This volume is a tribute to Dr Jean Clottes, one of the most outstanding rock art researchers in history. In his role as the General Inspector for Archaeology at the French Ministry of Culture, he has continued the French ‘dynasty’, arising with Henri Breuil and later André Leroi-Gourhan, of guiding the discipline towards a scientific direction by example.  His greatest contributions to rock art research are probably the exemplary research programs he directed at Cosquer Cave, discovered in 1985 near Marseille, and Chauvet-Pont d'Arc Cave, discovered in December 1994 in the Ardèche. Both sites are not only exceptional representatives of Pleistocene cave art; they are also among the most painstakingly studied rock art sites in the world. The Chauvet project especially has been remarkable in the scope of new knowledge it has yielded, and in the high standards of research it has pioneered since 1995. The project has become a paragon, an embodiment of excellence in the field, under Clottes’ leadership. I had the privilege of spending four days in the cave with Jean, and witnessing first-hand the methodology he was developing with his outstanding multidisciplinary team.

Jean’s degree of dedication to his projects is perhaps best illustrated by the way he approached with J. Courtin, the exploration of Cosquer Cave, whose 175-m-long entrance tunnel begins 37 m below water. In the Pleistocene, the cave was well above sea level. The dive to access it today is so dangerous that in 1991 three experienced divers perished attempting it. Jean had not been inside the cave, having had to direct its exploration from a nearby boat via a video link. Frustrated by this impediment, he resolved to learn how to dive when, aged almost 60, he attended the 1992 IFRAO Congress in Cairns, Australia. In his early seventies he dived into Cosquer Cave dozens of times, undeterred by the dangers involved. His determination is reminiscent of the commitment and courage of scientists in the 19th century, some of whom also accepted great dangers to life and limb through devotion to their work.

In the same year, 1992, Jean established the International Newsletter On Rock Art (INORA), a bilingual newsletter presenting each published paper in both French and English. He has since produced three issues of INORA every year, a veritable resource about new discoveries of rock art throughout the world. This editorial work came in addition to his more than 500 academic papers, and over 30 books written or co-written by him.

Particularly important and consequential has been Jean’s involvement in the IFRAO, the International Federation of Rock Art Organisations. In September 2010 he organised and chaired the 15th IFRAO Congress in Tarascon-sur-Ariège near Foix, which was the first time the event had been held in France. Its most appropriate topic was ‘Pleistocene Art of the World’, it had a record attendance and marked the beginning of Jean’s Presidency of the IFRAO. But perhaps more importantly than that, he is universally regarded as the highly respected elder statesman of the Federation.

Jean has received many honours, including the Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1973), Commander dans l’Ordre National du Mérite (2015), Commander dans l’ordre des Palmes académiques (2007) and Chevalier dans l’Ordre de la Légion d’Honneur (2010). But he was particularly touched by an honour conferred on him by the Tuareg of the western Sahara, where he has also worked extensively. They made him an honorary Tuareg in 2007 and named him Almawekil. Not surprisingly, that name translates into ‘Our Respected Representative’. And in 2007 it was in a remote corner of the Sahara that Jean buried his wife, in a Tuareg ceremony.

Jean Clottes is a man larger than life: he is one of those rare scholars who inspire subsequent generations, who are role models for us all. He is a legend in his own life time. This book is dedicated to him.

Prof. Robert G. Bednarik, Professor Australian Rock Art Research Association (AURA) and Cave Art research Association (CARA), Australia. Convener of the International Federation of Rock Art Organization (IFRAO)

Quote this text : Bednarik R. G. 2021, Jean Clottes et l’étude de l’art préhistorique/ Jean Clottes and research on prehistoric art, 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, 7.

 

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Dear Jean,

You reminded us on more than one occasion: "Fifteen more years with François [Rouzaud who died too soon and who would have had a place in this book], twenty with Jean-Pierre and twenty-five with Jacques". It's a way of marking the generations, of remembering our ages, of respecting each other, of forging shared and sometimes complicit memories, of pursuing our careers without ever losing sight of each other.

During our early years, many of us saw you as a director of antiquities, responsible for worksites that followed one another at the enviable pace of the late 20th century, when most Ministry of Culture employees spent four to six months of the year on worksites, often urgent salvage, sometimes programmed salvage, rarely programmed excavations, from the Middle Pleistocene to the Early Iron Age.

We remember our meetings as if they were yesterday, and yet they were two or three decades before the end of the last century.

