Site Map
Site Map 
Magdalenian occupation sites in the Pyrenees. In the Dordogne region only the two best-known sites have been marked. The 1 000 metre contour is shown.
1. Isturitz, 2. Duruthy et les sites voisins, 3. Labastide, 4. Enlène, 5. Les Trois Frères, 6. Le Tuc d'Adoubert, 7. Le Mas d'Azil, 8 Le Portel, 9. La Vache, 10. Les Eglises, 11. Fontanet, 12. Les sites de Laugerie, 13. La Madeleine.
Photo: Secrets of the Ice Age by Evan Hadingham, 1980
Entrance to Les Pradières, central Pyrenees, France, a cave occupied by hunters at intervals throughout the last Ice Age
Photo: Secrets of the Ice Age by Evan Hadingham, 1980
Dordogne Valley
Photo: Sharon Rogers/Walkhound 1999
Vezere River
This is the river that Ayla and Jondalar travelled down at the very end of POP to get to the Ninth Cave, home of Jondalar, which is on its banks. There are many caves in the limestone cliffs along the course of this small river, used as human habitation since old stone age times.
Photo: Sharon Rogers/Walkhound 1999
Vezere River
Photo: Feyda 2003
Vezere River - "La madeleine".
Photo: Feyda 2003
Vezere River
Photo: Feyda 2003
Vezere River
Photo: Feyda 2003
Vezere River
Photo: Feyda 2003
Vezere River
Photo: Feyda 2003
Vezere River
Photo: Feyda 2003
Vezere River
Photo: Feyda 2003
These are objects gathered on a walk beside the river, indicating things that may or may not have been available 20 000 years ago. The nuts are walnuts and chestnuts, and the goose feather would have been good for fletching an arrow or spear.
Photo: Feyda 2003
Les Eyzies Caves
Two lines, one horizontal, one vertical, drawn from a a meet in the centre of the principal cave
Photo: C. Lyell "The Antiquity of Man" (1873)
The evolution of a rock shelter and its deposits.
When a zone of weaker rock underlies a stronger stratum, frost weathering (freeze/thaw cycle) cuts away the softer rock, creating a rock shelter. (The initial formation and subsequent undercutting of a cliff can also be caused by a river.) When this provides enough shelter, it becomes occupied. The roof periodically falls, covering the occupation material of bones, ash, and artefacts with rock and dust, the shelter is reoccupied, and the cycle continues until the rock shelter becomes completely filled in.
It would be hard to think of a better method for preserving fossils from the stone age than this, though it is tough on any inhabitants at the time of the rock falls.
Photo: H. Laville et al, 'Rock Shelters of the Perigord'
The Cro-Magnon shelter, the abri where the type specimen for Jondalar, one of the characters from the series on the ice age by Jean Auel, was found.
Photo: Utika 2002
Translation of the sign : 'here were discovered in 1868 the Cro-Magnon men by François Berthoumeyrou'
Photo: Utika 2002
Font de Gaume
This cave has never been closed by natural causes, as Lascaux was for example, which explains the bad state of the paintings. Though paintings are everywhere in the cave, they have not been seen (again) before 1901 (by the man who also discovered Combarelle a few weeks before). Kids of Les Eyzies used to play there and they carved their names and dates on the walls, sometimes destroying what the (supposed) Magdalenians did. Added to that, water deposited some calcite on the walls, hiding most of the paintings-carvings.
Painting of a wolf in Font de Gaume after Breuil, from a postcard. My thanks to Anyasun for bringing it to my attention.
What is so special with Font de Gaume is that the animals are carved, then painted inside the carving. It's a great thing, because if the paint disappeared, most of the carving can still be seen. Recently, about 3 years ago, they renovated the ground of the cave for tourists. Before doing that, they studied the walls again, to be sure they did not miss any paintings.
And they discovered something like 180 new 'things', from animals to simple signs. Most of them are behind a layer of calcite, and can be seen only with a UV or IR light. Utika says 'the guide showed the visitors a really cute little mammoth, about the size of my hand that they missed before. That is also then that they discovered the wolf. Only the carved part of that wolf survived'
The entrance of Font de Gaume is on the right. On the left, it's only a small cavity - small compared to the cave itself (nowadays used to leave bags, and everything that could touch the walls by mistake during the visit). This is the natural shape, but they modified the floor to make it flat.
