The figurative component of European Palaeolithic cave art may be divided into fourteen main motifs. A data base consisting of 416 polythematic panels (from two to six different themes) was collected and analysed from a statistical and structural point of view. Factor Analysis and Ascending Hierarchical Classification led to a partition into five classes, one of which is hierarchically dominating (horse, bison, ibex). Using these five classes it was found that only a very small number of the possible combinations have been produced. Moreover, they constitute such a regular pattern that the hypothesis of a random distribution appears highly improbable. A very simple model consisting of a few rewriting rules accounts for the thematic composition of 98% of the Palaeolithic cave art figurative productions. The consistency of the applied structural constraints shows that the inter-thematic associations were governed by semantic choices which remained relatively stable during Upper Palaeolithic in western Europe. A social organisation based on independent, but closely related groups may explain both the stability of the structural principles shown by this work and the regional and chronological diversity of Palaeolithic cave art.
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