Jean Clottes, prehistorian and Honorary General Curator of Heritage at the French Ministry of Culture, needs no introduction.

Born on 8 July 1933 in the Aude department (France), this internationally acclaimed specialist of prehistoric art has made his mark on both the scientific and media arenas. His constant presence in the media since the 1990s illustrates his commitment to disseminating knowledge to as many people as possible. So much so, that for the general public, his name is almost as familiar as that of a relative, as a result of his countless chronicles and explanations recounting the discoveries of prehistoric art. But his colleagues are acutely aware that constant and challenging work in the field is required to produce clear and accurate information. Prehistoric archaeology is an ever-changing discipline where methodological and practical advances continuously enhance and update our knowledge.

This knowledge has been built up over a lifetime of research into prehistoric art. It has been distilled into hundreds of publications in France and, above all, abroad. Researchers, and not just those devoted to the study of the Palaeolithic, know that it is often necessary to return to Jean Clottes' texts, which are an inexhaustible source of factual data analysed from profoundly original points of view - two essential ingredients for those who wish to go beyond the mere recording of facts and engage in the more daring exercise of fundamental research. As Jean Clottes rightly reminds us, recording the raw facts is not an end in itself, and we need to come up with the explanations that are the ultimate goal of all research.

The Jean-Clottes Database - Animal Representations in Prehistory was designed to reconcile this scientific objective with making data accessible to the general public.

Jean Clottes' dual qualities of media appeal and scientific influence stem from his total commitment to prehistoric science [bibliography], his tireless activity as a researcher and, above all, his unstoppable enthusiasm. These characteristics enabled him to carry out important administrative tasks, such as those he undertook as director of prehistoric antiquities in the Midi-Pyrénées region (1971-1991, [testimony J. Jaubert & J.-P. Giraud], or as scientific advisor to the Sub-Directorate for Archaeology, French Ministry of Culture of archaeology (1992-1999). A man of principle, Jean Clottes was able to take on responsibilities where heritage issues could be decisive. His decisions were always guided by a desire to conserve and protect prehistoric evidence. This approach has been widely demonstrated in the field, where he led the study of important caves, such as Niaux, the Réseau Clastres [Testimony of St. Thiébault and M. Otte], Le Placard, Enlène, Cosquer and Chauvet-Vallon Pont d'Arc. His international reputation is also remarkable. He has worked on sites all over the world, from North America to the Sahara Desert, from India to Australia [Testimony of R. Bednarick].

These sites represent the milestones of his professional journey, during which many accolades have rightly been bestowed upon him. The list is too long to itemize here, but we should not forget that he was a member of the Conseil supérieur de la recherche archéologique (Higher Council for Archaeological Research, French Ministry of Culture, 1979-1995) and of the Commission supérieure des monuments historiques (Higher Commission for Historic Monuments), in the Decorated caves section (1979-2002), that he has been Honorary President of the Société préhistorique française (French Prehistoric Society) since 1993, and that he is also an international expert with the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and UNESCO, as well as a member of the scientific council of IFRAO (International Federation of Rock Art Organisations).

Aline Averbouh and Karoline Mazurié

Quote this text: Averbouh A. et Mazurié K. 2024. About Jean Clottes  in : Averbouh A., Feruglio F. & Plassard F. Dir. Base Jean-Clottes, Les représentations animales de la Préhistoire[MOU1]  (BJC), French version online since 15 November 2022. https://animal-representation.cnrs.fr/s/bjc/

 

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Biography: Jean Clottes. Ecce homo: a lifetime of passionate dedication

This short biography was written by the author to conclude the book "Bouquetins et Pyrénées" dedicated to Jean Clottes. For a detailed biography, see: Clottes J. and Semonsut P., 2015. Jean Clottes, un archéologue dans le siècle : entretiens avec Pascal Semonsut, Arles, Errance, 223p.

