The Cave and the Cathedral: How a Real-Life Indiana Jones and a Renegade Scholar Decoded the Ancient Art of Man

by Amir D. Aczel

Book Overview

What Are The Ancients Trying To Tell Us?

"Why would the Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherers of Europe expend so much time and effort to penetrate into deep, dark, and dangerous caverns, where they might encounter cave bears and lions or get lost and die, aided only by the dim glow of animal fat-burning stone candles, often crawling on all fours for distances of up to a mile or more underground . . . to paint amazing, haunting images of...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0470373539
• ISBN13: 9780470373538
• Release Date: July 2009
• Publisher: Trade Paper Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.3" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

The Beginnings of Religious Speculations and Cathedrals. Great Read!

The author tells his story very well. It is easy to read and interesting and a great introduction to CAVE ART and RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. He held my interest and I was grateful for the photos included. I wish there had been more. I enjoyed this enough that I intend to read his other books. A worthy addition to your personal library or for a discussion group interested in religious and philosophical topics. Enjoy it! Goes well with Karen Armstrong's A CASE FOR GOD! [ASIN:0307269183 The Case for God]]

Answers to questions I never knew I cared about

I have to admit, I knew very little about the subject matter discussed in this book, namely, the paintings found deep in the caves of Europe. I never knew enough to ask the main questions that Aczel asks in the book, and those are: (1) Why are the paintings almost exclusively of animals, and (2) Why did the artists go to the trouble of placing them deep in caves, in places that are difficult to get to even now, in the 21st century. However, I found myself drawn in to Aczel's exploration of the possible answers. The author takes us through various theories on the subject that have held sway during various times since the discovery of the paintings, and gives us a glimpse into the lives of the scientists and researchers who have played a part in forming those theories. I hope that I get to see some of this art first-hand some day, although I don't know how likely that is. Aczel does a very good job conveying to us his experiences of visiting many of these caves in France and Italy with his wife and daughter. In the end, Aczel gives us what is his opinion about why these painting were done, and why he holds this particular opinion and not any of the other prevailing ideas. You can agree or disagree, but in my opinion this book will certainly get you to ponder answers to questions that perhaps you never cared about: questions about art, about religion, and about what makes us tick.

A Great Read! Thoughtful, Compelling Introduction To Cave Art

This book is a great, surprisingly reader-friendly introduction to the whole phenomenon of cave art, and to the stories of the men and women who discovered and studied it. Aczel deftly interweaves well-written accounts of his and his family's personal experiences visiting the caves, with clearly presented and extensive background information from the fields of prehistory and paleoanthropology. This results in a book at once wonderfully informative and personal--and so fun(and quick)to read. The severe negative review on this page is misguided. An enormous amount of research, as well as travel, and time spent in personal interviews with world-class experts went into this book. Of course Aczel does have a point of view, one he articulates and defends clearly. It helps give the book its personal quality and its energy. The author of the negative review disparages the theories Aczel champions as "out-dated, NeoFreudian, and structuralist", and dismisses the obvious significance of gender and gendered symbols in cave art. This betrays a very strange attitude toward the past. The last fifty years of continental philosophy have taught us to give up on the idea that we can, once and for all, negate or escape completely from "the past". (That being just a myth of the Enlightenment.) Certainly, Freud, structuralism, and conceptions of the universal presence of gender contain serious limitations. But they also at the same time contain much that is inescapable in the human condition. Freud, structuralism, and overarching conceptions of gender are thus both false and true! Understanding this seemingly paradoxical but ultimately profound notion, the last half century of philosophy tells us, is the beginning of intellectual maturity. Aczel acknowledges the theories he rejects and explains clearly why he finds them unpersuasive, even as he admits that there may well be some truth to them. He also provides a good description of the theories he prefers. Once again he proves a great introduction, even to this topic.

Very interesting and a good read!

Amir Aczel's book "The Cave and the Cathedral" is well written and very enjoyable. I also learned a lot reading it. Growing up in France I had heard about Lascaux but I knew next to nothing about prehistory and I found Aczel's overview enlightening while sometimes mind boggling: there were times and places where two species of man coexisted! The Basque language may contain traces of a prehistoric language and the Basque words for knife, axe and hoe are all related to the word for stone... Aczel focuses on the art which our ancestors left us in deep underground caves located mostly in southern France, Spain and Italy, with a detour via an intriguing painting in Africa. The book is also a travel memoir where the author recalls unsteady walks through dark tunnels in a rarefied air before a flashlight reveals amazing paintings. These paintings combine animals and symbols, handprints etc. Scientists disagree on the meaning and function of cave art but they all agree that it came after an evolutionary leap allowed for the possibility of symbolic thinking. A few chapters in the book are devoted to Abbé Breuil (1877-1961) who can be viewed as the founder of the science of prehistorical man and art. Aczel depicts how this science evolved throughout the century and interacted with other sciences; the meaning of the art, especially the symbols, remained mysterious and gave rise to several conflicting theories. Aczel reviews these various theories before enthusiastically siding with André Leroi-Gourhan, the leading French prehistorian after Breuil. For Leroi-Gourhan the symbols on the walls all evoke sexual organs, some more explicitly than others; likewise the animals in the paintings are paired, each species being associated to a gender (horse = male, bison = female). Cave art expresses this dualistic male/female world view of our ancestors. I strongly recommend this book!!!!

A superb read

This is a delightful book that explores the art of the caves of Europe. It surveys the latest theories about the meaning of the symbolism of Paleolithic cave art. The author has done a great job at weaving in the stories about the people who first explored the caves that have been discovered in France, Spain, and Italy over the decades starting in the 1800s. These stories flesh out the theory about the purpose of Cro-Magnon cave art, decorated items, and mysterious sexual images and signs. This is easily the best book I have read about the subject. What this book does that others don't do as well is to combine the human saga with the exploration of the enigmatic distant past.