Les Combarelles

Combarelles, Les

 

an Upper Paleolithic site in the Les Combarelles cave, near Les Eyzies, Dordogne Department, France. More than 400 representations of various animals (mammoths, rhinoceroses, horses, bisons, reindeer, alpine lions) and of anthropomorphic figures were found in 1901 on the walls within the cave—a narrow corridor measuring 237 m long. The representations were mostly engravings.

REFERENCES

Efimenko, P. P. Pervobytnoe obshchestvo, 3rd ed. Kiev, 1953.
Okladnikov, A. P. Utro iskusstva. [Leningrad, 1967.]
Leroi-Gourhan, A. Préhistoire de l’art occidental. [Paris] 1965.
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I say the names of the caves to myself, as well, to impress upon my image-sotted memory the composition of the whole: the place, the artwork, the voice of the guide--now a woman, in Niaux, impossibly young, and delightful when she stands in the center of a vaulted chamber and sings aloud a high, long note to show us the echoes; now a man whose hands keep moving before his face, and in the space between us where we're cramped in the tiny passageway of Les Combarelles, he seems even now to be holding and shaping something unseen; now a woman with long, dyed hair and an accent of perfect clarity, who at the Abri de Cap Blanc sells the tickets, directs one to the restrooms, and conducts, each hour, tours of the carved horses on the shelter's back wall.
In Les Combarelles, a lion gazes from the wall, its eye bright white in the guide's flashlight, where a pebble or flint from the sedimentary substrate already was focused outward, oh, obviously an eye, around which the thick, strong face has been incised; a swelling in the stone itself has become the beast's cheek, and the ear is engraved to be leaning forward, as attentive as the eye to what lies ahead.
Here the animal

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