To round off our 2019 France trip, we paid a visit to the caves of Arcy-sur-Cure in the Yonne dept. (north-central France). We booked a tour to see the cave paintings in the Grande Grotte, which boasts some of the oldest cave art (28,000 years) after Chauvet cave in the south (31-35,000 years).
The entire area is rich in geological and archaeological history, and the site at Arcy-sur-Cure has an impressive prehistoric reputation; alongside the Palaeolithic cave paintings in the Great Cave, there is also evidence of Neanderthal occupation in the other caves, and fossil remains of prehistoric animals. The caves themselves have been sculpted for millions of years by the action of water.
The outside of the cave had a small visitor’s centre and car park; the cave entrance was a long, low opening, fenced off. The tour consisted of around 12 of us and a guide, who very kindly offered to do some parts of the tour in English.
We saw a bat in the entrance of the cave behind the metal fence, probably a Greater Horseshoe Bat / Grand rhinolophe (Rhinolophus ferrumequinum); since people have been visiting the cave and the inside has been permanently lit, the bats have left the main cave. However, the bats have set up large colonies in the surrounding caves and tunnels, some of which have been permanently grated a few metres inside to prevent people from accessing it, keeping the environment undisturbed for them. I thought this was a good trade-off for the bats – private luxury accommodation!
We couldn’t take any pictures inside the caves themselves because the land the cave is privately-owned (though I believe you can contact the landowner in advance to ask permission), but the Grande Grotte has a fascinating and turbulent history that makes this action necessary.
The large cave consists of several ‘rooms’ connected by narrow tunnels, and then a series of intact cave paintings in the end chamber, on an angled flat relief. It was discovered in the 19th century, and used for supplying ‘fake stalagmites’ for the rich, who wanted to create novelty fake grottoes on their properties. There was a lot of foot traffic to the cave in the century or so after it was discovered and the walls became blackened with smoke, so in order to combat this the cave interior was washed in the 1990s with a pressurised hose, which undoubtedly removed some of the prehistoric artwork underneath.
One of the chambers in the cave was very large, somewhat resembling a church. I believe this is the chamber referred to as the ‘Virgin’s room’ with some spectacular calcite deposits resembling crosses and other features; one humped block of stone was referred to as ‘the organ’, and the whole setup did indeed eerily resemble the interior of a cathedral. If I had been an early explorer of this cave in the 1800s armed with only a low-powered light source, I would definitely have been inclined to believe that this place had a powerful religious feel to it.
The cave paintings themselves were located at the very back of the cave, around 500 metres in. They were lit by a few LED floodlights and were roped off, so visitors couldn’t touch them or get too close. It was a peculiar frieze, with several animals together in a comparatively small area compared to the surfaces in the rest of the cave. I remember a few mammoths (one with a small animal beside it that I thought looked like a pecking bird), some strange signs of obscure representation, and a magnificent Megaloceros, which was partially drawn using the relief of the rock, which created his magnificent antlers using the shape and shadow of the rock above. I only have those features represented in my field notebook, though the caves also contain depictions of bears, fish, rhinoceros, felines, horses, and more. I thought that one little sign on the ceiling strongly resembled a sleeping bat or a beetle in flight, but didn't get enough of a look to make any confident assumptions.
We were told by our guide that there were more paintings, some of which we could see as we walked, including handprints and other ochre-coloured signs, still covered by a calcite layer. These were remaining that way until technology became available that could let people see them without causing damage (the small frieze of exposed paintings had been originally uncovered using a dentist’s drill).
Following the conclusion of the official tour, we had a short walk around some of the other caves, which were situated alongside the Cure river. Many of the caves were fairly large, with wide entrances and a little bit of walking space inside. Several also had parts fenced off, and a brief shine anywhere in the cave illuminated groups of sleeping bats, as well as Cave Spiders (Meta menardi). We didn’t stay long in any of the caves for fear of disturbing the bats, but it was interesting to see nonetheless. Movement in the water of the river transpired to be from Coypu (Myocastor coypus), a South American native which has been accidentally introduced to much of Europe.
This was my first experience seeing cave paintings, and it was definitely a moving and slightly unsettling sight; the dark at the end of the cave behind the paintings was heavy, and it seemed to make the shapes of the animals on the wall stand out. In flickering firelight, they would almost certainly have moved, such as the stag’s shadowed antlers on the cave wall. It was fantastic to have been able to see in person something as ancestral and somehow personal as a cave painting, and to stand where somebody else had stood 28,000 years previously, daubing pigment on the walls.
Further reading:
Movius, H. L. (1969). The Châtelperronian in French Archaeology: the Evidence of Arcy-sur-Cure. Antiquity, 43(170), 111–123.
Bahn, P.G. (1999) Some new depictions of mammoths in ice age art – in: Haynes, G., Klimowicz, J. & Reumer, J.W.F. (eds.) – Mammoths and the Mammoth Fauna: Studies of an Extinct Ecosystem – Deinsea 6 (39-42)