SIs this how the museum visit of the future will look like? We put on headphones and the six of us take a seat in a kind of futuristic box car. This so-called module sets itself in motion automatically and enters the “restitution” – we come back to the term – of the Stone Age grotto Cosquer near Marseille. Dripstones, expanses of water like black mirrors, the first signs of human presence: traces of smoke on the ceiling and – you think you can hear them whinnying – four coal-black horses on a limestone wall. Soon to follow drawn and engraved bison, chamois and deer, as well as animal species that are extinct or rarely appear in cave paintings. The way in which the visitor’s gaze is guided during the thirty-five-minute tour has something cinematographic about it: the audio guide talks about an object in the room, the “module” turns towards it, invisible projectors illuminate the relevant area out. In the case of poorly visible incised drawings, a laser beam even traces the contours.
The course leads from the dark, earth-colored bottom floor to the sunny, pure white top floor. Here, a spacious center d’interprétation illuminates the context. The replica of a cave shelter opens onto a Provençal cold steppe landscape, with moving images of the Stone Age fauna. Upon exiting the cavern, one encounters – in stuffed or recreated form – all eleven animal species depicted in the Cosquer Grotto: bison, chamois, deer, lion, horse, seal, saiga antelope and ibex, as well as the extinct species aurochs, Megaloceros (an enormous deer) and Great Auk.
At your side is a lifelike replica of a bright-eyed Sapiens beauty. Over nettle panties, Paleolithic Venus wears a patchwork fur; her headband is adorned with small shells. The tour elegantly draws an arc to the theme of the sea, which illustrates pieces of jewelry made from fish bones or sperm whale teeth and a boat made from bison skins. The rise in sea level over the last nine thousand years is also evoked here. If the cave was once six kilometers from the coast and its entrance was up to eighty meters above sea level, four-fifths of its interior has been flooded since the end of the last ice age. The (only) entrance today is thirty-seven meters under water! With the renewed rise of the oceans since the twentieth century, the Cosquer grotto is doomed. The water level rises by at least three millimeters every year; all drawings and engravings are at a maximum of two meters above the water level.
The time left to explore the cave is numbered. Especially since access is difficult, potentially dangerous and only possible in good weather. The cavern is not primarily impressive because of the artistic quality of its artefacts. Jean Clottes, Jean Courtin and Luc Vanrell, who have explored the Cosquer grotto since the early 1990s, call the 229 animal figures “rough” and “summary”. In comparison to Altamira, Chauvet and Lascaux, the “Sistine Chapels” of cave painting with their large-format “wall panels” rich in figures, Cosquer actually seems a bit poor.
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