave near Lascaux. The wonderfully free finger drawings are done on the wet clay surface of the cave walls and are possibly a little younger than the Chauvet paintings, being between 25 to 27,000 years old.