Painted Cave
A FULL account of Rouffignac and La Guerre des Mummouths has been eagerly awaited by the English-reading public since the announcement in late July, 1956, of the discovery in the Dordogne of a cave full of paintings and engravings equalling Lascaux and Altamira. This discovery was reported by Professor Nougier of the Univer- sity of Toulouse and M. Romain Robert of Tarascon-en-Ariege, and the intrinsic excitement of their news was brought to fever pitch in the following months when a number of local archreologists and speleologists in the Dordogne declared the discoveries to be false, and the paint- ings and engravings to be forgeries done by the Maquisards and by cavers in the post-war years. This book, the translation of a French book which appeared last year, is their account of the dis- covery and the controversy about .a cave variously known as Rouffignac, Miremont, the Cro de Grandville, or the Cro du Cluzeau. I say 'their account' advisedly because so much of the book is written apparently in the first person of Profes- sor Nougier, yet elsewhere Nougier appears in the third person. To this confusion of authorship is added the fact of a poor translation, but neither confused authorship nor poor translation can be more than partly responsible for a book whose immediate, impression is of tetchiness and bad temper. This impression grows as the book pro- ceeds; our authors have done no good to their cause and their scholarly reputation by this hasty, journalistic and unkind book. We do not, fortu- nately, have in England this feeling of sharp dis- tinction between professional and amateur in archaeology that is felt in some foreign countries, but the arrogance with which Nougier and Robert speak of amateur archteologists and speleologists as 'little men,' and their sycophantic near- deification of distinguished professionals make the present reviewer squirm with rage.
Our authors now declare that they did not 'dis- cover' Rouflignac, and that the paintings were known from the sixteenth century, when Francois (lc &Deforest in 1575 describes at Miremont 'a few altars and paintings in several places, and the traces and marks of large and small animals.' They no longer deny that there are forgeries at Rouflignac and indeed direct us to 'the salsify- bison' done by Gerin with the smoke of his acetylene lamp. But they maintain that there can no longer be any dispute about the authenticity of the great majority of the paintings and engrav- ings and support their views with the expert archicological assessment of the Abbe Breuil, Professor Graziosi and Professor Almagro, the technical arguments of Professor Grasse and others, and their alleged unmasking of what they claim to be the untrue statements made by Ber- nard Pierre!, • de Faccio, William Martin and Gerin. • Roullignac is now open to the public and we may all go and see these paintings which have caused a furore in France unequalled since the times of Glozel, and the tiara of Saitaphernes. could have wished that Nougier and. Robert had given us a guide-book to the cave,, and confined their comments on .the controversy to a short, objective account of La Guerre des Manunouths. They protest so much that I am left under- persuaded, and I am still suspiciously uneasy about the many people who visited the cave and saw nothing, even if I discount, as i am now told to do, the amateurs who declared they saw the paintings grow from year to year. We are now informed that the Abbe Breuil only spent an hour in the cave in 1915, but the great E. A. Martel was there in 1893 and spent two whole days map- ping the cave. It appears that Martel wrote Fond! at the spot where we now see a frieze of rhinoc- eroses and mammoths, but why did he—or for that matter the Cambridge undergraduates who spent a long day there in 1939—not describe these paintings which. to quote our authors, 'must have been obvious to the least seeing eye' (p. 97)? Why 'did not the Perigordians, who have been looking for prehistoric painted caves for fifty years, find this cave? Because, we are told, it is a Pyrenean cave and needed expert Pyrenean archaeologists! This is an unsatisfactory, unhappy book; it is another stage in the controversy, but it does not resolve this great archaeological rontan policier.
GLYN DANIEL
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