Discovery of Palaeolithic cave art in Britain. (Research).

Bahn, Paul ; Pettitt, Paul ; Ripoll, Sergio 等

Antiquity is pleased to present here a preliminary account of the first discovery of Palaeolithic cave art in Britain.

On 14 April 2003 we made the first discovery of Palaeolithic cave art in Britain. Since portable art of the period has long been known in this country (Sieveking 1972; Campbell 1977: vol. 2, figs 102, 105, 143), it has always seemed probable that parietal art must also have existed. We knew that we were most unlikely to discover paintings, since these are generally quite visible; but as far as we knew, nobody with a trained eye and advantageous lighting had combed the British caves in search of engravings, which are often extremely difficult to see. Such was the purpose of our initial survey and, sure enough, we rapidly encountered engraved marks in a number of caves, which we will be investigating more fully and systematically in the near future. At the well-known sites of Creswell Crags, in Derbyshire, we found both figurative and non-figurative engravings of the period. What follows is a brief, preliminary announcement of a discovery soon to be further amplified in print following systematic investigation.

This is third time lucky for British cave art, following two false alarms. In 1912 the abbe Henri Breuil and W. J. Sollas claimed that ten wide, red, parallel horizontal painted stripes under calcite in the Welsh coastal cave of Bacon Hole (east of Paviland) were 'the first example in Great Britain of prehistoric cave painting' (see The Times 14 October 1912: 10; Sollas 1924: 530-31; Garrod 1926: 70); but Breuil later stated (1952: 25) that their age could not be fixed. Subsequently, these marks rapidly faded, and are now thought to have been natural or to have been left by a nineteenth-century sailor cleaning his paint brush (Garrod, ibid.; Houlder 1974: 159; Daniel 1981: 81, Morgan, W.L. 1913).

In 1981 the Illustrated London News rashly published--without verification of any kind--an 'exclusive' claiming the discovery of Palaeolithic animal engravings in the small cave of Symonds Yat in the Wye Valley (Rogers et al. 1981; Rogers 1981). Subsequent investigation showed that the marks were entirely natural, and that the claim was groundless (Daniel 1981: 81-82; Sieveking 1981, 1982; and for a grudging retraction, The Illustrated London News, May 1981: 24).

In the case of our own discoveries, there should be no doubt either of their existence or of their great age. The most notable figures have been encountered in Church Hole cave, Creswell Crags. It contained Pleistocene and Holocene deposits reaching almost up to its roof, albeit irregularly, which were excavated in the 1870s by the Reverend J. Magens Mello and Sir William Boyd Dawkins. These contained Late Glacial archaeology that was termed 'Creswellian' by Garrod in 1926, and for which several radiocarbon dates place the Creswellian occupation between c. 12000 and 12500 BP (e.g. Mello 1877; Campbell 1977; Jacobi 1991). We included Church Hole in our preliminary survey because of this known presence of Late Glacial archaeology.

For the moment we have identified two areas of incised figures in this cave. The first is about 3.5 metres above the present floor. Here is a figure which in our very preliminary interpretation is that of a male caprid, possibly an ibex, facing left, and slightly inclined downwards at the front (Figure 1). It measures 57.2 cm in length from the muzzle to the rump, and 40.4 cm in height from the extremity of the horn to the end of the front leg. It is represented in semi-twisted perspective, that is, both horns are depicted, but only one of the rest of the paired elements--i.e. legs, ears and eyes--is drawn. There may be some interior markings, but until we carry out a more detailed analysis these may correspond to another figure underneath. The groove of the incision is totally patinated, and relatively narrow (about 3-5 mm) and shallow (less than 5 mm), and U-shaped in section.

In a second area, located farther inside, we found two other incised figures which are harder to read. These may possibly be two birds--one has only its head depicted, together with a very elongated neck which leads us to think it might be a crane or a swan. The outline of the one on the left, with a very elongated subtriangular tail, and a head with a curved beak, points to some kind of bird of prey. The dimensions of these images are about 30 cm in height and 32 cm in length, with a groove of about 3-4 mm in depth, with a U-section and totally patinated.

