Chauvet Cave Virtual Tour

by Paula Johanson

Are you interested in studying the lives of people from the Stone Age? Whether you're a scientist or just interested in learning something about archaeology, there are LOTS of ways to study the traces left by these people and their lives.

The best one I've found this week is a virtual tour of a cave in France called Chauvet. It's near the famous Lascaux cave, and like Lascaux it has astonishing images painted on the walls. Chauvet cave was closed off by a landslide thousands of years ago, so the images are well-preserved and undisturbed.

Take some time to go to this link at https://archeologie.culture.fr/chauvet/en to see a very detailed website. There's a menu tab on the left, that leads to a list of many short articles. There are details on the discovery of the cave, this region in France, replicas of the art, as well as a bibliography and glossary.

But if you can take yourself away from all these resources, the primary reason to go to this website is to take a virtual tour of Chauvet cave! On the walls of this cave are drawings in black or red, showing animals and scenes and markings drawn by people many thousands of years ago. Some marks are smudgy, some are precise, and all are interesting.

There is also a terrific website about archaeology, by the Bradshaw Foundation. Their section on Chauvet cave has many images and descriptions of the cave art.

Because Lascaux cave has been damaged by light, dust, and the breath of visitors, scientists have declared that Chauvet cave will be visited only by a very few experts. Each year only a handful of people enter the cave, to preserve the site. This virtual tour is available to everyone.

If you want to learn more about Chauvet cave and archaelogy, there are books available at your public library. That's where I found all three of these books on cave art that were recommended by the Bradshaw Foundation. Though these books are intended for adults, there's no reason a child can't look through the beautifully clear photographs and read a little here and there, especially with an adult. My own book The Paleolithic Revolution is a good choice for the first book to read on the lives of these long-ago humans, and it is a book well-suited to young people or to adults who are new to this topic.

Another way to tour Chauvet cave is to watch a Werner von Herzog film called Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Here's a link to the Wikipedia page on this amazing movie, directed by an award-winning film maker. The director was given permission to film inside the cave, using 3D techniques, which show something that photographs in books cannot show.

The paintings are not made on flat walls, but on surfaces that change how the drawings look. When an animal was drawn, the bumps and hollows on the wall filled out the shape or can change how it is seen. A light held in one hand can be moved to make the shadows change.

When the film was first released in 2010 I watched it in a theatre. The 3D effect of some scenes in this film makes me a little dizzy after a while, because I have an inner-ear problem. My husband had no trouble with dizziness, but he didn't know what the cave paintings looked like, so I found him a book and THEN he knew what he was seeing in the film. We have since then watched the film again, using our computers; bigger screens instead of tablets are worth it for this film!

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is available on Netflix. If you search in Google you can find excerpts from the film on YouTube and the entire film is available on DVD. Ask at your library or buy a copy.

My advice? First, look through this virtual tour of the cave. Then explore the Bradshaw website images or get a book with the cave paintings, like Chauvet Cave: The Art of Forgotten Times by Jean Clottes -- or something similar. I found books at the library! Then watch Cave of Forgotten Dreams on a big screen TV. Amazing.