A wonderful paleolithic art gallery, Lascaux Cave was discovered by a couple of schoolboys scrambling around the French Dordogne valley in 1940, and most likely painted between 15,000-17,000 years ago.
Lascaux Cave's vast interior contains about six hundred paintings and almost 1,500 engravings, including animals, birds and rhinoceros and bison as well as cattle and deer and horses, and hundreds of "signs", quadrilateral shapes and dots and other patterns.
Sadly, or perhaps inevitably, the beauty of Lascaux drew tremendous numbers of tourists by the late 1950s, and the traffic endangered the paintings. The cave was closed to the public in 1963. In 1983, a replica of the Hall of the Bulls was opened, and it is there that most tourists go.
The most recent research at Lascaux has been concentrated on determining pigments and painting systems. Several French studies have been completed at the CNRS, and investigations seem to show a change in pigments and level of sophistication over time.
Sources
This glossary entry is part of the About.com Guide to Cave Art and the Dictionary of Archaeology.
Chalmin, Emilie et al. 2004. Les blasons de Lascaux. L'Anthropologie 108(5):571-592
Leroi-Gourhan, Andre 1968 The evolution of Paleolithic art. Scientific American 209(2): 58-74.
Leroi-Gourhan, Andre and Sara Champion 1982 The dawn of European art: an introduction to Palaeolithic cave painting. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Vignaud, Colette et al. 2006. Le groupe des «bisons adossés» de Lascaux. Étude de la technique de l'artiste par analyse des pigments. L'Anthropologie 110(4):482-499.
