Rouffignac cave

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Rouffignac Cave , located in the territory of the French community Rouffignac-Saint-Cernin-de-Reilhac , department Dordogne , contains more than 250 petroglyphs (rock carvings) dating from the late Upper Paleolithic , probably dating from the Magdalenian . It belongs to the circle of the Franco-Cantabrian cave art .

The entrance to the Rouffignac cave

Geographical location and description of the cave

The Cave of the hundred mammoths , also known as Cave of Miremont , Cave of Cluzeau than or Cro de Granville known lies about 5 kilometers south of Rouffignac, on the right side of the valley of the brook Labinche . The bedrock of the cave is flat-lying limestone , which is very rich in chert tubers . The cave is located below a ridge that represents the watershed between Isle and Vézère .

The cave is more than 8 kilometers long and is now used for visiting purposes with a small electric train that penetrates 2 kilometers deep into the mountain along the main tunnel system. There are 10 shaft openings that lead into a lower cave floor. Strangely enough, important pictorial compositions were often attached directly to these dangerous places. Another 4 kilometers were explored from the lower floor.

history

The Rouffignac cave is mentioned as early as 1575 by François de Belleforest in his Cosmographie Universelle , in which he addresses "Paintings and animal tracks". In the 19th century it was known as a tourist attraction. Well-known archaeologists such as Henri Breuil , Glory and Martel visited it in the early 20th century , but it was still until 1956 that the rock carvings by Louis-René Nougier and Romain Robert, two prehistorians from the Pyrenees, actually did recognized and confirmed. During the Second World War , the cave was used by the Resistance as a shelter. From 1959 the cave was opened for tourist purposes.

Since 1979, the cave is in conjunction with other major sites of the Vézère Valley World Heritage Site of UNESCO .

Illustrations

Woolly mammoth and ibex

The works of art were primarily executed as scratch or black outline drawings. So far, 224 animal images and 4 human figures have been registered. The animal representations can be broken down as follows:

Of the six animal species shown, the mammoth occupies a prominent position. Woolly rhinos are also extremely common here, while they were only shown sporadically in other caves. Signs are much rarer than depictions of animals. There are 17 tectiform (house-shaped) and six serpentiform (snake-shaped) characters known. Quite often, however, so-called “fingerprints” ( French: tracé digital ) appear, macaroni or meander-like signs that cover the walls and ceilings of the cave over about 500 square meters. With a publication in 2006 it became known that 50 of these fingertip traces can be traced back to the hands of children, as a measurement of the width of the fingerprints showed. Some of these two- to three-year-old children were apparently picked up by adults while they were touching the walls. The archaeologist Dick Stapert specified the figures more precisely, insofar as 46 of the 50 traces are from two children. One of them was a two to three year old girl, the other a two to three year old boy or a five to six year old girl. The four remaining traces were made by two to four other children, who were between six and thirteen years old. In 2011 Rouffignac was therefore presented as a “Prehistoric Art School” during the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Childhood in the Past .

The paintings on the ceiling of a widened room, the Le Grand Plafond, with 63 depictions of animals alone are particularly rich . Here, too, there is a connection with a shaft opening.

Scratches from cave bears

Scratch marks on the walls underneath the human engravings testify to the presence of the cave bear , which became extinct about 25,000 years ago (before the maximum of the last ice age).

Age

No 14C data are available for the Rouffignac Cave , as no other artifacts or charcoal were found in the cave other than a blade . However, due to their stylistic classification ( style IV according to André Leroi-Gourhan ), the paintings and engravings should all date from the Magdalenian period, i.e. are at least 14,000 years old.

Excavations at the cave entrance have shown traces of human settlement from the Mesolithic ( Tardenoisia and Sauveterrien ), as well as from the Neolithic and Iron Age . Mesolithic hunters and gatherers inhabited the entrance area of ​​the cave between 9200 and 7800 BP , as evidenced by several stacked fireplaces, animal bones and stone artifacts. Geometrically shaped microliths (Rouffignac tips) were discovered from the Sauveterrien . Tombs from the Neolithic and Iron Age were found in the upper layers.

visit

The Rouffignac Cave is open from April 1st to November 1st. The number of visitors is limited to 550 people per day.

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Cave of Rouffignac  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Website of the cave (French, English)
  2. ↑ Nougier L.-R., Robert R .: Rouffignac ou La guerre des Mammouths. Paris, 1957
  3. ↑ Lothar Zotz : The rediscovery of the oddities of Rouffignac. In: Orion, Heft 3, 12, 1957, pp. 169-174
  4. ↑ Vidal, Pierre: Cavernes en Périgord. 2nd edition . 1987.
  5. ↑ K. Sharpe, L. Van Gelder: Evidence for cave marking by Palaeolithic children. In: Antiquity, Volume 80, 2006, pp. 937-947
  6. ↑ a b Dick Stapert: Finger flutings by Palaeolithic children in Rouffignac Cave: comments on a paper by Sharpe & Van Gelder. In: Antiquity, Volume 81, No. 312, 2007
  7. ↑ Finger drawings from a prehistoric preschool. In: Science , Volume 334, 2011, p. 24

Coordinates: 45 ° 0 ′ 31 ″  N , 0 ° 59 ′ 16 ″  E