2007: The inappropriate new air-conditioning machine is shut down (but not replaced by one like the original machine that functioned well for some 30 years). The black spots continue to proliferate. The temporary roof remains in place still exposing the cave to exterior climate and precipitation. Water runs down the cave’s walls and paintings at times, followed by periods of extreme dryness. In December of this year, Léauté-Beasley and the ICPL succeed in bringing UNESCO into the picture; Lascaux is one of the first “World Heritage Sites” on UNESCO’S list.

The global Upper Paleolithic is wrapped, as it were, in historical gauze. All our words for continents, regions, areas, sites, tools, weapons, techniques, and aesthetics are historically imposed, more often than not by modern history…

By December, the black spots have tripled in number since the summer. It is now proposed that they have been created as a result of the direct lighting used by the survey team and art restorers over the last four years.

There is still no independent scientific oversight of Lascaux’s situation.

2008: The black spots now contaminate 50% of Lascaux’s decorated walls. Most of the 1600 engravings are effected. In July, the ICPL calls for UNESCO to place Lascaux on the World Heritage Sites in Danger list (no action is taken). At no time over the past eight years has the Lascaux administration conducted a thorough scientific investigation of the cave’s situation prior to treatments being applied. The World Heritage Commission now presents France with the following requirements: 1) To create an impact study before further intervention. 2) To invite a World Heritage Commission mission inside Lascaux to examine the current condition. 3) To submit to the Commission a conservation report by February 2009 on the causes of the damage (up to now only symptoms have been treated). Christine Albanel (The Minister of Culture), proposes to that the Commission requirements be ignored and that the current work inside the cave be continued.

2009: Albanel now sets up a symposium to focus on Lascaux’s problems. At the symposium, she announces the creation of a new scientific committee which will operate independently from the non-scientific bureaucratic management of the cave. However, at the end of the symposium, Jean Clottes, the renown rock art expert and Chairman of the Symposium, declares that the cave is no longer in danger! This contradicts his earlier statement on the “hundred or more micro-organisms cohabiting and interacting in the cave.”

International scientists offer their services to form a Lascaux International Think Tank. As of August 2009, France had not empowered them to act.

At the end of 2009, in brief the situation is as follows:

1. No study as to the origins of the damage has been undertaken.
2. No treatment has been found to stop the proliferation of the black spots.
3. The climatic balance in the cave has not been restored.
4. The Think Tank, earlier in the year given permission to begin its work by the new Minister of Culture, Frédéric Mitterand, has been abolished.
5. There is still no scientific supervision of Lascaux.

It is now clear that those primarily in charge of Lascaux, including those who have authorized the installation of new equipment or preventive measures inside the cave — primarily, as I understand it, Oudin, Geneste, Pallot-Frossard, and Albanel (and as of 2009, Frédéric Mitterand) — have, as Paul Bahn has written, “orchestrated a policy of misinformation, denial, and blame-shifting since the beginning of the crisis in 2000.” Léauté-Beasley has explained: “It is clear that the authorities in charge of managing the Lascaux conservation crisis have, for the most part, some direct responsibility for its occurrence. This is why they have produced no objective view or critical analysis of what has been done since the inception of the crisis. The scientific committee which they direct cannot have the necessary critical approach needed to understand what happened, why, and how to remedy the problem. The scientific commission appointed in 2002 by the minister of culture meets two or three times a year to review the actions decided on by the administrators. The scientists on the committee are acting as consultants, not as decision makers. And being hired hands, or part of the Lascaux administration, they are prevented from talking about Lascaux’s problems with other scientists outside the commission. This situation with its lack of transparency is lethal for the cave.”

The global Upper Paleolithic is wrapped, as it were, in historical gauze. All our words for continents, regions, areas, sites, tools, weapons, techniques, and aesthetics are historically imposed, more often than not by modern history. While this is obvious, it is a slippery matter. Many a subliminal association has linked “France” to “the origin of art.” Which is to say that fundamentally Lascaux does not belong to France. It belongs to the earth of which France is a historic superimposition.

While this may be spiritually true, I do not know of any way to politically enforce it. Might the United Nations be called upon to intervene? Might the President of France have the intelligence and guts to release the cave from what must now be the shame-ridden strangle-hold of those now in charge and place Lascaux under the supervision of an international scientific committee?

Or is it too late?