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ARCHAEOLOGY TARASCON, FRANCE— Jean Clottes, the eminent French prehistorian, is leading a visitor into the Grotte Niaux, a cave decorated some 13,000 years ago with delicate black sketches of bison and horses. Clottes has visited this cave hundreds of times and studied its art in depth, but as he shines his light onto the painting of a shaggy bison, his eyes are as alight with excitement as if he were a spelunker stumbling into the dark grotto for the first time. “There's always the chance of seeing something new, or seeing things in a new way,” he says, peering at the wall and tracing every crack and rocky ripple with his beam. Despite a long career in cave art, the 65-year-old Clottes has never lost an amateur's sense of wonder. He was an English teacher in a French school before becoming director of antiquities for the Midi-Pyrenees, a region that encompasses much of southern France—and some of the world's most spectacular cave art. “I never thought I'd become a professional archaeologist,” says Clottes. “And I certainly never thought that I'd do nothing but research into prehistory, which was my hobby. So all of this has been something wonderful.” Perhaps in part because of his unorthodox background, Clottes has been something of an outsider among the French scholarly elite. He works in the provinces far from the traditional hub of French archaeology in Paris, and he was paid only a token wage for his first 4 years as director of antiquities. He has never had a university or museum affiliation, working instead out of his “cave bear's den”—a cluttered basement office in his home in Foix on the edge of the Pyrenees. But over time Clottes's enthusiasm, innovative ideas, and willingness to try new methods have turned him into the consummate insider. He heads the most important cave art dig in France—some would say in the world—on the 32,000-year-old paintings at the Grotte Chauvet (see main text). He serves as scientific adviser to the French Ministry of Culture, and the fax machine in his study hums constantly with preprints and requests from around the world. Most importantly, Clottes's abiding curiosity has led him to collaborate with other leading scholars to probe the “what, when, why, how, and who” of rock art. “He's got a twinkle in his soul and a love for this stuff that is simply contagious,” says archaeologist Robson Bonnichsen of Oregon State University in Corvallis. And Clottes's “research has moved rock art into a much more scientific framework.” Thirty-five years ago, Clottes was teaching English to high school students. But to satisfy his curiosity about the past, he attended university at night to study archaeology. He was chosen for the directorship of antiquities for the Midi-Pyrenees region in 1975, while he was still working on his Ph.D.—although the job was so poorly paid he had to continue teaching at first. But he thus became responsible for overseeing the scientific exploration of some of the world's most spectacular cave art. Perhaps because of his unconventional career path, Clottes has never been afraid of taking chances, and his gambles have paid off. For example, some scientists might hesitate to touch the cave paintings, even to take small chips of paint for analyses, says Meg Conkey, an archaeologist at the University of California, Berkeley. But with Clottes, “it's always, ‘Maybe we might learn something.’” And so with the passion one brings to an avocation, Clottes has organized a host of scientific studies that have changed cave art research. In the late '80s, for example, he teamed up with Michel Menu and Philippe Walter from the Louvre Museum to analyze the pigments in paintings from Niaux and other caves. Those studies—which did require taking chips from the paintings—revealed that the ancient artists had “recipes” for mixing paints, adding various minerals to extend the pigments and to make the paintings last. Next he worked with radiocarbon specialists to date the art, yielding ages of 11,600 years to nearly 30,000 years for various caves. The dating studies also showed that artists had visited the caves many times over thousands of years. And Clottes had animal behaviorists look at paintings in Niaux and other caves; they found that the artists often painted not “symbolic” animals but individual ones that they had actually watched or hunted. “He advocated doing archaeology in the caves, trying to find out what the people were doing in them,” says Conkey. “The astonishing thing is that nobody had really asked that question before.” Yet not all of Clottes's studies are grounded in hard science. In his latest and most controversial study, he and cognitive archaeologist David Lewis-Williams of South Africa's University of Witwatersrand suggest that prehistoric artists created paintings after seeing visions in trances, much as some modern peoples practicing shamanism do. “People have speculated for years about what these might mean,” says Clottes, pointing his light at a vertical series of small red circles on the wall of Niaux. Spelunkers have told Clottes that they often see dots after spending days underground, and Clottes thinks the red and black dots “were part of [the artists'] visions, the trances they had after staying in the dark of these caves.” Not surprisingly, this idea has drawn scorn from some archaeologists and skepticism even from Clottes's backers. “I think they [Clottes and Lewis-Williams] have a somewhat narrow understanding of shamanism,” says Conkey. But Clottes is undeterred. “There are similarities between the way people in very different parts of the world go on vision quests and see animals in trances,” he says with a Gallic shrug. “I think we can then extrapolate to the Upper Paleolithic without being too fanciful.” Clottes is now piecing together the art and archaeology of the Grotte Chauvet, the biggest task of his career because the paintings are so pristine and so old. Says he: “It's a great joy understanding something a bit better. I think that's part of being human—wondering about our ancestors of 30,000 years ago.”
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