Photo of Font de Gaume and text: Utika 2002
This is a big rock near the entrance of Font de Gaume. Ayla (from the book 'Shelters of Stone' by Jean Auel) says it looks like the face of the Mother.
Photo: Utika 2002
The Abri Pataud (les Eyzies).
Abri Pataud consists of an immense balcony of a hundred metres length where Cro-Magnon man lived, hunted and gathered. They were seminomads. Abri Pataud was excavated between 1953 and 1964. 14 archaeological layers with altogether forty successive campings of hunters of reindeer, who settled on 20 000 year old sites under the cliffs of Les Eyzies were discovered. The site and museum is in the village of Les Eyzies.
Photo: 'Discovering Perigord Prehistory' by B & G Delluc, A Roussot & J Roussot-Larroque.
My thanks to Sharon Rogers/walkhound for alerting me to this excellent book.
Grotte du Grand Roc
Photo: Per 1999
In 1961, Arambourou made an extraordinary discovery in the levels of this middle Magdalenian phase. Close to the cliff, he uncovered, all within the space of a single meter, a rich collection of art objects. There was a fine horse head carved from white limestone and pierced as if it were intended to be worn as a pendant. A second, less expressive horse head of ivory was found close by, and this appeared to have been treated in a more abstract style or else left unfinished by its creator. A few centimeters from the first head was a fragile little round bead of jet, which disintegrated as attempts were made to remove it.
Photo: 'Secrets of the Ice Age' by E. Hadingham
But the third sculpture recovered at Duruthy exceeds all these finds in its quality and interest. It is the largest portable object of Paleolithic art ever found and one of the most striking. Fashioned from a sandstone block some twenty-seven centimeters long, the bold head and shoulders of a horse are thrust forward, while the details of the rest of its body are not clear. The block is too short to have accommodated the horse's legs, and it may be that they were intended to be shown as if folded under the body in an attitude of repose. Whatever the case, the disturbing power of this work is not easily forgotten by those who see it today. M. Arambourou expresses it perfectly:
One cannot fail to be struck by the entirely hieratical character of this horse, which owes as much to the posture given to the animal as to the manner in which it is executed. With a realism which nevertheless suggests the particular rather than the general, the sculptor has, it would seem, figured not a horse, but the horse.
Photo: 'Secrets of the Ice Age' by E. Hadingham
Grotte du Grand Roc
Photo: Sharon Rogers/Walkhound 1999
Grotte du Grand Roc, distant shot.
Photo: Per 1999
Grotte du Grand Roc, other side.
Photo: Per 1999
Cave Rouffignac. As you can see, the cave mouth has been extensively modified for the tourist trade. Total length of all the chambers and galleries in three levels is about 10 kms.The cave is very long, so a narrow-gauge railway with special mini-trains, consisting of open platforms each for 6-8 persons, was put in. Rouffingac paintings have not been dated yet, and there is some doubt about the authenticity of some of the paintings.
Photo: Per 1999
Entrance to the cave of La Vache in France.
Photo: Man before history by John Waechter
Grotte de Vic, decorated with animal figures.
Photo: Per 1999
View from Cave Rouffignac. There is a reference to the 'grotto of 100 mammoths' in this cave.
Photo: Per 1999
La Roque Gageac located 10 km south of Sarlat.
Photo: Sharon Rogers/Walkhound 1999
Sean at the hearth. This is a recreation of a bronze age dwelling in the Dordogne Valley, much later than the times detailed in the EC series. Building houses in this way meant that young families were not dependent on moving in with relatives, often a stressful experience, or finding a new cave, which by that time were non existent - all habitable caves were being used already. You could also site your new 'cave' close to water and game, and could enlarge it as necessary with a minimum of labour.
Photo: Sharon Rogers/Walkhound 1999
Neanderthal man at Le Moustier, overlooking the valley of the Vézère, in the Dordogne. Drawing by C. Knight, under the direction of H. Osborn.
Photo: H. Osborn, 'Men of the Old Stone Age' (1916)
Le Moustier in the Dordogne. Neanderthal man lived in these rock shelters overlooking the small town of Le Moustier, and gave its name to a characteristic Neanderthal tool set and culture, the Mousterian.
Le Moustier is on the right bank of the Vezere at its confluence with the Vimont valley. Village houses rise in tiers on the rocky steps of the limestone outcrops at the angle formed by the two valleys.
