This article was first published in Rouleur Issue 17.4
It started with a robot dog. Or a dog called Robot. Or maybe it didn't. No one is quite sure. Anyway, the details are incidental. What matters is that in September 1940, four friends, teenage boys from the village of Montignac found a newly opened hole in the ground beneath an oak tree uprooted in a storm. Depending on which version of the story you believe, the quartet was either looking for a secret underground passage, or just bumbling about in the countryside and happened upon the opening by chance.
According to yet another version of the story, one of the boys, Marcel Ravidat, had a dog called Robot who scurried into the hole, and his owner had to widen it to crawl through in pursuit.
What Ravidat discovered in the passageways beyond was to transform his life, and our understanding of prehistoric man.
The boys realised that the passageway under the tree led to something significant, and returned with oil lamps. They pushed and wriggled down through the earth, then fell into a cave. In further passages leading away from the cave, they were astonished to find hundreds, thousands, of bright, dynamic paintings. The subjects were mainly animals — horses, stags, bulls, bison — but there were also abstract symbols and a handful of human figures. Knowing the importance and beauty of what they had stumbled upon, the boys vowed to keep it a secret.
This lasted less than a week. They told a local art teacher, who estimated that they had witnessed works of art not seen by another human being for 17,000 years. During the remainder of World War II, the cave was used by the French Resistance to store weapons, then opened to the public in 1948. The caves were given individual names, the paintings recorded and studied, their origin and meanings debated. Most art historians have connected the images to hunting, either as records of successful trips, or as rituals to bring good hunting fortune.
The caves proved so popular amongst awestruck French tourists that 1200 people visited every day, and this disruption to the cave's atmosphere caused lichens and crystals to grow on its walls, endangering the vivid colours of the paintings. In 1963, the caves were shut permanently to the public and 20 years later a replica of the Lascaux Caves opened nearby. While tens of thousands of tourists gaze at replica Paleolithic paintings and engravings, in the real cave the scientists are still fighting an ongoing battle to control mould and fungus that threatens to spread across the walls.
After being sealed tight for 17,000 years by a layer of chalk, a geological quirk absent from other caves in the region, the Lascaux Caves had their delicate ecological balance upset by the intrusion of modern man, and this tragedy-in-waiting has made scientists and historians review the way we handle similar sites of historical importance. In 2009, the French Ministry of Culture gathered together experts from 17 countries at a symposium in Paris with the aim of sharing knowledge about preserving prehistoric art in subterranean environments.
Now a spectacular new visitor centre has opened, officially called Centre International d'Art Pariétal, nicknamed Lascaux 4. And the Tour de France, in its role as de facto French tourist agency, is paying a visit. The eighth stage, from Périgueux to Bergerac, runs right through Montignac-Lascaux itself, passing close to the new visitor centre, though the television producers are surely scratching their heads at how to bring to life a building that is mostly underground.
Digital technology plays a big part in the visitor experience at Lascaux 4; the curators have even created a soundtrack of Marcel Ravidat whistling for Robot, playing on speakers in the woods through which visitors approach the entrance.
One wonders whether the sprinters' teams vying for control of the peloton on the rolling Dordogne roads will hear this refrain drifting through the trees and take a moment to reflect on the role of art in society and the transitory nature of human existence?
No, I don't think so either.
