Font-de-Gaume cave
The cave of Font-de-Gaume with its polychrome decorations is one of the most beautiful palaeolithic sanctuaries. It contains more than 200 painted and engraved animal figures. The cave resembles a 120-metre-long lava passage with three diverging side galleries: the Vidal gallery, the Prat gallery, the side gallery, and a “cabinet des bisons".
The cave is in Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil, in the Dordogne region. Listed as a historic monument since 1902, it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1979. A 3D digital scan was recently made of this cave owned by the French State and, to better preserve it, opened to visitors by the CMN under strict conservation conditions, along with a virtual reconstruction to explore on a dedicated website: font-de-gaume.monuments-nationaux.fr
The reconstruction enables people who cannot visit the site to explore it in greater depth; it is also an outreach and learning tool and is used as a comparator site by researchers.
The project was part of a digitisation call for tenders launched by the Ministry of Culture in 2011. The Centre national de Préhistoire and the Centre des monuments nationaux teamed up to produce the 3D digital model of the Grotte de Font-de-Gaume. The Centre des monuments nationaux (CMN) has produced a website of the virtual visit of the Grotte de Font-de-Gaume, which it manages and opens to visitors, with three goals in mind: protection, study and outreach.
A work La grotte de Font-de-Gaume by Jean-Jacques Cleyet-Merle was released to coincide with the launch of the site in the "Regards..." collection published by Les Éditions du Patrimoine.