Rouffignac  - a recommended visit.

The Rouffignac cave, situated in the French Dordogne, contains over 250 engravings and cave paintings, dating back to the Upper Paleolithic. Rouffignac Cave, also known as The Cave of the Hundred Mammoths, has the most extensive cave system of the Perigord with more than 8 kilometers of underground passage ways, formed during the Pliocene 3 to 2 million years ago.

During the Second World War the cave had served as a hide-out for the French Resistance. In 1959 the cave was officially opened for visitors. In conjunction with other caves and abris, or shelters, of the Vezere valley, the Rouffignac cave was classified a Monument Historique in 1957 and a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1979.

It is an impressive cave - vast and slowly descending, and in the ambient light the size of a motorway tunnel, smoothly sculpted by water over deep time. Majestic intermittent panels of black drawings and engravings gradually move from the walls to the ceiling as the height of the cave decreases, whilst on the floor there are tessellating hollows of cave bear pits once used for hibernation, until the end of the cave is finally reached, where a dizzying display of drawings including woolly rhinoceroses, mammoths, horses and ibex adorns the ceiling; a prehistoric Sistine Chapel. Like Michelangelo, these would have been drawn by the Palaeolithic artists lying down.

The artistic representations, unlike those of Lascaux and Font-de-Gaume in this region, are monochrome rather than polychrome, mainly executed as engravings or black contour drawings. Documentation reveals 224 animal representations and 4 human figures; 158 mammoths, 70% of all represented animals, 28 bisons, 15 horses, 12 ibex, 10 woolly rhinoceros and 1 cave bear. 

There are also symbols; 17 tectiform and 6 serpentiform. There are also finger flutings. Most of the flutings are thought to have been made by children, some as young as three years old.

And the cave bears scratched the walls, unaware of the art, yet strangely enhancing the art.

Dating the rock art has not been based on the very few artefacts or occupation traces, but on 'style': from the Magdalenian culture, some 13,000 years BP. And then Rouffignac was occupied through the Mesolithic, the Neolithic and the Iron Age.

The Rouffignac cave is open to the public between April 1 and November 1. The number of visitors is restricted per day.

Visit our France Rock Art Archive:

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/france/index.php

Visit Rouffignac:

http://www.grottederouffignac.fr/