The Hands of Gargas: Toward a General Study

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Beginning in 1906, the year of Cartailhac's writing on the hands outlined in red and black in the cave of Gargas,' several articles and numerous allusions have confronted the problem raised by the 160 or so hands grouped on the cave walls. In 1952 the Abbe Breuil devoted forty lines to them in his Quartre cent sik'cles d'art pariital, summing up his point of view at that time: The majority of these hands, outlined in black or red, sometimes in white or yellow, are left hands; there are more than 150 of them, many of which appear mutilated, as if the joints of one or several fingers had been cut off.2 He adds one very important detail which does honor to his power of observation: It is certain that we have here the same hand, with the same in multiple examples. Finally, he states, is thus far the only European cave, among the approximately dozen discovered containing hands in outline, in which these mutilations appear. In 1958, upon republishing the text of Four Hundred Centuries in the Milanges J.-B. Noulet, he added a mention of the outlined hands recently discovered in the cave of Tibiran, a few hundred yards from Gargas.3 Indeed, except for Maltravieso in Estramadura, Gargas and Tibiran are the only caves in which hands with missing fingers are to be found. Gargas and Maltravieso, furthermore, differ considerably from each other. In the latter cave, all the hands uniformly lack the last two joints of the little finger, while at Gargas we find ten different forms out of the fifteen possible combinations obtainable by cutting the finger. This variety in mutilation, the grouping of hands in separate pairs, the pairs of identical hands, and the distribution of red in relation to black have gone unnoticed by writers on the subject. Assisted by Father Hours and Monsieur Brezillon, we undertook a survey of the totality of hands in their topo-