Safeguard of the cave
However, in spite of a continuous purification of the atmosphere - which appeared unsuited -, the walls of the cave of Lascaux underwent a biological contamination: several hundreds of colonies of algae, the ferns, foams and mushrooms proliferated there. In the same way, in spite of the precautions taken, one could not prevent the appearance of light calcite veils which threatened to cover certain paintings.  

In 1963, to counter all these dangers definitively, the authorities order the closing of the cave and launch a conservation campaign. It will be necessary more than two years to come to end from the micro-organisms which tackled paintings. Saved, Lascaux is today only open to the scientific personalities - object of a scientific analysis concluded in 1979 per Arlette and Andre Leroi-Gourhan - and cultural - to the maximum five people per day and five days per week. Since 1983, Lascaux II carried out by several painters and sculptors, after digitalization of the true cave, offers to the public a reproduction partial but faithful of what constitutes one of the most important caves decorated with the paleolithic superior.

An iconographic construction

The cave of Lascaux, long, 250 m is a succession of galleries, a cave-corridor with a well and a diverticulum. In north, the entry - which was in line with the current entry - leads to the Rotunda, big room with nonvertical walls whose figures painted in modelled black and red and black constitute the largest plank of all paleolithic art; indeed, whereas in Altamira the largest bisons reach hardly 2 m and that in Niaux they make less than 1 m, the bovids of the rotunda of Lascaux exceed 5 m length. To carry out this “decoration” - organized in half-circle -, the prehistoric men probably used scaffolding. Prolonging this room of the Bulls, the axial diverticulum is a gallery long of almost 20 m and high to 3.50 to 4 m, where the walls are decorated of three iconographic compositions; the figures, much less monumental than those of the Rotunda, represent bovids - cows and aurochs -, horses and ibexes. Of return in the rotunda, on the line, towards the south, one borrows the “passage”, left secondary diverticulum which separates the room from the Bulls of the apse; it is a broad corridor from 2 to 4 m whose walls support 385 graphic elements which are divided into various animal figures, but also in sometimes painted signs.  

An important bestiary
The walls and the ceiling of the apse, circular structure 5 m in diameter, are decorated painted and engraved figurations, laid out in staged bands; upwards, at a rate of one only animal specie per carousel, one finds there bulls, stags, hinds, then, with the ceiling, horses. The apse also shelters two particular figures: a musk ox and a reindeer, appear rare in the parietal whole of the time. The well - which prolongs the apse in the west -, released on a 5 m depth, delivered an important archaeological material: points of decorated assagais, lamps, residues of dyes, shells bored, etc Here, the painted decoration puts in scene a rhinoceros, the only one of its species, and a man, single him also, with the extended arms, reversed by a bison piqué of an assagai and the open entrails. One is unaware of which significance to give to this enigmatic composition; is the well the crowned part of the cave, the heart of the sanctuary? Following volume, called the Nave, is a high and broad gallery, rich in paintings and engravings; north towards the south, one notices there five great compositions of very good execution: panels of the ibexes, the print, the black cow, the stags swimming and the cross bisons.  

In the extreme south, the diverticulum of Cat-like is a low and narrow gallery - less than 1 m in the greatest width - which evokes the deep gallery of Niaux; as its name indicates it, it shelters engravings representing of cat-like, true scene which develops six figures seizing such as that of the male urinating to mark its territory and that of cat-like wounded. One also finds there representations of ibexes, bisons, horses, a stag and a hind, all remarkably carried out.  

The luminary
Yesterday like today, one could not penetrate in a cave without having a means of lighting. The prehistoric men of Lascaux made use of lamps with tallow, the ones nonworked, the others worked. The first, found in great number on the site, are generally of vulgar stones limestones to concave face dug of a natural basin; visible traces of ashes, soot, coal and rubéfaction attest of their use at ends of lighting. The seconds are extremely rare; of the two witnesses delivered by Lascaux, there remains only one lamp today, left roaster machine in the shape of racket, finely cut in pink sandstone. In addition to the lamps, Magdaléniens de Lascaux undoubtedly used torches and fires of lighting.  

A control of rupestral art
Incontestably, the man of Lascaux was endowed with an artistic solid direction; its talents, visible in the quality of the execution, also appear in the plan of the production of the figures. The preoccupation with a composition shows through until in the way of exploiting the natural irregularities of the cave: in the Rotunda and the axial diverticulum, the artist used the entablature to appear the ground; in the apse, perceiving the circular structure of the ceiling, it laid out its “cauliflower” figures. Its compositions are not free from elegance, even of harmony; thus, in the axial diverticulum, during “cow which change” is a large black bull and, in space called the Rotunda, two groups of aurochs are opposed in a perfect symmetry of the masses.  

