Today I bought Jean Auel’s last book, The Land of Painted Caves.[1] Somehow I missed it last year, when it finally appeared in print. So many years have passed since the previous book in her Earth’s Children series that I am not sure how I will find it this time around, but the whole series has been very much to my liking ever since the first book, The Clan of the Cave Bear,[2] which I gulped down in 1998. My fascination with the series has to do with the period it brings to life, which goes all the way back to the stone age. The last, and perhaps the final, book in the series delves into cave art, the very reason I have found it so appealing from the very beginning. And this is the art that I have been bringing back to life over the last two decades or so. Which is precisely why I feel a bit cautious, if not even guarded, at the moment. Will Jean Auel and I share the view of cave art? This is surely my hope.

Addendum (May 25, 2012)

I enjoyed the book quite a lot, but Jean Auel and I do not share the view of cave art. Not at all, as a matter of fact. This is what I feared from the beginning, as her Acknowledgments do not mention David Lewis-Williams, whose work is central to my understanding of cave art. Instead, she thanks Jean-Philippe Rigaud and Jean Clottes, two leading French specialists in the field.[3] Both of them helped the author visit many painted caves in France. However, French scientists dealing with cave art have little time for Lewis-Williams’ arguments, expressed brilliantly in his key book on the subject.[4] They insist on sticking to what can be found in the caves rather than surmising anything about the mentality of people in the Paleolithic. Quite a number of them are outright hostile to his views about shamanism. As the book demonstrates, they have won in the end. Auel’s shamans hardly do any cave art. Their trance does not lead them to visualizing entoptic forms of all kinds before experiencing full hallucinations involving animals and even humans. Which is why she has hardly anything to say about geometric art that is of greatest interest to me. Besides, most of the paintings are already on cave walls when the story starts and no-one knows when they were painted. Perhaps this is Auel’s way of avoiding the subject?

Footnotes

1. New York: Bantam Books, 2011.

2. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1980.

3. The Land of Painted Caves, op. cit., p. xv.

4. The Mind in the Cave, London: Thames & Hudson, 2002.