 

In interviews we conducted a few years ago [1], Jean Clottes admitted: "[...] I'm not just interested in prehistory [...]. I'm also very interested in politics, without belonging to a party. I read a lot of novels, I listen to music, I like walking in the mountains or looking for mushrooms [2], skiing [but it is true that] I have no other passion than Prehistory" (Semonsut 2015 p. 178). Jean Clottes is a man with a passion, for the beginnings of our species, and above all - and it is in this field that he became known to the general public in the 1990s - for Palaeolithic art, both cave art and portable art. But should we confine this scientist, this man, to this single subject? Is it only the beginnings that attract him or, beyond these origins, the first tentative steps, Man himself, Man freed from time, Man at his most profound, at the very root of the human condition? For Jean Clottes, is getting closer to the earliest times simply the surest, most direct way of getting closer to the founding times? The question is worth asking, for at least two reasons: on the one hand, Jean Clottes himself admits when he explains that while what interests him "at the outset, is rather prehistoric Man", he immediately adds that "even if [he] does not do it for this purpose, [his] work on prehistoric Man [leads him] irresistibly towards Man in general" (Ibidem, p. 177). On the other hand, what he himself acknowledges to be his 'ethnological turn', during his first trips to India in the 2010s, seems to bear this out, as we shall see later. Jean Clottes is a complex, multi-faceted personality. Perhaps it was the scholar in him who urged him take his first steps, but it was the humanist who showed him the way. This contribution can only skim the surface of this complexity, by merely highlighting the stages that seem to us to be the most important in a busy life. We apologise to the reader for this[3].

 

Jean Clottes was born on the eighth of July 1933 in Espéraza, a small village in the Aude department. His mother was the daughter of Spanish immigrants who had fled the civil war and ran a small hosiery business, and his father was an accountant and later a delegated authority in a hat shop. Through contact with his maternal grandmother, who spoke a mixture of French and Spanish, he "unconsciously acquired a sense of the language" (Ibidem, p. 40). This led him to study English at the University of Toulouse. There he was deeply influenced by the teaching of Robert Merle, author of Week-end à Zuydcoote, among other titles, whom he considers to be one of his mentors, along with the prehistorians Louis Méroc and Léon Pales. He obtained the CAPES in English in 1957. So it was as an English teacher that he left the Aude for the Ariège, and more specifically its capital, Foix, in 1959. He never left the department or the town after that, apart from for his many trips.

 

He has a very strong, almost carnal relationship with his adopted land. He knows its heights like the depths of his skin: "I've hiked in the mountains, walking at least once a week for two hours or more. I admire and love this landscape that I see every day from my window. And then there are the caves! I've done a lot of digging in the Ariège, I've studied Niaux, Enlène, Les Trois-Frères, Les Églises... So, yes, my roots are there" (Ibidem, p. 31). His book La vie et l'art des Magdaléniens en Ariège (Clottes 1999) is, of course, the work of a prehistorian, but perhaps it should be seen first and foremost as a declaration of love for a territory, his territory. He also has strong links with the Tarascon-sur-Ariège Prehistory Park, where in July 2009 he inaugurated the Jean Clottes Resource Centre, so named because he bequeathed his books, archives and slides to the park. This surveyor of prehistory, this scientific cosmopolitan is a Pyrenean lover. So how did this English teacher, this "loyal-hearted Ariègeois (Ariégeois cœur fidèle)", to paraphrase a famous 1970s French TV series, become a prehistorian, and one of the greatest of his generation? 

