dAf 85
LORBLANCHET Michel
La grotte ornée de Pergouset (Saint-Géry, Lot)
Un sanctuaire secret paléolithique
The cave of Pergouset, a narrow cavity inundated by the floods of the River Lot, is an archetypal "secret sanctuary", decorated with 153 magdalenian engravings. Ten years of excavation and multidisciplinary studies have made it possible to analyse the traces of occupation left in the cave 's fiIl, and to investigate the parietal motifs which, in addition to naturalistic animal depictions, include a dozen "monsters" and some human figures, which pose the question of a mythology concerning the origins of the world.
Abstract
Abstract
1 The Cave
The cave of Pergouset was discovered in February 1964 by J.-G. Astruc, C. Brillant, G. & M.-T. Maury, C. Milhas and the abbé Terret, all members of the Quercy Spelaeological Group. It has now been the subject of a ten-year multidisciplinary study, the results of which are presented in this monograph.
Located on the bank of the River Lot, in the commune of Saint-Géry (Lot), it comprises a single, very narrow passage, 190 m long, which ends in a crawlway leading to a small underground watercourse. This constitutes the upper gallery and overflow of this subterranean stream.
The areas decorated with parietal engravings are small chambers in which one can only sit. The deep part, on the other hand, is more spacious. A series of sixteen test-pits have made it possible to study the cave’s fill. The sediments are mostly clay and silt, often finely laminated, which were laid down by the underground river and the Lot. They are several metres thick at the entrance, and 1 to 2.5 m thick in the deep galleries where the engravings are located.
The cave is regularly inundated in winter when the Lot floods: the same phenomenon occurred throughout the past, and even in the Palaeolithic.
The test-pits, together with cleaning of the bottom of the walls covered by flood silts, have not revealed a single parietal engraving buried beneath the fill.
In the entrance zone, the test-pits brought to light the importance of the medieval occupation, probably related to exploitation of the river’s resources (fisheries). No palaeolithic layer was discovered.
The few small bits of charcoal produced by excavations in the zones decorated with engravings (chamber II) date to a recent period, probably medieval. They seem to have been brought in by the waters of the Lot during an exceptional flood. The interior zones explored by the other test-pits proved to be archaeologically sterile. The only possible evidence of a palaeolithic presence at the base of the decorated wall was discovered in chamber IV. It was a piece of wood charcoal that lay on a rocky ledge and was covered by five centimetres of silt; it has been dated to 32,850 ± 520 BP (Gif A96675), but does not seem to have any relationship with the engravings, all of which are very probably magdalenian. Palaeolithic visits to the cave at the time when the engravings were produced must have been unobtrusive and of short duration, since no evidence has been found in the sediments despite a systematic search, including microscopic examinations.
Geological (J.-G. Astruc), sedimentological (C. Ferrier), palynological (F. Diot), anthracological (J.-L. Vernet) and ichthyological (O. Le Gall) studies, as well as the anthropological analysis of the human remains discovered in the entrance (M. Escola) have contributed a variety of information that completes the data from the test-pits and makes it possible to understand the site’s evolution as well as its utilisation by people through time.
If one takes into account the general location of the engravings above the flood levels visible in the cave’s different sectors, and also the results of the test-pits and all the scientific analyses, then all of the work carried out enables one to claim that, at the time when the engravings were made, the cave floor was more or less at today’s level.
Almost all the engravings are placed in locations and at the height where an engraver would put them today. So the antiquity of most of the fill, its present stability and its archaeological sterility are definite facts. Even if one accepts the hypothetical existence of a recent deposit of a few centimetres in various sectors of the gallery, the cave’s topographic permanence is now well established. In answer to the question that our research posed from the start, it is now possible to affirm that Pergouset in the Palaeolithic was indeed a narrow cave, more or less as narrow as today, that contained a sanctuary which was difficult to reach.
2 The parietal motifs
153 parietal motifs, mostly engraved but with a few painted examples, have been counted and traced. The deep part of the cave conceals schematic or indeterminate motifs, and an exceptional series of a dozen monsters which are highly original in character; on the other hand, in the middle part and towards the beginning of the sanctuary, the figures become increasingly precise and detailed: some motifs such as a doe, a bison or the ibex on the first panel are among the most realistic depictions in Quaternary art.
Pergouset’s originality also lies in the presence of sexual figures: a clearly sexed headless man, and three vulvas distributed along the whole length of the gallery.
Dominated by horses, ibex and reindeer, this assemblage can reasonably be attributed to the Middle or Upper Magdalenian through its associations of themes, and the converging series of graphic conventions (anatomical precision, separation of planes, representation of the coat, herringbone mane, animated silhouettes, etc.) and geometric signs (angular signs, zigzags, grids, comet...) also argue in favour of the Magdalenian; however, there is no possibility at all of verifying this through radiocarbon dating. Pergouset is one of the European palaeolithic caves of medium importance, but is one of the richer caves in Quercy that belong to the second regional group which we earlier baptised the “Sainte-Eulalie-Murat group”, of the Middle and Upper Magdalenian.
3 A secret sanctuary
The multidisciplinary study of the site has shown that Pergouset represents a veritable archetype of what one can call a “secret sanctuary” reserved for one or two officiants or just a few “initiates”, and quite different from the great public sanctuaries whose regional typesite is the cave of Pech-Merle, aptly baptised a “Temple-Cave” by A. Lemozi.
Some aspects of the technology of the drawings, and especially the dynamic distribution of themes, underline the homogeneity of Pergouset’s parietal layout and the existence of a veritable scenario that unfolds in the depths of the gallery. The figures become more and more numerous and increasingly realistic from the back to the beginning of the sanctuary.
The three vulvas feminise the surrounding subterranean universe. The engravings animate the cave in a spectacular fashion; they seem to spring out of the rocky reliefs. All of the observations made in the course of this long investigation suggest that, for the Magdalenians, the cave itself seems to have played an important symbolic role in relation to the appearance of life in the bowels of the Earth, that is, to a mythology of the origin of the world.
