The Battle to Save the Cave

For more than 17,000 years, the bestiary of the Lascaux cave in southwestern France survived the ravages of history, unseen and undiscovered. Entering it now is like walking into a time capsule, where 12-foot-long bulls and plump yellow horses appear to float across the vaults like religious apparitions. Although the draftsmanship is strikingly Modernist–on exiting the cave in 1940, Pablo Picasso is said to have remarked, “We have invented nothing”–these creations are remnants of the Upper Paleolithic Age, when our hunter-gatherer ancestors acquired the gift of consciousness and a knack for nature drawing.

But despite its robust longevity, Lascaux is surprisingly fragile. Five years ago, after the ill-conceived installation of new climatic equipment, Lascaux suffered a fungal infection that threatened to destroy in a few years what thousands of years had left largely unscathed. The cave’s custodians are still struggling to eradicate this scourge, a nasty fungus called Fusarium solani. Access is strictly limited; TIME was allowed to visit the cave because its keepers feel they finally have the outbreak under control. But to keep the fungus in retreat, a team of restorers enters the cave every two weeks–dressed, as everyone who enters now must be, in hooded biohazard suits, booties and face masks–to remove filaments from the walls. “They tell us the cave’s condition is stable,” says a member of the Scientific Committee of Lascaux Cave, which the French Ministry of Culture set up in 2002 to deal with the problem. “But that’s what they say about Ariel Sharon.” The sad fact is that visitors to Lascaux today come to look not for wonder, insight or inspiration. They come to look for fluffy tufts of mold.

CULTURE WARS

This is a story about three kinds of culture: the cultural heritage of Lascaux’s art, the stubborn mold that threatens it and the arcane and insular culture of French bureaucracy that diffuses responsibility for what went wrong. But it begins and ends with the beauty and mystery of the Lascaux cave. “It’s so spectacular that it boggles the mind,” says Jean Clottes, one of the world’s foremost experts on cave paintings. “When I first saw it, I cried.”

Art restorer Rosalie Godin was overwhelmed for a very different reason when she was urgently called to Lascaux in August 2001 by France’s Research Laboratory for Historical Monuments (LRMH). “It was as if it had snowed in the cave. Everything was covered in white,” she says. Two of the cave’s caretakers, Bruno Desplat and Sandrine van Solinge, had raised the alarm when they discovered that white filaments, first spotted in isolated parts of the cave months before, had spread over much of the interior in a matter of days. Desplat, who lives next to Lascaux and has devoted more than 15 years to its care, says that when he saw the luxuriant bloom, he became physically ill.

That’s not to say that he or the cave’s curator, the prehistorian Jean-Michel Geneste, could have been entirely surprised. The previous spring, workers had finished installing a $28,000 air-conditioning system beneath the stairs leading down to the cave. The new machine represented a major change in the way Lascaux’s delicate balance of temperature and humidity had been regulated for more than three decades. The old system, installed in 1968 after years of minute studies of the cave’s climate, relied on Lascaux’s natural currents to pass air over a cold point and ensure that water condensed there, like it does on a beer can, rather than on the walls of the cave. This passive system was necessary only during the wettest periods of the year, when it worked as a functional replacement for the earth that for millenniums had absorbed excess water from the saturated air of the cave but was removed after the cave’s discovery in 1940.

The new system was designed to automate the process and improve on it, using two massive fans to pull air toward the cold point. The intrusive approach scandalized those who had worked so hard to figure out a more modest solution to earlier problems in the cave. “Our idea was always to be as parsimonious as possible,” says Pierre Vidal, a retired researcher who worked in Lascaux for decades. “This thing seemed more like a central air-conditioning system.”

In most organizations, an individual or board has the last word on decisions, especially one this controversial. Yet nobody claims authorship of the decision to install the new machine–neither the curator nor the project’s main architect. Technical advice was provided by Ingéni, an air-systems consultancy firm based near Paris, which had designed systems for supermarkets and museums but had no experience with caves. “We proposed a system, and that’s what they chose,” says the firm’s managing director, Michel de la Giraudière. “I don’t know why they favored an active system over a passive one, but I do know not everyone was of the same opinion. They wanted a certain efficacy, and the discussion was somewhat political.”

The appearance of the mold soon after the new apparatus was put in place in April 2001 suggests it was not up to the task of maintaining Lascaux’s equilibrium. By the end of that year, Geneste ordered the fans taken out altogether. “If we knew then what we learned later, we wouldn’t have installed that machine,” says Alain Rieu, the director of conservation for the region of Aquitaine, which ultimately signed off on–and paid for–the work. “But the old machinery was in a bad state of repair, and we all decided unanimously that we couldn’t take the risk of doing nothing. It seemed like the least bad solution.”