Jean Clottes was introduced to prehistory through caving, under the guidance of his father, a founding member of the Aude and Ariège caving clubs. During his underground excursions, he found sherds of pottery and bones that fuelled his "latent curiosity" and fired his imagination (Semonsut 2015, p. 54). During his studies at Toulouse University, he learned by chance that prehistory courses were being given there and, still out of curiosity, he attended Louis Méroc's course [4], thinking that when he had more time he would take a greater interest. After becoming a certified English teacher, he was twice eligible to take the agrégation, which he narrowly failed on his second and final attempt. This failure cost him the chance to teach Shakespeare's language, but saved him when it came to studying Cro-Magnon, for two reasons. On the one hand, this ensured that he was completely bilingual, which would later enable him to read and publish in English. Secondly, he now had time on his hands: he enrolled on Louis-René Nougier's course [5], passed the Certificate in Prehistoric Archaeology as an independent candidate, and then, at his suggestion, went on to write his PhD thesis, which he presented in 1975, on megalithism in Quercy. Before becoming the Paleolithic art specialist we know today, Jean Clottes was first and foremost a recognised Neolithic expert. So where did the Palaeolithic change come from? Once again, by chance. Although most of his work focused on the Neolithic, the Palaeolithic was not absent from his practices and questions. In 1964, he began excavating the Grotte des Églises, prompted by the discovery of Neolithic and Bronze Age remains in the scree. Beneath a Middle Bronze Age layer, he uncovered a large Final Magdalenian settlement. Naturally, he continued his research right through to his thesis, but this chance discovery led him to abandon megaliths once and for all after his PhD, and to devote himself just as permanently to the study of the Palaeolithic. He readily admits that if he hadn't made this discovery, he would have stayed in the field of megalithism. 

He then took on various positions and functions, at an increasing pace over the decades, decades during which he was accompanied and supported by his wife Renée, "a real support not only for the children but also for [him] since [it] enabled [him] to work as much as necessary"[6] (Ibidem, p. 55). Correspondent for the Lot department, with Louis Méroc, Director of the Antiquités Préhistoriques de Midi-Pyrénées, from the 1960s onwards, he succeeded him in this position in 1971. By his own admission, it was the great opportunity of his life. His memories of this appointment are as clear as they are modest: "When I was appointed Director, I was chosen from seventeen candidates, including several eminent prehistorians [...]. In the end it came down to me and an assistant professor from Bordeaux University [...], supported by the illustrious professor François Bordes. The other bosses didn't take too kindly to this application, as Bordes was at the time director of a major laboratory at the CNRS, professor at the University of Bordeaux and Director of the Antiquités Préhistoriques d'Aquitaine. He was already accumulating a lot of power and appointing his candidate would have given him too much, in their opinion. Aquitaine was Bordes: Midi-Pyrénées was not to fall into his hands. I was lucky, because I'd only started digging eight years earlier and I hadn't yet defended my PhD thesis. Louis Méroc was very supportive, but it was Dr Pales [7] who played the decisive role in my appointment. All things considered, I was a bit like a pawn in a battle of giants..." (Ibidem, p. 60).

After four long and appalling [8] years of combining this activity with that of secondary school teacher, he left teaching for good to devote himself full-time to his directorial duties from 1975 to 1991. From 1979 to 1995, he was a member of the Higher Council for Archaeological Research (Conseil Supérieur de la Recherche Archéologique). He also became involved with ICOMOS [9], in the 1990s and was appointed  chairman of its international rock art committee. In addition to these official roles, Jean Clottes also held other, perhaps less official, but equally important positions: he was a member of numerous associations and the honorary president of earned societies, such as the Société des Études du Lot, the Société Préhistorique Ariège-Pyrénées (Ariège-Pyrenees Prehistoric Society), the Société Préhistorique de France (French Prehistoric Society), and, abroad, the Bradshaw and Leakey foundations and the Trust for African Rock Art.

