2023-08-28 ARF Fall Lecture. Fritz, Current Research at the Chauvet/Pont d’Arc (Ardeche, France)

Monday, August 28, 2023
Hillside Club, Berkeley, CA
About: The current Director of Research, Dr. Carole Fritz, and artist/prehistorian, Dr. Gilles Tosello, will present an illustrated lecture on the current research directions at the Chauvet/Pont d’Arc cave (Ardèche, France), where dozens of drawings and engravings dating to between approximately 36-25,000 years ago were discovered in late 1994. Both scholars have been involved in the research at this site (as well as at other significant Upper Paleolithic period cave art sites) since programmed research began there in 1998. Both are affiliated with the University of Toulouse and its Center for Research and Study of Prehistoric Art (CREAP), a Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) unit of which Carole Fritz is the team director. They have carried out pioneering documentary research and multimedia presentations on the Marsoulas cave in the French Midi-Pyrénées, as well as innovative studies on the ways in which Paleolithic images were made. It has been through new techniques to understand the image-making processes and past “artistic techniques” that they are able to make inferences about the creative processes of these anatomically modern Humans (Homo sapiens sapiens), the production of images through time, and how these help us to better understand possible linkages between individuals and groups. Gilles Tosello has been directly responsible for many of the Chauvet images that were replicated for the Visitor Site for the cave in Pont d’Arc (Ardèche, France).

Speaker: Carole Fritz, Head of Research for the CNRS at the Prehistoric Art Research Centre (CREAP Cartailhac), Toulouse
Speaker: Gilles Tosello, Université de Toulouse, Centre de Research et Etude Art Préhistorique