ABSTRACT

A few years ago I attended a small rock art conference in South Africa, which focused almost exclusively on the rich and complex rock art repertoire of that country. One evening, we took our boxes of wine back to the conference room to watch videos, including a recently released video about Lascaux—the famous painted Ice Age cave in southwestern France—a video that had been made as part of the commemoration of the 50 years’ celebration of Lascaux’s discovery in 1940. After the video, my South African colleague—and perhaps one of the most important voices in rock art research today—David Lewis-Williams, asked me to say a few things about the current state of research in Paleolithic art. The room went hush, and I was struck by the rapt attention to, if not veneration of, the topic. As David pointed out later, I could have gone on and on…What is it that has generated such awe and interest, such engagement in and mystique of these few hundred caves and rock-shelters, clustered in what is today southern France and northern Spain? Having just spent almost four weeks traipsing about in some of the most magnificent countryside I have ever been in, observing only a handful of what must be more than 100,000 painted rock art sites in South Africa, I was perplexed that for these researchers there was still such reverence for the “decorated” caves of Ice Age Europe.