The Valley of Marvels

For centuries, the only visitors to the snowbound "Valley of Marvels," high in the Alps of Southeastern France, were shepherds and mountain climbers who risked the punishing 6,000-ft. trek from the village of St.-Dalmas-de-Tende, 30 miles northeast of Nice. The travelers all brought back tales of mysterious rock carvings, but no one could explain their origin. Were the ancient artists some Carthaginians who once lived in the region? Were they prehistoric men? Now, as a result of on-site study by a French archaeologist, the secrets of the carvings are beginning to come clear.

Henry de Lumley, who has led many teams of volunteer explorers into the valley during snow-free summer months, believes that the primitive art was inscribed between 1800 B.C. and 1500 B.C. Thus the carvings belong "not to prehistory but to protohistory--that period of roughly 2,000 years between prehistoric times and recorded history." De Lumley's dating involved shrewd detective work in museums. The short, triangular dagger blades portrayed in many of the engravings, for instance, closely resemble artifacts already identified as products of early Bronze Age (1800 B.C.-1500 B.C.) civilizations in the Rhone Valley and Swiss lake villages. Other daggers with either oval or elongated blades, concave edges and T-shaped hilts are typical of middle Bronze Age weapons made between 1500 B.C. and 1100 B.C.

The Bronze Age artists used a curious technique; with a tool made from hard rock, possibly quartz, they hammered or scraped groups of closely spaced small holes, 1 mm. to 5 mm. in diameter. Significantly, the most painstakingly executed samples of valley craftsmanship are found in the earliest engravings. Later artists were content with fewer and larger holes, and their work became blurred and uneven.

The engravings include a rich but baffling array of symbols. The most frequently recurring images are horned figures--what De Lumley calls "stylized cattle." There are also daggers, crosslike inscriptions, stars and geometric forms, all of which may have had religious significance. Only a few hundred of the 37,000 engravings catalogued thus far portray human figures: one example, known as the "Chief of the Tribe," shows a man formed almost entirely out of horn symbols.

With the aid of a computer at the University of Aix-Marseille, De Lumley hopes eventually to index all of the valley's more than 200,000 engravings. That could help him to interpret the obscure symbols and learn more about the men who carved them. All that he will say now is that the valley "appears to have been a sacred place in the Bronze Age. But by the beginning of the first millennium (100 B.C.), its message was lost."

Unfortunately, the valley's treasure may also soon be lost. It is now being threatened by an onslaught of tourists and souvenir hunters who use chalk or abrasive stone on the engravings to make them stand out more clearly for snapshots. Some vandals have even hacked engravings out of rock faces or carted off entire slabs. "If this keeps up," De Lumley warns, "in 50 years the Valley of Marvels, the most remarkable cultural treasure of the Alps, will have been destroyed."

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