The Painted Sanctuaries: A Narrative Review of Palaeolithic Cave Art, from Altamira's Controversy to the Chauvet Dates

Abstract

The painted caves are the human record's deepest sanctuaries: Altamira's bison, whose 1880 publication by Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola was twenty years dismissed as forgery; Lascaux's bulls and horses; Chauvet's lions and rhinos, whose 1995 publication and 2001 radiocarbon dates made the cave the art's oldest; the Cueva de las Manos's hands and hunts in Patagonia. This article presents a narrative review of the primary literature of that art, from Sanz de Sautuola's 1880 Breves apuntes and Leroi-Gourhan's 1965 Préhistoire de l'art occidental and Ucko and Rosenfeld's 1967 Palaeolithic Cave Art, through Chauvet, Brunet Deschamps, and Hillaire's 1995 La Grotte Chauvet, Bahn and Vertut's 1997 Journey through the Ice Age, Clottes and Lewis-Williams's 1998 The Shamans of Prehistory, Valladas and colleagues' 2001 radiocarbon, Clottes's 2001 L'art des origines, Lewis-Williams's 2002 The Mind in the Cave, Guthrie's 2005 The Nature of Paleolithic Art, Pike and colleagues' 2012 uranium-series dating, and von Petzinger's 2016 The First Signs. The synthesis is organized around three themes: the authenticity's battle, in which Altamira's acceptance set the art's legitimacy; the interpretation's schools, in which the structural, shamanic, and neuropsychological readings contested the meaning; and the dating's revolution, in which direct dates reordered the sanctuaries' chronology. It is concluded that the cave art's literature is the discipline's self-portrait—its controversies, theories, and dates—and that the sanctuaries' art, now measured, remains the human record's oldest expression.