But the new machinery may not be what introduced the fungus to the cave. Isabelle Pallot-Frossard, director of the LRMH, says that the presence of formaldehyde–used for decades as a foot wash to prevent fungal infections–may have killed off many other organisms present in Lascaux that might have prevented the explosion of fusarium. “The fusarium strains we found in the cave are extremely resistant to formaldehyde, unlike strains from elsewhere,” says Pallot-Frossard. “It didn’t come from outside, but had been there all along. All it needed was a slight modification in climate to take off.”

And take off it did. At first Godin’s team sprayed the mold with an alcohol solution of Vitalub, a common ammonium disinfectant. But the fusarium appeared unscathed: scientists later learned that it lived in diabolical symbiosis with a bacterium, Pseudomonas fluorescens, which was degrading the fungicide. So the restorers added antibiotics to the mix in which they soaked bandages to plaster the lower walls of the cave. Tons of quicklime, which kills fungus but also temporarily raised the cave’s ambient temperature, was spread on the floor. Since the worst of the infection has been brought under control, the team now relies on “mechanical removal”–that is, carefully plucking the filaments from the wall by hand.

GETTING INTO A HOLE

Lascaux might have escaped history and its indignities if four boys rambling on a hillside just east of the Vezere River in southwestern France in 1940 had not decided to investigate an opening revealed by a fallen tree. Soon Abbe Henri Breuil, a pioneer in the study of Paleolithic cave art, arrived to inspect their extraordinary find. He theorized that Lascaux’s broad galleries might indicate a magical or religious function for the drawings; Lascaux became known as the “Sistine Chapel of prehistory,” and people clamored to see it. After the war, the La Rochefoucauld family, which owned the property, authorized work to enlarge the entrance, shunt off the water that had once cascaded through the cave and install steps and concrete flooring through much of the underground complex. As many as 1,700 visitors traipsed through Lascaux every day. But by the late 1950s, the presence of so many warm-blooded, carbon-dioxide-exhaling bodies had altered the cave’s climate to the point that calcite deposits and lichen were threatening the paintings. By 1963, the threat of permanent damage was so acute that Andre Malraux, France’s first and most famous Minister of Culture, ordered the cave closed.

By the beginning of the 1970s, Lascaux had found a kind of stability. The crowds were gone, the lichens banished, and Jacques Marsal, one of the cave’s boy discoverers, was in the cave almost every day, alert to even the slightest changes. Studies had determined that the cave could handle about five visitors a day for 35 minutes each, five days a week; that protocol was never exceeded for the next 30 years. Since 1983, the crowds that come to the region have had to settle for Lascaux II, a modern facsimile that gives them an inkling of the cave paintings’ power. But before the fungus outbreak, anyone determined and patient enough could successfully petition the authorities for permission to visit the real thing. The only precaution was a requirement that visitors walk through a trough of formaldehyde solution–the regimen that Pallot-Frossard of the LRMH suggests may have inadvertently enabled the fusarium to flourish.

FUTURE TENSE

Pallot-Frossard contends that the fungus has not caused irreversible damage to the paintings, but others disagree. Laurence Leaute-Beasley, a Franco-American who led art tours into Lascaux from 1982 to 2001 and formed the International Committee for the Preservation of Lascaux in 2004, says one knowledgeable visitor to the cave in April not only saw fusarium on the paintings but also noticed a grayish tinge to formerly black surfaces where growths had been removed. When the quicklime was removed from the cave over the course of last year, so too was what was left of the soil–which could affect the cave’s climate and humidity. Desplat, the Lascaux caretaker who first discovered the outbreak, says that in the course of restoration work in the Great Hall of the Bull, a large stone flake painted with a horse’s head sustained three cracks; Geneste says the cracks aren’t new. Some believe that a ridge around part of the Great Hall bears the marks of the restorers’ ladders, and that the lower parts of the walls have been changed through the use of a powerful water-based vacuum cleaner called a Gregomatic.

It’s hard to sort out the competing claims because there still has been no independent judgment of what went wrong and whether it is being put right. The committee the Ministry of Culture created to perform that task is made up of most of the bureaucrats responsible for the damage, including the architect who installed the climate system, the curator who oversaw the installation project and the lab director. How such a committee can arrive at unbiased answers is “a good question,” admits Marc Gauthier, an expert on the Gallo-Roman era and the committee’s chairman. But he says the process is working. “Too often we’ve reacted to the symptoms of the problem,” he says. “But for the last three years we’ve been reflecting and acting on the reasons.”

Leaute-Beasley is unconvinced. “We feel that big mistakes have happened and may still be happening,” she says. “The French are dealing with them like it’s their backyard, but they need to feel accountable to the rest of the world. After all, who does the past belong to?”

Lascaux’s keepers are no longer using chemicals to eradicate fusarium; gone are the antibiotic patches and the quicklime. Geneste sees a few tiny insect colonies as evidence that a new ecological balance is taking shape, and there is talk of reopening Lascaux next year to a carefully restricted numbers of visitors. But that won’t be the test of whether Lascaux has imparted a lasting lesson of humility to its custodians. Whether that lesson sticks will be determined by future generations. It will be a terrible indictment of this one if it does not.