Gargas

Gargas, cave in the French Pyrenees that contains important examples of Late Paleolithic mural art, paintings, and engravings, most of them probably dating from the Gravettian Period (about 27,000 to 22,000 years ago).

The cave’s decoration was discovered in 1906. Many “macaroni,” or finger tracings, appear on the clay walls and ceiling of the cave; some are simply tangled lines, but others contain outlines of animal forms. A large number of animal images—including horses, ibex, stags, aurochs, bison, mammoths, and some birds—are engraved in the cave’s rock walls.

The most distinctive feature of the decoration at Gargas, however, is the large number of stencils of human hands painted on the walls of the cave. These are “negative imprints” of real hands, achieved by spitting or blowing paint around and between the fingers while the hand is pressed, palm up or down, to the wall surface. Such hand stencils occur throughout the cave art of France and Spain, but at Gargas there are no fewer than 230 of these images, painted in red or black, and the stencils are sometimes arranged in rows. A curious feature of these silhouettes is that many are lacking one or more phalanges on some fingers, most frequently the last two joints of the four fingers. Often the same incomplete hand is stenciled repeatedly over an area. Debate still rages, as it has for a century, over whether the fingers were simply bent over as a form of code, or whether the joints were actually missing, in which case either disease (such as some kind of frostbite) or a ritual mutilation was responsible. A bone fragment found stuck into a crack in the wall next to some hand stencils has been radiocarbon dated to 26,860 years ago, which may give an indication of the age of the stencils.

The significance of this artwork is unknown. The hand stencil motif is widespread in Stone Age art, appearing not only in Ice Age Europe but also in the art of other hunting cultures, most notably in Australia and Patagonia. From the testimony of Australian Aborigines, it is known that it may be a kind of personal signature, denoting a relationship with the site, a symbol of possession, a memorial, or even a record of growth.