For one of them (JPG), it was in July 1972 on the Capdenac-le-Haut site (Lot) co-directed with Michel Carrière. At the start of the previous year, you had just been appointed Director of Prehistoric Antiquities (DAP) for the Midi-Pyrénées region, while you were still teaching English at the Lycée in Foix, and working on a thesis on the megaliths of the Lot, which you defended in Toulouse in 1975. You took over from Louis Méroc, who had died a year earlier, one of the people who undoubtedly steered your career in the right direction when, in 1964, you undertook a dig in the Grotte des Églises in Ussat (Ariège), which led you to spend most of your life in the Upper Palaeolithic - what we now prefer to call the Late Palaeolithic.

For the other (JJ), a visit from the director of Midi-Pyrénées to Les Fieux, awaited, and somewhat feared, by your friend Fernand Champagne in July 1976, a year of drought that made the causse as dry as a brick; then the following year, a training course in the Chasséen, or rather in the Final Bronze Age of Capdenac-le-Haut, as you had to alternate work sites to obtain the 'excavator' diploma issued at the time by the Ministry of Culture.

And for both of us Capdenac, but also Coudoulous (Lot), or again in the rich Middle Magdalenian of Enlène whose programming in September sounded like the Ariège reward at the end of the year. The relaxed working hours and meals in the annex of the Château de Pujol at the home of your friends Robert and Jeanne Bégouën, and the unusually relaxed pace of Jean's daily life compared with his short visits to the Dalbade and the other sites of the year, where the pace was reputed to be more than a little tense. A tireless worker, you managed the day-to-day running of the department on Sundays, the only day of rest granted to the excavators. With age, we've discovered the secret: everything is held together by micro-naps.

Jean Clottes belongs to the second generation of directors of antiquities, the one responsible for professionalising the position, and the first wave of full-time appointments in 1974 as director of antiquities. Guided by an inextinguishable sense of public service - don't worry, it was contagious! - you set about gradually building up an operational department, ensuring that it played a role in its own right, developing regional research, encouraging and providing financial and material support to the prehistoric archaeologists of the Midi-Pyrénées, both professionals and amateurs. Many have seen the Circonscription's Citroën tube bring its share of site tubes, reinforced tarpaulins and Allibert tubs, providing material and logistical support for the teams. Another time.

You made a real commitment to protecting archaeological heritage, particularly through what was then known as rescue archaeology, continuing the work of your predecessors Louis Méroc and Georges Simonnet on the Neolithic site of Saint-Michel-du-Touch in Toulouse, which was also the site of your programmed excavation team at Noyer Cave (Lot). In addition to a number of urgent salvage operations, you mobilised the department for what was one of the largest scheduled salvage operations in the south of France, at the Neolithic site of Villeneuve-Tolosane (Hte-G.), alongside Jean Vaquer (CNRS), the late François Rouzaud and one of us (JPG). At the other end of the chronological spectrum, you formed an alliance with Eugène Bonifay, from 1978 to 1980, for a planned rescue project at the Middle Pleistocene site of Coudoulous (Lot), which was taken up much later by those who were loyal students at the time (JJ). Finally, from 1982 to 1986, we worked together (JPG) on the excavation of the Solutrean and Badegoulian site of the Cuzoul shelter at Vers, which was under threat from roadworks on the banks of the Lot.

Convinced of the importance of the research mission of the archaeological services, if only to be able to play their monitoring role as effectively as possible, in a community where peer review is the rule, you never ceased to advise your colleagues to get involved in research. And by setting an example: from the early 1970s to 1990, excavations in Enlène Cave and at the Tuc d'Audoubert in Montesquieu-Avantès (Ariège) in collaboration with Robert Bégouën, F. Rouzaud and one of us (JPG).

This regional investment has not prevented you from playing an important role at a national level: on the Higher Council for Archaeological Research (Conseil supérieur de la recherche archéologique or CSRA now CNRA) from 1979 to 1995 and its permanent delegation (1985-95), where you convincingly defended prehistoric archaeology, making the voice and accent of the Midi heard, as has been reported. 