Photo: 'Discovering Perigord Prehistory' by B & G Delluc, A Roussot & J Roussot-Larroque.
My thanks to Sharon Rogers/walkhound for alerting me to this excellent book.
The following is from H.Laville et al, 'Rock Shelters of the Perigord':
Le Moustier is the name of a village 10 km upstream from Les Eyzies, under the spur of a cliff formed by the intersection of the Vezere and Plazac valleys. The upper shelter has been studied since 1863, and is now completely excavated, so that no further study is possible.
The lower shelter is 14 metres below the upper, and occupies the base of the cliff in the village itself, the bedrock being lower than the modern riverbank. It was first excavated in 1907. Most recently, Laville and Rigaud conducted well organised excavations there in 1969. The bulk of the deposit has been removed, but a control section for later work remains.
The text below is from 'The Prehistory of Europe' 1980 by Patricia Phillips
The Le Lazaret cave contains a sequence of deposits, but the presumed living floor lies in the upper levels. The diagram (after de Lumley, 1969, Une Cabane acheuléene dans la grotte de Lazaret, Fig 54) shows the ground plan of the Le Lazaret 'tent', southern France (inset shows the protected area of the cave)
It dates to the third stage of the Riss glaciation in conventional terms, while aminoacid tests have produced dates c. 150 000 B.P. De Lumley has published detailed distribution maps of the position of stones, flint tools and debris, bone, charcoal and shell, and suggested that the Acheulian hunters created a shelter about 11m X 3.5m at one side of the cave.
The bottom of the shelter wall is defined by rows of stones, including possible post-supports. A skin curtain and roof may have been draped over the posts. The distribution of finds suggested entrances and internal compartments, with two hearths in the larger compartment and none in the smaller. The presence of tiny sea shells, which would have been attached to seaweed, and of the foot bones of fur-bearing animals like wolf, fox, lynx and panther, around the hearth and in the smaller compartment, may indicate bedding. The tools include hand axes and choppers, and lots of tools made of pebbles, of Upper Acheulian type.
Study of the pollen contained in coprolites suggests that the cimate had been colder than today, with stands of pine trees in the vicinity of the cave. The shelter would have provided protection from wind and cold, and represents an attempt to achieve a 'home'.
Leaving the spectacular cliffs of the Dordogne valley behind and heading south along the minor roads, a tourist soon finds himself on an and plateau crisscrossed by narrow lanes and drystone walls. This is the upland "causse" country of Quercy, where the thin soil supports a light cover of birch trees, juniper bushes and coarse grasses, attracting thousands of bright butterflies in the summer. It is possible to walk only a hundred yards among the birches and become utterly lost in the featureless scrub, with the distant clatter of sheep bells in every direction confusing the senses further. It is a kind of desert, in fact, which one can scarcely imagine ever to have been prosperous or continuously inhabited. Yet the signs are there: in the clearing around a field boundary here and there loom the massive stones of a megalithic tomb, or "dolmen," in all probability erected by Neolithic shepherds in their summer pasturelands four thousand years ago, and surprisingly there are also the painted caves left behind by the Ice Age hunters.
It was in the middle of one such stand of birches, a place impossible to find without a guide, that the cave of Les Fieux was discovered by a group of potholers in 1964. No impressive cliff or porch confronted the explorers, for the entrance was a mere "foxhole" disappearing into the earth beside a shallow depression in the flat stony plateau. In prehistoric times this narrow crack opened onto a broad chamber with a thin roof shattered bit by bit by winter frosts and eventually filled up with sand and the hunters' domestic rubbish. On the surface the only trace to be seen of this was the shallow depression. In the other direction the crack led down into the darkness of the Les Fieux cave.
Monsieur Caminade, the landowner, a vigorous man in his eighties, has always led visitors himself into the depths of his cave despite the fact that his powerful shoulders can barely pass through the narrow "foxhole" of the entrance. Crawling along on elbows and knees, one descends from the hot plateau into the coolness of the cave, and at length scrambles into a rather dingy chamber about twenty-five meters long and thirteen meters wide. It is no Lascaux or Altamira: some of the dozen or so painted hand impressions are very hard to see, the triple red dots made by dabbing at the cave walls with three fingers are uninformative, while the only other traces are some extremely worn carvings, apparently representing a pair of ibexes, covering one side of a block lying in the middle of the chamber. It is indeed hard to imagine a great ceremony or gathering taking place here in this claustrophobic chamber where one slides and stumbles among muddy little crevasses and can easily be knocked painfully across the head by bristling stalactites.