It is somewhat premature to seek parallels, but stylistically all these figures could be placed in Leroi-Gourhan's Style IV. Our preliminary interpretation of the caprid figure is that of an ibex, even though no unequivocal ibex remains have been found among the very rich faunal remains known for Late Glacial Britain. Several factors such as its style and technique make us certain of its age, but there are additional corroborative points which should be emphasised: The figure lies beneath graffiti, some of which date to 1948; and the very marked difference in patination and sharpness between the dark figure and the bright graffiti makes it obvious that the image is far older than the writing. The figure also has calcite on top of part of it. Forgeries of Palaeolithic cave art, as opposed to portable art, are extremely rare (Bahn & Vertut 1997: 80-83); all have occurred in regions (such as N. Spain) where one might expect cave art to turn up, and most of the few examples known postdate 1948. Besides, what would be the point of making such a fake if it was not to be discovered for many decades? If it were an ibex, this would be an odd choice for a modern forger. In the British Palaeolithic, the only known animal figure (on a bone from Robin Hood's Cave, also at Creswell Crags) is a horsehead, so one might expect a forger to engrave a horse. Since no clear examples of ibex are known from the UK either in the Pleistocene or Holocene it would be equally unlikely to feature in late prehistory, or the Medieval period.

Our initial estimate based on style would place this figure at around 12500-12000 BP, i.e. in the Creswellian (which is well represented at Creswell). Our discovery therefore places Britain at last on the distribution map of Palaeolithic parietal art--hitherto, the northernmost example was the cave of Gouy near Rouen, but Church Hole is about 280 miles (448 km) farther north--and it also confirms the great importance of the Creswell Crags sites to the British Palaeolithic. Indeed, all of the known figurative art of this period in Britain--the above-mentioned horse-head from Robin Hood's Cave, the anthropomorph from Pin Hole Cave, and now our discoveries--have been found at Creswell.

If our preliminary interpretation proves valid, the identification of an ibex is of great potential interest. Given the environmental preference of modern ibex, e.g. steep crags in high mountain regions, perhaps the species was, at least on occasion, established in the Creswell area in the Late Pleistocene. It must be said, however, that no clearly identified remains of ibex have been recovered from the Creswell caves (e.g. Jenkinson 1984). Although Campbell (1977) lists one possible ibex identification among the fauna from Robin Hood's Cave, this is an upper left M1 that is indistinguishable from goat/sheep according to Charles & Jacobi (1994) who suggest that the latter is the more likely identification. Small numbers of ibex remains were recovered from the Belgian late Magdalenian of the Trou de Chaleux (Cordy 1974; Pathou-Mathis 1994; Charles 1998) and Bois Laiterie (Gautier 1997), and from Late Glacial Interstadial Federmessergruppen site of Niederbeiber, and the Younger Dryas Ahrensburgian site of Kartstein III, both in the Neuwied Basin, Germany (Turner 1990; Street 1998; Street & Baales 1999). It seems therefore that while ibex were common in southwest Europe and known in small numbers in northwest Europe, no clear examples are known from the UK (Charles 1998). While the depiction of an ibex in the Church Hole cave may therefore reflect a 'sighting' of the species in the UK, perhaps it is more probable that it was seen on the continent, e.g. Belgium. Given the general archaeological links between the UK and northern European continent in the Late Glacial Interstadial (e.g. Charles 1999), perhaps this is not surprising.

Received: 25 April 2003; accepted: 25 April 2003

Acknowlegements

The authors would like to thank Dr Gesine Reinert for invaluable help with the survey. The project in its final form was organised at the Keble College founders and benefactors feast, Oxford, November 2002.

Paul Bahn (1), Paul Pettitt (2) & Sergio Ripoll (3)

(1) 428 Anlaby Road, Hull HU3 6QP (Email:pgbahn@anlabyrd.karoo.co.uk)

(2) Keble College, Oxford OX1 3PG (Email: paul.pettitt@keble.oxford.ac.uk)

(3) Depto. de Prehistoria e Historia Antigua, UNED, Apdo Correos 60.147, 28080 Madrid, Spain. (Email: sripoll@geo.uned.es)

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