Dordogne

Montignard, Périgord, Monday 14 May 2012

Checked into Hotel le P'tit Monde, in beautiful Montignac on the River Vézère in the Dordogne region, with charming hostess and hopefully charming wifi. Yes, it works.

It's now late afternoon Tuesday 15 May and I have booked a visit to more palaeolithic paintings; this time at Pech Merle. I must be hooked.

I'm used to arriving at places by water, which is often much the best way. Driving hither I passed through towns which I had previously visited by water: the road led me to supermarkets and petrol stations but water has regularly brought Mathilde and me to the old town centre, with pretty squares, restaurants and old buildings. Boating in France is recommended.

So I came to the Dordogne Valley by road. One says valley, but from the highway the area is a plateau with scrubby vegetation, interrupted by sudden deep valleys cut by the River Dordogne and its tributaries. It looked pretty lousy hunting country for a Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon man: I didn't see a single mammoth, though I did cross some spectacular viaducts from one stretch of plateau to another.

The valleys are quite different, green and fertile, and I did see a mammoth.

This morning I visited Lascaux II, which is an incomplete but otherwise claimed accurate replica of Lascaux, a cave with a slew of paintings from around 17,000 BC. I had read about Lascaux paintings and looked at pictures in books, but there's nothing like entering a cave, even an artificial one, and seeing paintings in their true size, around and above one. No print on a flat page can equal the impression of a painting of an aurochs three or four metres long, looming above and fitted to the curves, colours and irregularities in the rock.

I prepared myself for a sort of shamanistic or religious by reciting the prayer of humble access and other such while waiting but in the event I was more struck by the beauty and impact of the paintings than by a meaning that I had read about, namely that the animals are not meant to be depictions of physical beasties but evocations of the spirit world, which is reached through the cave walls, which serves as a membrane between the two worlds. The spirit-world thesis points out that the animals generally don't seem to have their hoofs firmly on the ground but are depicted floating, as spirits would. On the contrary, I was struck by how often an individual animal or a series would be placed on a ledge, so that they did seem to have something to stand on.

There is only one depiction of a human in Lascaux—and he has a bird head. The guide made a joke of the evidence that this ithyphallic figure was obviously a man, as her torchlight travelled down his body highlighting his great big—feet, she said. One of the tourists was less subtle, asking whether his erection meant anything. Another woman in the group said, “it usually does,” which raised a laugh. But we don't know. The paintings, with their accompanying markings, evidently meant something, but we don't have the translation.

The paintings have been interpreted as relating to hunting magic, but the guide said that the diet was 95% reindeer—but this animal was never depicted. I'm prepared to stick with the spirit-world theory, though that still leaves many questions: why were the horse, the ibex, the deer (not reindeer) and the aurochs so important?

Later I went to La Roque St-Christophe, a settlement used by Neanderthals 55,000 years ago and practically everybody else since. Built into a cliff face, it is good for defence; it was fought over in the Hundred Years War (which started in 1337 but was such a success that it went on for more than a century). Sort of hobbit-holes arranged vertically.

Most attached photos are self-explanatory, but a map shows, in orange, where the ancient caves are. The other map, of waterways, has Mathilde in the bottom right, near the Mediterranean Sea.