 

In his various positions and functions, Jean Clottes has always been driven by a fierce desire to find the causes, the whys and wherefores of things. He explains this in his book Pourquoi l'art préhistorique? Prehistoric Man "is so far away from us, and this immense distance makes him seem so strange, that the search for his motives, let alone the meaning of his drawings, seems doomed to failure. For a long time I shared this scepticism, which is shared by most of my colleagues" (Clottes 2011 p. 11). This is no longer the case, because "it is part of human nature to ask questions. He may come up with scientifically questionable answers [...] but, whatever, he tries" (Semonsut 2015 p. 20). To understand, to get to the why, Jean Clottes takes three main roads: excavation, art survey and travelling. Excavations "have played an essential role, and I don't regret it, because close contact with the field is irreplaceable! I've been excavating all my life, and if I deliberately stopped with the Placard Cave twenty years ago, it's because I thought I'd never be able to publish everything I'd already done. I directed a lot of digs and I liked that, but I wasn't content just to organise and direct: I was also directly involved in the excavation work" (Ibidem, p. 99). Surveying cave art is "comparable to digging. A layer is also infinite. You can't record everything; you can't record every speck of dust. From this infinite reality, you must, using the criteria you consider most effective, eliminate what you consider irrelevant in order to reveal the prehistoric reality, at least the one you are looking for. You have to make choices" (Ibidem, p. 105). The following table will suffice to show the amplitude and diversity of these two key activities in Jean Clottes's work.

 

Fifty years of cave art excavations and surveys

Travelling is another boundless source of information for Jean Clottes. His thirst for knowledge has taken him to every continent, to countries and regions as diverse as Morocco, Mexico, Russian Siberia, Thailand and New Zealand, not forgetting almost every European country. As a travelling prehistorian, he "doesn't think that our brains are all that different from those of Magdalenians, but it is likely that our ways of looking at the world are different. However, it is possible to approach their way of thinking thanks to traditional peoples, for whom everything is alive and meaningful, such as the Australian aborigines or" (Ibidem, p. 111) the Tuaregs, whom he loves so much and whom he is one of since his baptism in Niger in 2006, under the name of Almawekil, which means "Our respected representative" [10].

 

Once he has understood, the scientist's duty is to explain and explain. Jean Clottes takes this mission very much to heart through the scientific events he directs, such as the Congress of the Société Préhistorique Française held in 1979, the Symposium on Portable Art in Foix in 1987 and, most recently, the Congress of the International Federation of Rock Art Organisations (IFRAO) in Tarascon-sur-Ariège in 2010. Bringing his thoughts together in a book or article is also extremely important, as his abundant bibliography attests. When asked which of his books are the most important to him, he cites his thesis, which "cost him a lot (in every sense of the word!)", Pourquoi l'art préhistorique? "(Why Prehistoric Art?), Le musée des roches (The Rock Museum), which "took up a lot of his time and work because it deals with prehistoric art worldwide", Les chamanes de la Préhistoire (The Shamans of Prehistory) because of the controversy it provoked, and Des images pour les dieux (Images for the Gods) (Ibidem, pp. 124-125), which marks the beginning of his ethnological turn. Finally, he also contributes to the thinking of other researchers as director of collections (‘Arts rupestres’ published by Seuil and ‘Histoire de la France préhistorique’ published by La maison des roches) and as editor of INORA, an international bilingual newsletter on rock art, published in French and English.

 

For Jean Clottes, understanding, like explaining, is in no way antithetical to feeling, and it is in contact with works of art that the prehistorian often gives way, at least initially, to Man, and that science temporarily gives way to emotion: "There have been three times in my life when I've been moved to tears by my first encounters with certain works of prehistoric art. Firstly, in front of the clay bisons at Tuc d'Audoubert; secondly, when I saw Lascaux for the first time (in the spring of 1960 with Jacques Marsal, one of its discoverers); and thirdly, in front of the four Chauvet horses, especially as I was the first prehistorian to see them. A lot of elements come into play: the aesthetic shock, the feeling of fragility - the Tuc clay bisons have been there for around 16,000 years, if you touched them they would fall apart - the presence of the artist (we have the impression that the Magdalenians did this yesterday) and the setting. What I felt at Chauvet could be compared to the shock a Van Gogh specialist would feel when discovering several of his paintings, previously unknown, in an attic. There's nothing scientific about it, it's pure emotion" (Ibidem, p. 25). In addition to these sites, Jean Clottes is deeply marked by the Niaux and Cosquer caves. For Cosquer Cave, this is essentially due to the fact that he had to learn to dive at the age of seventy, whereas his relationship with Niaux is much more intimate, as he explains in Voyage en préhistoire: "I must have been to Niaux hundreds of times and it's probably the cave I know best, down to the smallest nooks and crannies. During these visits, I have not made any spectacular discoveries of new animals or signs, but I have come to feel the cave and to discern the choices made by the Magdalenians" (Clottes 1998 p. 24).           

