Benjamin Sadier

Further constraints on the Chauvet cave artwork elaboration

Since its discovery, the Chauvet cave elaborate artwork called into question our understanding of Palaeolithic art evolution and challenged traditional chronological benchmarks [Valladas H et al. (2001) Nature 413:419–479]. Chronological approaches revealing human presences in the cavity during the Aurignacian and the Gravettian are indeed still debated on the basis of stylistic criteria [Pettitt P (2008) J Hum Evol 55:908–917]. The presented 36Cl Cosmic Ray Exposure ages demonstrate that the cliff overhanging the Chauvet cave has collapsed several times since 29 ka until the sealing of the cavity entrance prohibited access to the cave at least 21 ka ago. Remarkably agreeing with the radiocarbon dates of the human and animal occupancy, this study confirms that the Chauvet cave paintings are the oldest and the most elaborate ever discovered, challenging our current knowledge of human cognitive evolution.

Digital Tools for Managing and Promoting Karst Geosites in Southeast France

This article provides an overview of the various digital tools we have used and developed to study and promote a range of karst geosites. Our work focused on the very high heritage value endokarst sites (caves or karst networks) in France’s Ardèche département (Chauvet Cave, Aven d’Orgnac) and Chartreuse (Granier cave network), Vercors (Choranche Caves) and Bauges (Prérouge Cave) Regional Parks. These tools were developed using innovative, high-tech digital monitoring and 3D modelling technologies and combined laser scanners, digital cameras and sensors with specialised software. The resulting tools are now being used in the management and promotion of these sites, which are important territorial and heritage resources in areas where geotourism is increasing and being integrated into local planning strategies.

Engineers of the Arnhem Land plateau : Evidence for the origins and transformation of sheltered spaces at Nawarla Gabarnmang

The archaeomorphological study of Nawarla Gabarnmang in Australias Northern Territory challenges us to think in new ways about how Aboriginal people interacted with their surroundings; here a site of everyday engagement was a place of construction that retains material traces of past engagements. At Nawarla Garbarnmang, we show through archaeomorphological research how the changing physical layout of a site can be cross-examined against the impacts of human engagements through time. While the scope and scale of activities involved the anthropogenic removal over tens of thousands of years of rock pillars below the caves roof, other practices came and went over time, the complex sequence of rock art conventions being an apt example. These artistic transformations, much like the era of pillar clearances, are a clear example of changing cultural practices in a part of Australia where some 50,000 years of human occupation can be shown.The Arnhem Land plateau in northern Australia contains a particularly rich rock art assemblage. The area has a small number of large rockshelters with numerous and extensive suites of superimposed motifs (c. 2 per cent of 630 recorded shelters have >200 images). Studies of the rock art of Arnhem Land have primarily been concerned with attempting to understand the age of the art, with particular interest on the Pleistocene to mid-Holocene periods (Chaloupka 1977, 1984, 1985, 1993; Chippindale and Taçon 1993; Haskovec 1992; Lewis 1998; Taçon and Chippindale 1994). Most of these efforts have largely relied on interpretations of styles and their respective patterns of superimposition. Taçon (e.g. 1987, 1989a, 1989b, 1992) has written extensively on X-ray rock art from the northern perimeter of the plateau, and his work on ‘recent’ period art remains the most important study on this subject. The production of X-ray art has also been shown to have been popular during the European-contact period of the past 200 years or so (Chaloupka 1993; May et al. 2010; Wesley 2013). The most detailed study of rock art in the late Holocene period is the extensive radiocarbon dating of beeswax figures by Nelson et al. (2000), most of which fall within the past 500 years (but see Bednarik 2001).This chapter explores [the] incongruity in the distribution of Western-contact motifs contrasting northwestern and southwestern Arnhem Land in relation to the rich corpus of other kinds of rock art on the plateau. We stress from the onset that while images of ‘Western-contact art’ derive from a wide variety of responses to outsider influences, and include imagery that employs conventions akin and often indistinguishable to those of the pre–Western contact period, in this chapter we restrict our discussion to images of introduced objects and demonstrably foreign peoples.