But more than that, and what is better known internationally, is your investment in the protection, conservation and study of decorated caves that ensures you constant media coverage, a fantastic promotion for our disciplines. As soon as you were appointed Director of Antiquities, the discovery at the end of 1970 of the Réseau Clastres - which communicates with Niaux - followed by the discovery of the Fontanet decorated gallery (Ariège) at the beginning of 1972, brought you face to face with the problem of protecting and conserving decorated caves and the subtle balance to be struck between protection, study and public access. Of course, you had known about this environment for a long time, having practised speleology in your youth in the Aude (all the prehistorians posted to Toulouse were from the Aude!), but with these first interventions in hitherto unexplored galleries, the need to consider cave paintings in their natural, anthropic and heritage context is now imperative. The aim is to protect the discovery of a new decorated cavity from any environmental modification, including that of their own study. Optimum preservation of anthropic traces (footprints, charcoal marks, passage marks, vestiges, etc.) now helps to contextualise cave paintings and sheds light on their meaning. As part of this archaeological and heritage policy in such an original context, it was at Fontanet in Ariège that you met François Rouzaud, the pioneer of palaeospeleology, whom you recruited for his skills as a speleologist, among other things. He worked alongside you in Niaux on survey missions in the early 1980s.

Driven by this new passion for decorated caves, nurtured by enviable field experience, "Jean Grotte (i.e., Jean Cave in French)", as he was nicknamed by a journalist from La Dépêche du Midi, went on to develop internationally-recognised expertise in both the authentication and study of parietal assemblages and in the conservation measures essential to the long-term preservation of sites reputed to be so fragile.

After twenty years in charge of the largest prehistoric antiquities department in mainland France - and not the least rich! - in 1991, the Ministry of Culture and Communication entrusted you with a general inspection mission, and from 1992 to 1999, with the role of scientific adviser for cave art to the sub-directorate of archaeology. An expert role with ICOMOS and UNESCO, coupled with an impressive network of foreign colleagues, took you all over the world, from Baja California to Arnhem Land, from the sands of the Ténéré to the bush of southern Africa and, more recently, your new love: India. A magnificent contribution to the influence of French prehistoric research that can only make your few detractors jealous. Other colleagues in the pages that precede or follow, and who have become friends, recount this bulimia for rock art beyond our borders.

More at ease underground than at sea off a Marseilles cove, at an age when most people are ready for a peaceful retirement, you have a diving diploma and are - as far as we know - the only specialist with Jean Courtin in prehistoric art to have ever admired drawings of Provençal penguins in situ. Even in Marseilles, no decorated cave escaped your notice. The same was true in Charente a few years earlier, still on assignment from the Ministry, with the martyred Placard cave, whose painted and engraved signs made it an eponymous site. A call for tenders for the study of the most famous decorated cave in the Ardèche gave us the opportunity to reverse roles for the duration of an audition (!): you were able to assemble a multidisciplinary team to bring the study of decorated caves into the 21st century. The first generation of research carried out at Chauvet-Pont d'Arc will long remain a major step in the study of decorated caves. Happy are those who were able to work under your natural authority. Such studies can no longer be the monopoly of a few, let alone one man alone, as was the case for so long. Their study can only be conceived through the development of an ambitious multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach and a constant concern for the most rigorous conservation.

On a personal, collective, institutional or more personal level, there are many people who owe all or part of their knowledge, their career path and many other things to you. We are among them. Long live you and your passions, which have transformed our lives.

Jean-Pierre Giraud, Honorary General Curator of Heritage, College of Archaeology, Ministry of Culture.

Jacques Jaubert, University Professor, Professor of Prehistory, University of Bordeaux, UMR 5199 PACEA, 33615 Pessac, France. 

Quote this text: Giraud J.-P. et Jaubert J. 2021, Jean Clottes : des dolmens du Quercy à l’art rupestre universel, une vie de passion au service du patrimoine, 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, 11-13.

His laughter, accentuated by the southern rock art, reassured me in the depths of the Niaux galleries, where everything was geared towards knowledge and discovery. His emotions, orchestrated by the play of his lamp, made the drawings on the walls tremble. My intuition told me not to overdo it, not to rush into things, but to savour the mysteries, which would immediately fall back into eternal darkness. In the absence of the initial intention, a particular interest nevertheless arouses the attention paid to these drawings so deeply hidden. Such was the magic of the encounter with Jean Clottes, and it continues to this day.

The taste for knowledge and the pleasure of understanding were mutually reinforced. A sketch of a demonstration could then follow, but only as a pretext. Like himself, Jean Clottes' arguments were solid, and therefore convincing. A fruitful and active doubt seemed to drive him, with greed and appetite, but without pride, only to share the joy. For example, when I told him of the discovery of a third plate engraved in the Magdalenian of Chaleux, he announced the thousandth, found at Enlène. You had to know how to appreciate...

