Masques et mascarades à Font-de-Gaume (Les Eyzies, Dordogne). Réflexions préliminaires sur une mystérieuse assemblée

Abstract

The Font-de-Gaume cave lies at an altitude of 120 m in a massif of Coniacian sandstone, on the left bank of the Beune valley, about 1 km upstream from Les Eyzies (Dordogne). The cave, known for many years, was officially discovered on 12th September 1901 by Denis Peyrony, and became famous for its numerous figurative and abstract representations engraved, drawn and painted, sometimes in polychrome. Along with the Combarelles cave, discovered a few days earlier, it contributed to the definitive and unanimous recognition of the Palaeolithic age of cave art. In 1910, Louis Capitan, Henri Breuil and Denis Peyrony published a masterly monograph that is still an essential reference and a working tool. The Font-de-Gaume cave has been the subject of numerous academic studies and expert reports on its conservation and climatology. Since 2020, a new interdisciplinary research programme, led by the author, has been underway in the cave. It is part of the broadest possible archaeological approach, involving a transdisciplinary approach. Using recent analytical methods, the cave's parietal art is apprehended in the diversity of its physical, environmental, taphonomic and archaeological contexts. The result is a significant renewal of data at several levels. The corpus of parietal representations, for example, has been considerably updated, rising from 200 graphic entities, approximately counted in 1910, to almost 800 according to the latest inventories, which are still incomplete, as the research programme has not yet been completed. Among the new figurative representations discovered and recorded during our programme of systematic wall surveys, we present in this article around fifty masks that are all original creations, assemblages of cursive graphics and the natural forms of the supports that result in curious heads, without graphic outlines, confusedly human and/or animal. These pages describe the masks placed on stalactites and calcite columns in two rarely-visited galleries in the cave (the Prat gallery and the deep part of the side gallery), which are off the beaten track for tourists, and look at their status and function, opening up questions of otherness.