Two intact left hand impressions may be seen faintly in this photograph taken in the cave of Les Fieux in the Quercy region of southwest France. They are clearer in the small image here than in the larger one which has more obscuring detail. It also helps to squint the eyes and sit back from the computer monitor!
Les Fieux would not command much attention if it were just an isolated case of a small and poorly decorated sanctuary. In fact, as a result of careful prospecting during the past decade, nearly a dozen caves, their locations dotted over the dry hills and steep river valleys of Quercy, have been found to contain unimposing paintings or engravings. The caves are never more than a few hours' walk from the great rivers, the Lot, the Célé and the Dordogne, but to some extent these recent discoveries fill in blank spaces on the map between caves like Font-de-Gaume near the Vézère and Pech-Merle on the Lot which have long been celebrated tourist attractions.
However, no enterprising proprietor could ever turn these new caverns into profitable concerns, for who would pay to see Le Bourgnetou with its almost invisible reindeer carving and its solitary red handprint, or Les Escabasses with its ibex and two sketchy horses hidden among ugly walls of spongy calcite? It has been relatively easy for prehistorians to erect grand theories about the significance of caves like Lascaux where hundreds or even thousands of artworks survive. But it is difficult to apply the same ideas to the impoverished scale of decorations in caves like Cuzoul de Mélanie (one engraved bison) or Le Papetier (one engraved bovid and three abstract signs). Yet these recent finds demand an explanation no less than did the dramatic discoveries of the past. Perhaps they suggest the activities of solitary artists rather than the settings of great ceremonies.
One of the most striking examples of a very small gallery is in the cave of Tibiran in the Pyrenees where paintings and engravings were first noted by the celebrated explorer Norbert Casteret in 1951. From the entrance one slithers alarmingly down a steep muddy slope to the central chamber below. This room is a high-vaulted amphitheater about twelve metres wide, complete with an "upper circle," a high ledge where prehistoric artists left mutilated hand impressions on the wall (Gargas is only a short walk away on the other side of the same hill). The theatrical atmosphere of this chamber is strong, readily suggesting a place of dance or sacrifice to the imaginative. Yet the most interesting works in Tibiran occur not here but in a little cavity joined to the main chamber by an extremely low opening in the rock wall.
One slides painfully on hands and knees into the tiny chamber, where there is just room for two people to stand upright. One careless step, a hand flung out to catch one's balance, and the already fragmentary animal paintings could be seriously damaged. The best of these is a vigorous black painted horse, its outline engraved on two separate occasions, while on the adjoining wall a drooping stalactite shaped exactly like a bear's head is joined to a painted body, as if the artist was inspired by the natural relief of the stone. There are also traces of an ibex and possibly another horse. The idea of a large ceremonial gathering in the central chamber may of course be just a fantasy, but it is absolutely certain that not more than two people could ever have squeezed into the cavity with the painted animals at one time.
This apparently deliberate selection of an awkward secret place has emerged also from a recent study by two English cave-art enthusiasts, David Collison and Alex Hooper. Together they spent six weeks in 1972 minutely examining the confined walls and ceiling of one small gallery inside a cavern opening onto the spectacular rocky slopes of the Ariège valley, not far from Andorra in the Pyrenees. This cave of Les Eglises had been the successive shelter not only of Paleolithic hunters but also of Bronze Age peoples whose fragments of pottery have been excavated from the entrance, and, in the thirteenth century, a sect called the Cathars took refuge from religious persecution in the upper galleries of the cave.
Plan of the decorated cave at Les Eglises in the Ariège valley, central Pyrenees.
Nearly 100 meters from the entrance and not entirely out of reach of daylight is a small side turning that leads up to the dead end of the painted gallery, where the semicircular roof and walls form a smooth and continuous surface joining the gravel, clay and sand floor. In its final sections the tunnel becomes lower and narrower so that one cannot stand upright, and it is here in this cramped section that there are clustered eighty rather unimpressive red-painted and carved animals, abstract signs, points and lines.
Alex Hooper told me: "One of the most curious aspects of Les Eglises is why the artists chose such an awkward place to carry out their work. There are many surfaces elsewhere in the cave which would have been more convenient for decoration, and there are also several other narrow galleries just like the painted one which seem to have been ignored (except for some tiny spots of red ochre here and there.)"'