His entire life has been filled with a succession of adventures, from the most prestigious (Niaux Cave in Ariège, Chauvet-Pont d'Arc Cave in Ardèche, Cosquer Cave in Bouches-du-Rhône) to the most humble, such as the domestic paintings of northern India. A meticulous ethno-artistic investigation reveals the motivations, circumstances and narratives behind them. A mythology in action unfolds on these seemingly insignificant buildings, touching our most distant sensibilities.

This fertile and rigorous curiosity has spread everywhere, from Yemen to California: nothing escapes the language of images. This prestigious and unknown universe has been ennobled by the collection he directed at Le Seuil (Arts rupestres). But they have also been deciphered in detail through the publications of INORA, which has become the world's benchmark journal on rock art, bilingual (French, English) and of incomparable class and rigour.

Through his determination and tireless enthusiasm, Jean Clottes has not only passed on forgotten arts to us, he has brought them to life before our very eyes, to make us love them.

Marcel Otte, Professor Emeritus of Prehistory, University of Liège, Belgium, Director of the European Centre for Palaeolithic Studies

Quote this text: Otte M. 2021, Jean Clottes, la force et l’équilibre, 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, 321.

 

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One of my fondest memories.

A night on the train, a cold winter morning, a clear blue sky, a piece of bread soaked in coffee, Renée and Jean Clottes' kitchen, and off we went for a day in Niaux Cave... As a young researcher specialising in the identification of fragments of wood used and charred by prehistoric people, Jean Clottes had invited me to see if it would be possible to sample microfragments of charcoal, which would have been used to trace the representations in the cave, so that they could be identified.

It was a whole day of crawling, looking and rushing through the Clastres network, now accessible thanks to pumping to enable new research (and wondering whether it would be possible to return!), to admire not ibexes, but three bison, a horse and the mustelid, and above all to be moved by the footprints of prehistoric children, sunk into the clay of the ground, and to follow the tracks of a stray weasel.

Emerging at nightfall, my brain as intoxicated as ever after a journey underground and through time, I found myself back in a bunk heading for Paris, clutching micro-samples of what I hoped were identifiable charcoals.

This epic journey came to an end at the Gare d'Austerlitz, with a ticket inspector shaking me: we had arrived, it was the 24^th of December and Jean Clottes had already given me a fabulous present.

Stéphanie Thiébault, Director of Research at the CNRS, former Director of the CNRS Ecology and Environment Institute (INEE) 

Quote this text: Thiébault S. 2021, Une veille de Noël dans la grotte de Niaux avec Jean Clottes, 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, 323.

 

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Speech given during the day organised in honour of Jean Clottes by the Ariège department at the Centre de conservation et d'étude de l'Ariège (21 October 2023, Tarascon-sur-Ariège, France). 

 

I'm speaking to the Honorary President of the Société Préhistorique Française, a former President who was promoted to honorary rank in 1993, in recognition of his remarkable work as a researcher, thinker and organizer in the service of prehistory.

I address you, Sir Honorary President, with the greatest respect and on behalf of the SPF Administrative board, which I represent here. I do so as the current President of the SPF, a position you held during 1980. I hope you would not mind if I take advantage of the bond that unites us beyond time to call you Jean, rather than “Sir Honorary President”.

I am aware that it's a bit daring, because we do not know each other very well, you the great specialist in what I call ancient prehistory, cave art and shamanism, to which you have convincingly drawn the attention of our entire community. I, the "young" neolithicist and, incidentally, "Bronze age worker" of the north-western Mediterranean, desperately seeking to understand this period when the last hunters invented domestication and animal husbandry, this period that Jean Guilaine, your brother from Aude, one of my main mentors, opportunistically calls "ancient protohistory".

In this talk, therefore, I will not venture into the realm of memories shared in the darkness of caves, which I am one of the few not to be able to do in this assembly. I will not even dwell on the multiple components of your very rich work or career. I will confine myself to your career at the SPF, which nonetheless sheds a more interesting light on your personality than might otherwise appear.

Your presidency, Jean, in 1980, came between those of Eugène Bonifay (in 79) and Jean-Pierre Mohen (in 1981), in the heyday of Henri Delporte and André Chollet, your other deputy presidents with the aforementioned Jean-Pierre. The great era of Gérard Bailloud (then General Secretary), Jacques Hinoud, Fernand Champagne, François Poplin... You had been a member since 1959, at the age of 26, and elected to the Administrative board since 1975. In your speech when you took over as President, you touched on a number of subjects that were close to your heart, and at least partly describe your scientific personality. Hereafter, I will mention just a few of them.

