Dating the figures at Lascaux

The initial chronological hypotheses

Immediately following the discovery, Henri Breuil and Denis Peyrony both established a link with the Gravettian period. For Breuil, the chronology of Palaeolithic cave art was based on the existence of two cycles, one being the Aurignaco-Perigordian, and the other the Solutreo-Magdalenian. He compared the figures painted on blocks found in stratigraphy – and therefore accurately dated — in the Labattut shelter (Perigordian) and the Blanchard shelter (Aurignacian) to Lascaux. A more nuanced assessment was made by Annette Laming, who pointed out that this iconography displayed just as many features that could be attributed to either of the two major cycles.

For Séverin Blanc, most of the evidence suggested that some of this art dated back to the Solutreo-Magdalenian period.

First radiocarbon dates

In 1951, charcoal fragments from the Shaft excavations were analysed in Chicago, at the laboratory of Dr. W. Frank Libby, who first developed the method. The results provided new arguments that supported the latter proposal. The date obtained, around 19,000 years BP (15,516 ± 900 BP), placed Lascaux in the Magdalenian culture.

André Glory dated new charcoal samples taken during his excavations in the Passage and the Shaft, which gave ages of between 21,000 and 18,000 years BP (17,190 ± 140 BP and 16,000 ± 500 BP), dates confirming that the objects belonged to an early Magdalenian period.

André Leroi-Gourhan relied on stylistic data; the sites of Fourneau du Diable in Bourdeilles (Dordogne) and Roc-de-Sers (Charente), considered to be accurately dated, served as points of reference. They enabled him to link Lascaux to the Solutrean period. However, a few years later, the study of the lithic and bone material, as well as the stratigraphic analysis of the sections cut by André Glory, led to changes in this timeline. The work, directed by Arlette Leroi-Gourhan and Jacques Allain, clarified and narrowed down the chronological estimate, and the Lascaux complex was attributed to the Magdalenian II period. André Leroi-Gourhan agreed with this proposal.

These successive adjustments illustrate the difficulties encountered in establishing a precise evaluation that is sufficiently well-founded.

1998, 2002, new analyses

In 1998, and again in 2002, two radiocarbon dates obtained using a new method (accelerator mass spectrometry, or AMS) from fragments of reindeer antler from the excavations by Henri Breuil and Séverin Blanc, ended up being older than those of the latest estimates, giving an age of between 23,500 and 22,000 years before present (18,600 ± 190 BP and 18,930 ± 230 BP), at the transition between the Upper Solutrean and Badegoulian periods.

Norbert Aujoulat's formal analysis of the Lascaux figures suggests that this art belongs to a Solutrean tradition. Clearly, they are more reminiscent of the Fourneau-du-Diable or Roc-de-Sers works, whose attribution to the Solutrean period is debated, than any other example of the classic Magdalenian. 

Among the groupings of figures, the Confronted Ibex, drawn on the right-hand wall at the end of the Axial Diverticulum, are reminiscent of those found in bas-relief at Roc-de-Sers (Charente). At that same Upper Solutrean site, there is also the rare image of a man facing a horned animal, in this case a musk ox or bison. The same scene is reproduced at Lascaux, at the bottom of the Shaft. A bird can also be seen at these two sites.

Overcoming contradictions: the LAsCO project (2018–2021)

Twenty years on, the results are puzzling: groups of artefacts with "Magdalenian" characteristics, a "Solutrean" pictorial style, two sets of contradictory dates, themselves produced by testing different materials. Interpreting these contradictions today leaves us confronted with a series of archaeological and methodological questions and uncertainties: what is the relevance of assuming that the findings as a whole are from the same time period? What value should we place on the criteria we use to attribute artefacts to a particular culture? To what extent can we benefit from the comparison of dating carried out fifty years apart using different samples and methods?

The LAsCO project (Langlais and Ducasse coord.) re-examined these questions through a collective and interdisciplinary re-evaluation of all the archaeological material found in the cave. This project naturally led to the implementation of a new C-14 dating programme, the initial results of which were recently made public to the scientific community through publications in the journal PALEO. These new chronological data, obtained from the dating of several reindeer bone fragments from the main sectors of the cave, are perfectly consistent with the cultural attribution hypotheses formulated at the same time based on the study of stone and antler tools. The material remains left in the cave are therefore the result of one (or more) occupation(s) somewhere between 21,500 and 21,000 years before present, i.e. during a pivotal phase between the cultural traditions of the Badegoulian (23–21,000 years before present) and Magdalenian (21–14,000 years before present) periods.

The cave was therefore frequented 1,000 to 1,500 years later than the dates obtained at the end of the 1990s, dates which some members of the scientific community used to link all or part of the Lascaux wall paintings to the Upper Solutrean (approx. 24–23,000 years before present). This step is all the more important because, although we celebrated the 80 years of the cave's "modern" existence — simultaneously the subject of study, questioning and wonder — in 2020, scientists have been trying to unravel the mystery of its real age ever since…