Bara-Bahau

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Bara-Bahau

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Location: Dordogne , Nouvelle-Aquitaine , France
Geographic
location: 		44 ° 55 '27 "  N , 0 ° 55' 19"  E Coordinates: 44 ° 55 '27 "  N , 0 ° 55' 19"  E
Bara-Bahau (Dordogne)
Bara-Bahau
Geology: Campanium 3
Type: Collapse cave
Overall length: 90 m
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Bara-Bahau is a cave in the French commune of Le Bugue in the Dordogne department . It contains incised drawings from the Upper Paleolithic .

etymology

Bara-Bahau, derived from the Occitan Bara-Baou (pronounced Baraba-u), is a phonetic word that can be rendered in German as krachbums or kawumm . This refers to the thud that was produced when the roof of the cave collapsed. Bara-Bahau is sometimes referred to as Grotte de la Cocagne , from the French cocagne meaning land of plenty , as it was popular with the locals as a picnic spot.

Geography, geology and description of the cave

The Bara-Bahau cave is located on the right side of the valley of the Ladouch , a small right-hand tributary of the Vézère , just under 1 kilometer northwest of Le Bugue. It is the most south-westerly of the prehistoric caves in the Vézère Valley.

Bara-Bahau was formed in the marly limestone of Campanium 3 . The cave opens 70 meters above the valley floor on the slope of a hill and is about 90 meters long. It can reach a height of 3 to 12 meters, its width varies between 8 and 25 meters. Two sections can be distinguished: a quite large entrance portal, connected via a corridor to the hall called Rotonde , in which the engravings are located. During the rainy season in the winter months, a small watercourse sometimes flows at low points in the corridor. Shortly before reaching the rotonde in the most remote part of the cave, the fallen boulders are encountered, which gave the cave its name.

history

The entrance area of ​​the cave has been known since ancient times. The deep rear part of the cave was only discovered in 1951 by the famous French speleologist Norbert Casteret and his daughter Maud. It was also Maud who first noticed the incised drawings. In the same year Henri Breuil confirmed the discovery, and in 1955 André Glory made an inventory. Between 1986 and 1987 Brigitte and Gilles Delluc subjected the images to a scientific investigation.

Illustrations

There are a total of 26 images in Bara-Bahau. They were placed in three rows in a single panel, on the ceiling above the left wall. The Cretaceous limestone is very soft and contains many Flint - concretions . It is therefore particularly suitable for scratch drawings. The figures can be divided as follows:

  • 16 depictions of animals
  • 6 characters
  • 2 human representations

The animal representations, some of which are very large, include wild horses (55% of the animal representations), cattle ( aurochs and bison - 25% of the animal representations), a bear , a deer-like (possibly a reindeer ) and an ibex .

The characters consist of square shapes (tectiforms), sticks, fingerprints (“Makaronis”) and others.

A carved hand negative and a phallus act as human representations .

Archaeological context

During work on the two halls, only a few stone artefacts (blades from the Aurignacia ) were discovered in the soil deposits .

Geological exploratory work at the cave entrance revealed further stone artifacts from the Aurignacia (period 36,000 to 27,000 years BC), including scrapers .

The cave was also visited by cave bears ( Ursus spelaeus ), as numerous bone finds in the floor of the second room and deep scratches clearly show. These scratch marks sometimes make it very difficult to see the actual representations.

Age

Absolute age dates are missing in Bara-Bahau. Because of the artifacts found, the cave had long been considered to come from the Aurignacia. André Leroi-Gourhan assigned the representations (mainly because of the tectiform signs) to the transition from Style III to Style IV , corresponding to the period from the Old to Middle Magdalenian . This classification is still generally recognized today.

Visit the cave

A great deal of work has been done in the cave to make the engravings easier to access. For example, the corridor was leveled, the floor below the illustrations was lowered, and lighting, stairs and ramps were installed. So-called negatoscopes are also made available to visitors so that they can take a closer look at the images .

In contrast to Lascaux , Bara-Bahau has no problems with the conservation of his works of art. After all, the cave takes in more than 10,000 visitors a year.

Bara-Bahau has been a Monument historique since 1961 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Aujoulat, Norbert & Dauriac, Nicole: Bara-Bahau . In: L'art des Cavernes . 1964, ISBN 2-11-080817-9 , pp. 92-95 .

literature

  • Aujoulat, Norbert & Dauriac, Nicole: Bara-Bahau . In: L'art des Cavernes . 1984, ISBN 2-11-080817-9 , pp. 92-95 .
  • Aujoulat, Norbert, Geneste, Jean-Michel, Roussot, Alain & Rigaud, Jean-Philippe: La Vézère des origines, sites préhistoriques, grottes ornées et musées' . Imprimerie nationale, Paris 1991, p. 141 .
  • Bergounioux F.-M .: Interpretation géologique de la grotte de Bara-Bahau . In: Bulletin de la Société historique et archéologique du Périgord . tape 87 , 1960, pp. 105-109 .
  • Bertrand, Pierre-Lucien: La caverne de Bara-Bahau . PLB éd., Collection Fleur de lys, Le Bugue 2000, p. 22 .
  • Delluc, Brigitte & Delluc, Gilles: Grotte de Bara-Bahau (Le Bugue, Dordogne). Travaux 1986-1987 . In: Bulletin de la Société historique et archéologique du Périgord . tape 114, 4 , 1987, pp. 283-295 .
  • Delluc, Brigitte, Delluc Gilles & Guichard, Francis: La grotte ornée de Bara-Bahau (Le Bugue). Géologie et Préhistoire . In: Bulletin de la Société historique et archéologique du Périgord . tape 124, 1 , 1997, pp. 31-62 .
  • Delluc, Brigitte & Delluc, Gilles: Les gravures de la grotte ornée de Bara Bahau . In: Gallia-Préhistoire . tape 39 , 1997, pp. 109-150 .
  • Leroi-Gourhan, André: Bara-Bahau . In: Dictionnaire de la préhistoire (Leroi-Gourhan dir.), 2ème édition . 2005, ISBN 2-13-054544-0 , pp. 112 .

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