Firstly, you paid tribute to voluntary work and to what was then unashamedly called "provincialism". At a time when the SPF still had 3,000 subscribers (compared with 700 today!) and when the association's overflowing activity relied on the almost full-time work of 6 or 7 volunteers from the four corners of France, this was the least we could do. But not all incoming presidents had shown such concern for "enlightened amateurs", especially at a time when the AFAN was coming into its own and we were all striving to professionalize archaeology.

You also paid a short but vibrant tribute to the wives of prehistorians "whose lives are often quite thankless", you wrote! An avant-garde feminist intention that honours you and no doubt reflects your own experience.

You paid a third tribute to two of your teachers, Louis-René Nougier and Louis Méroc, as well as to your predecessor at the Direction des Antiquités in one of France's richest regions Léon Pales, who was long and mentor and a friend. You insisted on "the need to stay as close as possible to the realities on the ground", a point dear to Louis Méroc.

Calling for "good monthly sessions and good publications" for the SPF Bulletin, you made a vibrant appeal to combat the indigestibility of far too much prehistoric archaeology writing, and to propose more synthetic, more readable publications, leaving the details (and statistical arguments) in appendices. This passage from your speech is enthusiastically underlined in my young researcher's hand on page 6 of my copy of BSPF, Vol. 77, No. 1, which I unearthed in preparation for this speech. I even added a big, hopeful "OUI" in pencil. I'm delighted that your wish has been largely fulfilled, and all the more so now that the BSPF is making the Nakala digital archive, part of the national Huma-Num infrastructure, available to authors wishing to offer "supplementary data".

In this presidential speech, you also proposed that SPF Presidents should no longer be limited to a one-year term of office, as was still traditional at the time. You aptly (and humorously) recommended that this measure should only take effect for the President who succeeded you! It did, but a long time later, and I'm the lucky beneficiary, since I've already been in the job for two years with undisguised pleasure. And it's no secret that I'm here with you today.

You also proposed to organize a session "soon" at the Cabrerets Museum, which was to inaugurate the following year, and thus to relocate SPF sessions and bring them as close as possible to national prehistory events, both in the regions and in Paris. A fine tradition that the SPF continues today with Séances, whose organization it supports and whose proceedings it publishes two or three times a year. A great success!

As far as your work with the SPF is concerned, the most important event was undoubtedly the XXIst Prehistoric Congress of France (CPF), Quercy 1979, in Montauban and Cahors, which you masterfully organized between September 3 and 9. I remember it all the more vividly, as I was part of the "influx of young researchers" you welcomed in your inaugural address. Yes, even though we were born on almost the same day, you on July 8 and I on July 9, we were a few years apart! It was in fact my first CPF and my first paper presentation, co-presented with François Poplin, on the origins of the Corsican mouflon. I'd only been a PhD student for a few months. All the big names in volunteer prehistory I mentioned earlier were there, and we enjoyed some lively exchanges, including those between Jacques Hinoud and Doctor Rozoy on the Tardenoisian!

Sir Honorary President, dear Jean, it is a very great honour for me to take part in this tribute today, and to represent the SPF, a lady of almost 120 years, a lady we both served with the same enthusiasm, just a few years apart. Thanks to you, and to many other Presidents and members of the Administrative board, the SPF has been able to constantly renew itself and keep pace with the evolution of our discipline, from the crystallization of the first national core of prehistorians at the beginning of the 20th century, to the first law on archaeological heritage in the 1940s, to the professionalization of the 1980s, to the mutation of digital technology and the open science that we know, believe in and help to promote. I would like to express the gratitude and admiration of the SPF Board of Directors.

Jean-Denis Vigne, President of the French Prehistoric Society (SPF), Emeritus Research Director at the CNRS, UMR 7209 Archéozoologie, archéobotanique: sociétés, pratiques, environnements, Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Paris, France.

 

Quote this text :

Vigne J.-D. 2024, Jean Clottes and the French Prehistoric Society. Speech given during the day organised in honour of Jean Clottes by the Ariège department at the Centre de conservation et d'étude de l'Ariège (21 October 2023, Tarascon-sur-Ariège, France) in : Averbouh A., Feruglio F. & Plassard F. Dir. The Jean-Clottes database, Animal representations in Prehistory (BJC), English version online on 2024, https://animal-representation.cnrs.fr/s/bjc/page/