Montesquieu-Avantès () is a
commune in the
Ariège department
Department may refer to:
* Departmentalization, division of a larger organization into parts with specific responsibility
Government and military
*Department (administrative division), a geographical and administrative division within a country, ...
in southwestern
France
France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...
.
History
Montesquieu-Avantès has a significant prehistory in the
Pyrenees
The Pyrenees (; es, Pirineos ; french: Pyrénées ; ca, Pirineu ; eu, Pirinioak ; oc, Pirenèus ; an, Pirineus) is a mountain range straddling the border of France and Spain. It extends nearly from its union with the Cantabrian Mountains to C ...
. The cave-complex was carved out by the
Volp River resulting in three extensive caverns: ,
Trois-Frères and
Tuc d'Audoubert. They were discovered by the Begouën children on 10 October 1912.
The caves contain unique works of art. The Salle des Bisons features two masterfully modelled bison, which were sculpted in clay with a stone spatula-like tool 17,000 years ago and show the imprint of the artist's fingers. The pair are among the largest and finest surviving prehistoric sculptures.
Occupied in the
Upper Palaeolithic
The Upper Paleolithic (or Upper Palaeolithic) is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. Very broadly, it dates to between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago (the beginning of the Holocene), according to some theories coin ...
, notably during the
Magdalenian Epoch, the caves have been extensively studied. These works on Tuc d'Audoubert were compiled in 2009 in a monograph entitled "The Secret Sanctuary of the Bison". A subsequent book entitled "The Cave of the Three Brothers" ("La Caverne des Trois-Frères")
[.] documents a century of research. It was published in 2014 on the centenary of its discovery, on 20 July 1914.
These extremely fragile caves are closed to the public for the purposes of preservation.
Montesquieu
Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (; ; 18 January 168910 February 1755), generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French judge, man of letters, historian, and political philosopher.
He is the principa ...
was a country house founded in 1272 on the initiative of the Comte de Comminges Bernard VI.
Population
See also
*
Communes of the Ariège department
The following is a list of the 327 Communes of France, communes of the Ariège (department), Ariège Departments of France, department of France.
The communes cooperate in the following Communes of France#Intercommunality, intercommunalities (a ...
References
Communes of Ariège (department)
Ariège communes articles needing translation from French Wikipedia
{{Ariège-geo-stub