The visibility of rock art under paleolithic lighting: perceptual experimentation and probabilistic modeling applied to the Chauvet-Pont d'Arc cave
Résumé
The article investigates the issue of the audience of European Paleolithic cave art. Our methods consist of an original combination of experimental archaeology and spatial modeling to better understand the role of perceptual factors, such as viewing distance, lighting, the shape and contrast of the parietal depictions, and the morphologies of the cave. A methodological framework was thus elaborated to identify the locations from which a Paleolithic light-carrier in an underground space could perceive artworks on the walls, and to quantify this visibility. We conducted a visual perception experiment to produce a probabilistic model of the two distances from which a human holding a flickering light is able to detect and identify planar parietal depictions. Two lighting types (torches and grease lamps) and three artistic techniques (drawing, engraving and painting) were considered. The resulting model is a function of the angle of approach and two features of the graphic entity: its size and contrast, the latter resulting from the combination of the technique used to create the rock art and the nature of the cave wall. This perceptual model was extrapolated to a wider probabilistic framework to include non-planar and partially hidden graphic entities. It was applied to the data corpus of the Chauvet-Pont d'Arc Cave (photographs of graphic entities, artistic techniques, meshes of the walls and graphic entities). Ray casting yielded the visibility probability of 487 graphic entities from more than 20,000 possible Paleolithic human observation points, enabling several analyses and the creation of original visibility maps at different distances. The methodology developed in this study is applicable to the datasets of other sites and paves the way for new quantitative, perceptually-based analyses of cave art.
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