Fridays – Inside Chauvet Cave, France: Human Art 25,000 Years Ago & “Life on a Dig in Southwest France”
7/10 & 7/17 @ 11:00 AM/CH
Instructor: Stephen “Dr. Steve” Phillips, Ph.D.
7/10 Our capability to express ourselves symbolically through art is among the features that make our species unique in the animal kingdom. The search for the origins of human art plays an important role in anthropological research to this very day. Modern human artistic expression is evident in the form of hundreds, if not thousands, of stunning images painted onto the walls of caves in France and elsewhere. Early modern human occupations of these painted caves range in date from about 15,000 years ago to as much as 30,000 years ago and beyond, an astounding depth of time Over the course of four summers excavating a Neanderthal-era archaeological site elsewhere in southwest France, Dr. Steve had the opportunity to visit several of these remarkable caves personally. This lecture takes us on a journey to one of these remarkable sites: Chauvet Cave in southeast France. The images you will see we can relate to; however, can we relate to why these images existed at such a distant time in our human cultural history?
7/17 “Life on a Dig in Southwest France”
Humankind’s evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals, survived in Europe and parts of the Middle East for some 250,000 years. Modern France holds the sites of some of the most significant Neanderthal excavations and discoveries.
Each summer from 1996 to 1999, Dr. Steve served as the Field Laboratory Supervisor for the Penn Museum excavations at Fontechevade Cave, a site located deep in the southwest French countryside, about two hours northeast of Bordeaux. In this class we go behind the scenes on an actual archaeology dig, where we learn who the Neanderthals were, what their role in the human story was, and what they left behind to tell us their own story. They were far closer to us, in every way, than you might imagine.
Spend quality time in warm and sunny France learning what life is like on an archaeology dig deep in a cave, how we search for evidence of past lifeways more than 60,000 years-old, and what camp life is like while on an excavation in France. Is archaeology really like Indiana Jones?
