Conciliate Rock Art, Archaeology and Geology in the Study of Decorated Caves: The Case of Saint-Front Cave (Or Mammoth’s Cave, Domme) and Few Other Caverns From Dordogne (France)

Abstract

French South-West, especially the Dordogne region, is one of the richest European area of Palaeolithic sites, whether for human dwelling (including epony-mous and very famous sites like La Madeleine) as for Upper Palaeolithic rock art (of which Lascaux cave, Rouffignac cave, Font-de-Gaume cave, etc.). Those two categories are testimony of organization of daily life and livelihood strategies on one side, and the common system of values and meaning (culture) on the other side. Those two aspects are however very difficult to bring together. For adorned caves, it is often difficult to cross data coming from the walls and ground from a same decorated cave, data sometimes acquired separately. One way to deal with this problem is to develop a multi-disciplinary approach, which allows to combine rock art, archaeological and geological studies and which implies interactions and dialogs between many specialists. This goal, which goes be-yond simply providing archaeological and geological contexts for an image or a group of images, leads to the development of new approaches. Fig. 1. This paper proposes to present cases to the interdisciplinary study of the Great Saint-Front Cave (or Mammoths cave) and other adorned sites, studied within the frame of a collective research program, conducted from 2013 to 2016 and called Archologie des grottes ornes de Dordogne: cadre conceptuel, potentiel et ralit (Cave art archaeology: conceptual frame, potential and reality).