The painted caves of Lascaux in the Dordogne region of France are one of the most famed monuments of Ice Age art. Dating back about 17,000 years, the great Hall of the Bulls and its adjacent chambers proved so popular with visitors that a generation ago the cave had to be closed to save the paintings from encroaching mould. A replica, Lascaux II, was built nearby and has proved equally popular. One thing that strikes the visitor is the exuberance of the compositions, with hundreds of animals, including bison, horses and deer, parading along the walls and ceilings, often overlapping. A big problem in sorting out possible groupings of animals, andpossible motives for painting them, has been the issue of contemporaneity — what was painted when? A recent study by scientists at the Louvre"s research and conservation laboratories has suggested one avenue of approach, by studying the chemical structure of pigments from the cave walls and ancient antlers from Palaeolithic sites.
The presence of minuscule antler fragments in the paints may enable animal figures composed at the same time, using the same batch of paint, to be isolated and then studied apart from neighbouring depictions. Earlier paint analyses had detected phosphorus and calcium, suggesting the presence of crushed bone material: whether this was the result of adding bone powder as an extender for the paint, or the use of bone tools for applying it,was not clear. Writing in the journal Archaeometry, Céline Chadefaux and her colleagues note that bone, ivory and antler have similar compositions and can be studied using the same techniques. Seven antler specimens from Palaeolithic sites in the Dordogne region were examined, together with modern control samples of antler. Sixty-three paint samples from the Hall of the Bulls and the Axial Chamber of the Lascaux cave, 18 of them with calcium and phosphorus present, were also analysed.
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The painted caves of Lascaux in the Dordogne region of France are one of the most famed monuments of Ice Age art. Dating back about 17,000 years, the great Hall of the Bulls and its adjacent chambers proved so popular with visitors that a generation ago the cave had to be closed to save the paintings from encroaching mould. A replica, Lascaux II, was built nearby and has proved equally popular. One thing that strikes the visitor is the exuberance of the compositions, with hundreds of animals, including bison, horses and deer, parading along the walls and ceilings, often overlapping. A big problem in sorting out possible groupings of animals, andpossible motives for painting them, has been the issue of contemporaneity — what was painted when? A recent study by scientists at the Louvre"s research and conservation laboratories has suggested one avenue of approach, by studying the chemical structure of pigments from the cave walls and ancient antlers from Palaeolithic sites. 
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