La Grande grotte - Arcy-sur-Cure (Yonne), France - Pictographs on Waymarking.com

[FR] La Grande grotte d'Arcy-sur-Cure fait partie du site des grottes d'Arcy-sur-Cure.

282 peintures y sont visibles sur les parois de salles éloignées de 300 à 500 mètres de l'entrée46 ; de nombreuses autres œuvres y sont encore cachées sous des couches de calcite et ont été repérées sur une longueur d'environ 180 m.

Des peintures pariétales de 28 000 ans, les plus anciennes actuellement connues en France après celles de la grotte Chauvet, y ont été découvertes en 1990 ; ce sont dans ce pays les plus anciennes peintures pariétales connues accessibles au public.

[EN] The caves have sheltered Neanderthals from the Middle Palaeolithic (Mousterian and Châtelperronian).

Prehistoric parietal paintings were discovered by Pierre Guilloré in April 1990 in the Great cave, protected by a thin layer of lime/calcite sediments hiding them from view.

Unfortunately, some of the paintings were destroyed by regular cleanings of the cave's walls with high-pressurized water sprays between 1976 and 1990. At the time no-one thought that under the black smoke layer – at least some of it having come from torches carried during past centuries' visits –, prehistoric paintings could exist under a thin layer of lime sediments hiding them from view.

Made on walls in cave rooms located 300 to 500 m (980 to 1,640 ft) away from the entrance, the paintings are 28,000 years old for the oldest, according to radiocarbon dating measures on charcoal remains discovered in these cave rooms in the corresponding strata. Thus they are the second oldest after the Chauvet Cave (31,000 years old), well before those of Lascaux (15,000 to 18,000 years old); but they cannot compare with the latter in their quantity, as only 160 of them have been found so far, against over 400 in the Chauvet cave and about 1,900 in that of Lascaux.

The paintings were executed with ochre and charcoal. One finds there at the same time some hands of men, women and children, and some representations of animals.

The hands are 'negative hands': they are represented by outlines and not by their surface. One knows precisely today that at least one hand was drawn with some ochre with the help of a pipette.

To represent animals, the first European Homo sapiens often chose parts of the walls of which the relief, under the torches' flickering lighting, would come out as shapes that reminded of the animals' anatomy, such as eyes or the antlers of large deer. They then used the paint sparingly, drawing only the elements that the relief did not show. Only the animals' outlines were generally represented, the inside being left entirely blank.

Here the animals' feet are often open, a feature which is characteristic to these caves. They are generally portrayed with one leg at the front and one leg at the rear. Among the most interesting paintings, one finds a mammoth drawn entirely and a prehistoric stag whose antlers could be 4 meters tall (Megaloceros giganteus), partially depicted while using reliefs in the wall. Other animals also appear among the paintings, such as bear and woolly rhinoceros.

Type of Pictograph: Rock Painting

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