To carry out their experiments, Hooper and Collison installed an electric cable nearly a quarter of a mile long to power a series of floodlights and an ultraviolet lamp. Their intention was to study the response of the cave art to wavelengths of light beyond the ordinary visible range, with the aid of the lamps, special filters and infrared film. They hoped to detect normally imperceptible differences in pigments from one painting to the next, and to see if the sketchy and schematic outlines of animals had once been more complete.
.......But the strangest ancient medical problem of all concerns hands, not heads. In well over twenty caves distributed throughout southwest France and northern Spain, there are dozens of painted hand impressions. These were created by pressing a real hand against the wall and applying color around the edges: the result was a "negative" print like those that children still produce. In one or two small caves, these stenciled hands form the main works of art, but usually, they are relatively inconspicuous, and it is animal compositions that chiefly catch the eye of the casual visitor to the decorated caves.
Several close studies of these hand impressions have helped to explain the techniques most commonly used in their execution. In most cases, a red or black water paint has been sprayed on, resulting in an even halo of colored droplets of various sizes around the handprint. Because the red pigment (hematite or ocher) is entirely soluble in water and the black (manganese dioxide) is not, the rock soaks up the red coloring more easily. As a result the red hands are usually more fuzzy and less clear than the black ones. It is uncertain exactly how the color was applied; it is usually supposed that the artist took a big mouthful of paint and blew it out between pursed lips to produce a fine mist of color. In experiments supervised by the author, the effect closest to the original hand impressions was obtained by blowing down an elementary spraying device made from a perforated reed.
Here, we might conclude, was a quaint pastime that we might attribute to idle amusement or to magical or religious rituals. In three caves, however, the bizarre nature of the hand outlines lifts the entire problem to a complicated and mysterious level. One of the three caves is called Maltravieso in northern Spain and features about thirty negative prints of hands. Only about a dozen are clearly visible, and of these, only one hand actually possesses all the joints of the fingers and thumb intact. On the other hands, there are two cases of missing thumbs and joints of the little finger. Elsewhere, in the caves of Tibiran and Gargas situated on opposite sides of the same conical hill in the French Pyrenees, more of the extraordinary Mutilated hands appear.
Gargas has the most astonishing collection of these battered handprints. It is not a prepossessing cave; there are broad and rather low-ceilinged chambers, but the limestone is dull, and there are few glistening stalactites to divert the tourist. Yet in places, the sloping walls are covered with clouds of red-and-black hands, beginning close to the floor and mounting, halo after halo, almost out of convenient reach. Unlike Maltravieso, there are no thumbs missing at Gargas, but the catalogue of incomplete finger joints is long and varied. Recent censuses of the hands have resulted in conflicting figures because some are faded and difficult to see. However, there are well over 200 of them, and at least three or four times as many left hands as right. Among these are several intact prints belonging to the undamaged hands of babies only a few months old. Perhaps the most notable fact about the Gargas hands is that over 50 percent display the total loss of the upper joints of all four fingers. While it is certainly possible that the hands were intentionally mutilated because of some strange rite or superstition, the fact that the practice reduced the hand almost to a useless stump is rather surprising.
Photo from: Agenda de la Préhistoire 2002 - 2003, a superb diary with excellent illustrations sent to me by Anya. My thanks as always.
Gargas (Aventignan, Hautes-Pyrénées). Main négative.
But were the mutilations genuine, or are they an illusion? For many years, one of the popular explanations for the painted hands was that the artists were indulging in visual trickery by folding back the joints on undamaged, healthy hands and blowing color around these distorted outlines. Certain facts now make accusations of "cheating" rather unlikely. As far as anyone can tell, the very even spreads of sprayed-on color do not appear to include patches where the handprints could have been retouched or altered after the initial outline was made. More importantly, it is physically impossible to bend down only the top finger joint, which is missing on many of the hands. Experiments also show that it is difficult to create images as sharp as some of those at Gargas using curled-up fingers. Finally, a few of the outlines display oddly flattened or pointed ends to the shortened fingers, and these do look like mutilations rather than concealed joints.