Dyes
To carry out their paintings, the men of Lascaux used minerals dyes containing iron - hematite, blood, turgite, limonite, goethite - and of manganese - manganite, braunite, black ocher. The iron oxides were not always employed such as they are; often, were heated they to modify their natural color. To transform the dye into painting, one acted initially on mineral either by scraping it, or by crushing it; the powder obtained was then watered in cups.  

The direction of animation
By its composition, the bestiary of Lascaux is traditional; except the mammoth, surprisingly absent, one finds there all the animals generally represented in parietal art. In the mass of the animal figurations, the reports of frequency vary with the species; the horse and the bovids (bison and aurochs) outclass the stag, the ibex, the reindeer, the bear, the cat-like one and the rhinoceros. This hierarchy of the species is also observed in the site of the figurative scenes; there still, for reasons which escape to us, the couple horse-bison appears on the principal panels, whereas the cat-like ones and the rhinoceros are relegated in the galleries of the bottom.  

Lascaux - contrary to good of other caves - did not deliver a “monster”, appears mid--human mid--animal; the only atypical representation could be the “unicorn” of the Rotunda, appears enigmatic with two right horns.  

The originality of the art of Lascaux lies more in the mode of animation of the figures that in the iconographic variety; the artist expresses the movement in a realistic but segmentary and selective way. Thus, the animation of the forelimbs suggests it with it only the trot of a horse. In the same way, Lascaux is characterized by plurality and diversity from the signs which accompany the animal figures; André Leroi-Gourhan listed 410 of them, whereas most other caves only a few tens count any. The semiology of all these rectilinear features, signs disjoined, ramiformes, encased, full, claviformes, quadrangular and different, the reports which they maintain between them, pose as many difficulties of interpretation than the relative proportion of the animal species represented like their distribution in the cave. Let us retain however that the claviformes, also present at Niaux and the Three-Brothers in the Pyrenees, in Pindal in Asturies, testify to cultural affinities of Lascaux with the sites magdaléniens of the South.

Signs and their semiology

The walls of the cave of Lascaux are much richer in signs than those of the other large cavities of the paleolithic one. These signs are very diverse; some are common, others, like the ramiformes or the “checkerworks”, painted in red, yellow and black, remain without equivalent in parietal art. All raise of a symbolic system that the prehistorians try to bore. According to Andre Leroi-Gourhan, in Lascaux like elsewhere, the majority of the signs of paleolithic art would be divided into two great series: a male series and a female series. They would be figurations of sexual organs initially carried out with realism but gradually transformed into sign-symbols. Among the parietal signs of the male series, one distinguishes the arrows, the harpoons, the sticks and the features; on the other hand, the oval claviformes, points and forms are signs of the female series. All these signs, generally coupled and associated with couples of animals, testify owing to the fact that parietal art is not simply an animalist art; truffle of codes and messages in which the prehistoric man registered his dualistic vision of the world, it is the product of an extremely complex thought. The theory of Leroi-Gourhan - although just and relevant - we offers a unidimensional and total semiological reading paleolithic thought. Indeed, as this author recognizes it, certain parietal signs betray social concerns - it is the case of the disjoined signs of Lascaux, which would be either of the marks of hunters, or of the badges of social groups -, whereas others - “ranges and ribbons” - remain enigmatic to date.

Dating

As a whole, in spite of their diversity, engravings, paintings and the parietal signs of Lascaux are culturally homogeneous; from one end to another of the cave, in spite of the variety of the supports and compositions, one perceives the emanations of the same design and the demonstrations of only one style. This unit of Lascaux is confirmed by the fact that the ground of the cave delivered only one archaeological layer. The material osseous and lithic found in the cave is always associated with pallets, dyes and lamps. Moreover, the study of furniture leads to the same conclusion: the parietal signs, except for the quadrangular ones, have all their equivalent in the assagais found in abundance in the cave.  

Because of this coherence, the chronology is not doubtful: Lascaux belongs to Magdalénien; the technique of the cutting up of the wood of reindeer by double sawing, just as the presence of the needle with eye or that of scalene testify some clearly. In addition, radiocarbon and palynology confirm that the blooming of Lascaux is in first half of the XV E thousand-year-old.