Jean Clottes

Jean Clottes is a prominent French prehistorian. He was born in the French Pyrenees in 1933 and began to study archaeology in 1959, while teaching high school. He initially focused on Neolithic dolmens, which were the topic of his 1975 Ph.D. thesis at the University of Toulouse. After being appointed director of prehistoric antiquities for the Midi-Pyrénées in 1971, he began to study prehistoric cave art in order to fulfill the responsibilities of that position. The revelation of Chauvet's beautiful and often highly sophisticated paintings was seen as a blow to theories arguing that art history is a story of "progress" from crude, clumsy beginnings succeeded by increasing levels of sophistication. In 1994 he joined with South African anthropologist David Lewis-Williams to study prehistoric art in light of known neuropsychological phenomena associated with shamanic trances. Together they concluded that there is a strong argument for believing that much of prehistoric art was in fact produced in the context of shamanic practices. In 1996 they published their findings in the book Les Chamanes de la Préhistoire: Transe et Magie dans les Grottes Ornées (published in English in 1998 as The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves).

Published works

Chauvet Cave: The Art of Earliest Times. University of Utah Press, 2003.