What can we learn from this life outlined out here in broad strokes - too broad to embrace it in all its subtlety? What can we make of it? Well, that's precisely the point. It is impossible to conclude, because nothing is complete. As Jean Clottes himself says: "I am an eternal student" (Ibidem, p. 37). His new subject and field of study is now India. In the opposite movement to that of André Leroi-Gourhan, for whom he had a great deal of admiration, and believing that the basics were well established and that he could no longer find anything new to feed his thinking in prehistoric caves, and also driven by the passage of time, he has abandoned prehistory for ethnology, swapping the Magdalenians of Ariège for the Indians of Madya Pradesh. But is he really moving on? Is he giving up on anything? Of course not, he's still looking for what makes us us. If a page has been turned, the book is still the same. If the road has changed, the direction remains the same: it points to Man. 

Pascal Semonsut

Quote this text (french version) : Semonsut P. 2021, Jean Clottes. Ecce homo : une vie au service d'une passion, In Averbouh A., Feruglio V., Plassard F. et Sauvet dir. Bouquetins et Pyrénées. Tome I De la Préhistoire à nos jours. Offert à Jean Clottes, conservateur général honoraire du Patrimoine, Aix-en-Provence : Presses Universitaires de Provence, PréMed, 311-314.

 

[1] Unless otherwise stated, the quotations in this article are taken from Clottes & Semonsut 2015.

[2] The author of these lines witnessed this on two occasions, on the banks of the Loire and in the mountains above Foix.

[3] Readers interested in a slightly less impressionistic account, written by the author himself, may refer to the introduction he wrote for his collection of articles: Clottes 1998, pp. 5-37.

[4] 1904-1970. A magistrate and a pupil of Comte Bégouën, he succeeded him as professor of prehistory at the University of Toulouse. In 1951, he discovered a Neolithic settlement at Villeneuve-Tolosane, which Jean Clottes later excavated. In addition to his work as a magistrate, he was Director of Prehistoric Antiquities for the Midi-Pyrénées region, and for several years sat on the Conseil Supérieur de la Recherche Archéologique (Higher Council for Archaeological Research).

[5] 1912-1995. In 1948 he was awarded the first doctorate in prehistory in France, and in 1950 inaugurated the first Chair of Prehistoric Archaeology in France, at the Faculty of Arts in Toulouse. Her career was marked by the discovery, in 1956, with Romain Robert, of the engravings and paintings in the Rouffignac cave (Dordogne).

[6] He dedicated to her his seminal book Pourquoi l'art préhistorique?

[7] 1905-1988. A colonel physician in the French army, his doctoral thesis in medicine, Palaeopathology and Comparative Pathology, defended in 1929, is still a reference in the field. He was appointed deputy director of the Musée de l'Homme in 1951. In 1957, he left the army and the Musée de l'Homme for the CNRS.

[8] The word is by Jean Clottes: see Semonsut 2015 p. 59.

[9] This non-governmental organisation works for UNESCO, examining applications for the inclusion of sites on the World Heritage List.

[10] This baptism is mentioned in Jean Clottes' CV, along with his various honours, including the Légion d'honneur. As further proof of his attachment to this people, in 2003 he had a collection of Tuareg tales published by Editions du Seuil in the name of his friend Sidi Mohamed Iliès, entitled Contes du désert.