Chauvet Cave: The Art of Earliest Times by Jean Clottes (Director), Paul Bahn (Translator), Paul G. Bahn (Translator), Paul G. Bahn (Translator)

From the Publisher

"The discovery of the Chauvet Cave in France's Ardeche Valley in December 1994 by speleologists Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel, and Christian Hillaire was a remarkable event. The incredible age of the cave paintings, which dated back 35,000 years, and their exceptionally high quality were the source of both astonishment and admiration. No other major site exists that is as close in age to the arrival of modern humans in Europe." "Several years ago, a team of specialists from many different disciplines, led by Jean Clottes, began the first detailed scientific study of the cave. The cave has slowly revealed many of the secrets of its origins: its dating, the traces left by animals and humans, the artistic techniques that were used, and the themes of the paintings and engravings." All of these discoveries are published together here for the first time, accompanied by hundreds of color illustrations that allow the public to share not only this new knowledge but also the thrill and fascination of looking into the deep time of an ancient world.

The New Yorker

It’s a torture chamber, I think, a too-small casket tilted foot-up and you’re the one inside,” Barbara Hurd writes in Entering the Stone. Hurd, a caver for the past ten years, describes the difficulty of crawling through narrow subterranean passageways, called “flatteners” or “squeezes.” While tourists visit “show caves” like Howe Caverns in upstate New York, Hurd seeks out the more adventurous “wild” caves, and finds herself “trying to memorize escape” from them. In a marble cave in Oregon, she stops to press her hand into a wall of moonmilk, a calcite deposit with a cream-cheese consistency. But cavers are careful to leave the underground environment much as they found it. Despite collapsed rocks, fossilized bones, and the occasional piece of litter, wild caves may be among the cleanest places on earth.

Library Journal

When Jean-Marie Chauvet and his team of speleologists investigated a hillside draft in the Ardeche region of southeastern France in 1994, they discovered one of the greatest archaeological finds of all time-a series of caves rife with decorated walls, ancient human footprints, and animal remains that had been essentially untouched for tens of thousands of years. The French government chose a team headed by Clottes (World Rock Art; The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves) to expand on the earliest investigations, and this book documents the first three years of their study at the site. They take a multidisciplinary approach, examining all aspects of the caves' artifacts while preserving them for future study. The amazing discoveries include the earliest human art ever found-not casual graffiti but complex, deliberate, and sophisticated art that uses the morphology of the caves to achieve specific effects. The site is not open to the public, but Clottes and his team have created here a detailed, beautifully photographed record of major portions of the caves. Highly recommended.-Mary Morgan Smith, Northland P.L., Pittsburgh Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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