Against Chauvet-nism. A critique of recent attempts to validate an early chronology for the art of Chauvet Cave

Abstract

We are in complete agreement with the new paper (2014) by Jean Combier, the foremost specialist in the Palaeolithic archaeology and imagery of the Ardeche region, and Guy Jouve, a physicist specializing in radiocarbon dating, as well as with their earlier article on this subject (Combier and Jouve, 2012). After nearly two decades of objections to the proposal that Chauvet’s black series art is Aurignacian, an honest scientific debate is surely overdue. The Chauvet research team have so far completely failed to address any of the varied problems that have been highlighted in a number of publications in peer-reviewed journals. We raise more of these here. Discovered in 1994, the >420 figurative and non-figurative images in the Chauvet Cave (Ardeche, France) constitute some of the finest examples of Upper Palaeolithic cave art known to science (Chauvet et al., 1996). The images were initially attributed on the basis of style, content and technique to the Mid and Late Upper Palaeolithic (Gravettian, Solutrean and Early Magdalenian), but the results of a very preliminary radiocarbon dating program led to the rather hasty reassignment of many of the cave’s impressive ‘black series’ charcoal drawings to the Early Upper Palaeolithic (Aurignacian). If this assessment is valid, our whole understanding of the development of more than 25,000 years of Upper Palaeolithic art would be shown to be incorrect. www.em-consulte.com Available online at www.sciencedirect.com