In any case, independent evidence has recently come to light of genuinely mutilated hands in Ice Age France. In 1963, medical expert Dr. Sahly, who was conducting a detailed study of the problem, discovered a handprint with a missing little finger in the soft clay of a small circular chamber not far from the main panels of hands at Gargas. The walls and ceiling of the same chamber also were covered by rows of holes where fingers had obviously been thrust into the clay. Sahly made casts of the insides of some of these holes and revealed the shapes not of rounded fingertips but of scarred stumps, with such details visible as the lips of skin where the injury had healed together. Subsequently, several mutilated handprints were noted in clay at Lascaux, several hundred kilometers north of the Pyrenees, despite the fact that no painted impressions of such hands were seen on the walls of the cave.
The existence of people with severely damaged hands seems to be more or less proven. The key question that remains is whether these injuries were the result of intentional acts or of a crippling disease. There are no clear answers, but certainly, the restricted appearance of the mutilations, concentrated in large numbers only at Gargas, is very puzzling. If it was a cultural practice, it is odd that so distinctive a custom as chopping off fingers should be confined mainly to a sir~gle site and so, presumably, to a single group of hunters. The widespread stenciling of undamaged hands at so many other caves could indicate that the cultural ideas t hat motivated the hand paintirigs were not particularly exceptional but that the physical state of the Gargas subjects was. Incidentally, there are at least twenty cases of repetition at Gargas; the same hand with the same mutilation is obviously present, so that the number of people involved in making these prints may have been quite small. All these arguments tend to favor the explanation of some disease that affected only a tiny proportion of the prehistoric population, perhaps because it was shortlived or hereditary in character. Additional support for this idea may lie in the strange, twisted outlines of so many of the stumps, which perhaps indicate the remnants not of healthy but of terribly deformed fingers.
When a full list is drawn up, there are an alarming number of illnesses (most of them fortunately rare) that have the unpleasant effect of making the fingers wither or drop off. None of the specific, hereditary ailments precisely corresponds to the condition of the painted hands. Among these, Ainhum's disease, which causes the loss of the little finger through degeneration of the bone, seems to fit the case of Maltravieso, except that. the disease leaves behind a stump midway up the joints and not between them, as the majority of the painted outlines seem to show.
A similar hereditary condition, Raynaud's disease, mainly attacks young women in their twenties or earlier, may be promoted by cold and damp, and is a promising explanation for the Gargas hands. This illness afflicts any of the fingers and causes them to wither through gangrene, while the thumb is not affected because of its better circulation. Once again, however, the effects do not strike neatly between each finger joint so that if either of these two infections are responsible it is necessary to imagine the prehistoric victims deliberately having the wasted portion chopped off, perhaps to discourage the spread of the gangrene. The symptoms of many of the other suggested ailments make equally unpleasant reading, and we cannot easily decide which, if any, were responsible for the mutilations. Frostbite, leprosy, and severe arthritis are among the most popular theories.
What sort of "affluent society" can it have been for these unfortunate people at Gargas, if it is true that they really were cripples, able to do little but grasp clumsily with their ravaged hands? Sahlins' ideal vision of hunting and gathering was intended mainly as a criticism of present-day values. Clearly, it provides an inadequate basis for a deep understanding of the ancient past, although it has inspired many recent romanticized accounts of life in prehistoric times. Indeed, we may feet that most moral judgments of hunters, ranging from the aggressive monster to the noble savage, have been subject to the swings of intellectual fashion, and at the moment, no universal model of the hunting past is entirely satisfactory. As the accumulation of material evidence grows in volume and detail, we have to look beyond simple preconceptions and come to terms with a past more complex and unfamiliar than was ever imagined by the philosophers of Turgot's era, two centuries ago.
Hand mutilation still occurs in at least one hunter gatherer society, the Dani of New Guinea.This practice, seen in cave art, reaches back into the Stone Age. In cave art, hand prints in outline are a widespread occurrence. The hands are frequently missing one or all of the fingers; sometimes just a single digit. Was hand mutilation intentional? It indeed may be. The modern Dani of New Guinea offer crucial insight.
When the Dani avenge the death of one of their own, they kill one of the enemy. They also sever the tip of a finger of a young female relative of the victim. Some undergo this ritual for more than one dead relative. The mutilation is performed by a ritual specialist, who first ties a string tightly around the upper arm of the chosen girl. He numbs the finger by striking it hard against a rock. Then he severs one or two fingers at the first joint with a blow from a stone ax. The wound is quickly bound with leaves; she sits quietly for the rest of the day holding the hand upright so healing can begin. Many Dani women are so mutilated, but they go through life with little handicap, able to knit and weave with skill.
