partially cemented sands, silts and gravels beneath the 29- metre- high cliff. He certainly found some precious things. Apart from the reindeer, he also recovered the first known three- dimensional carving of a mammoth made from reindeer antler ( Fig. 3), as well as numerous drawings engraved on bone, antler and stone slabs, tools, hunting and fishing equipment and animal bones. He presented a paper on these discoveries to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris in March 1867, and later that same year brought them to the notice of an even wider public by exhibiting the reindeer and the mammoth at the great Exposition Universelle alongside finds from other recently discovered European sites. Had de l'Isle's motive been financial gain, this would have been the time to sell his finds, given the interest they generated among the international public and academics visiting the Paris exhibition, but, although he never excavated or published anything else, de l'Isle kept the material until the 1880s. Then, in 1884, he showed it in a geographical exhibition in Toulouse. Perhaps he hoped that it would be purchased by the Muséum d'histoire naturelle in that city, but the curator, Emile Cartailhac, whose own fame as an archaeologist was growing, made no attempt to acquire it. So in 1887 de l'Isle offered his collection to the 3 Part of a spear thrower carved from a reindeer antler in the shape of a mammoth. Found at Montastruc, Tarn- et- Garonne, central- southern France. About 13,000 years old, L. 12.4 cm. British Museum 10

11 British Museum for 150,000 francs, approximately equivalent to £ 580,000 today. Augustus Franks, the keeper responsible for the north European archaeological collections at that time, had seen the reindeer in Paris but declined de l'Isle's selling price because it exceeded the Museum's entire annual acquisition budget. Nevertheless, he sent his assistant Charles Read to see the material in Toulouse. Read negotiated and bought the collection for £ 500, equivalent to about £ 30,000 today and half the price of the collection from Courbet Cave, a site just upstream from Montastruc, where engraved drawings of animals on bone had been excavated in 1864. Appropriately, Franks purchased the Montastruc collection with funds bequeathed by Henry Christy, a Victorian entrepreneur who used his fortune made in industry to excavate caves in south- west France. Christy's discoveries in collaboration with the great French palaeontologist Edouard Lartet in 1864- 5 had proved beyond doubt that, at a time when it was much colder, people had coexisted with mammoths and other animals now extinct in Western Europe, such as reindeer, saïga antelope, musk ox and bison. Peccadeau de l'Isle's place in history Today it is the great painted caves of Altamira in Spain and Niaux, Lascaux, Pech Merle and Chauvet in France that dominate our ideas of Ice Age art, but none of these sites was known when the Swimming Reindeer were unearthed at Montastruc. The first painted cave to be discovered was at Altamira, near Santander, in 1880. Inspired by seeing artworks such as the reindeer in France, the owner of the Altamira site, Marcelino de Sautuola, started to excavate at the entrance to the cave in the hope of finding similar pieces. His daughter, Maria, wandered further in and saw a fresco of bulls painted on the ceiling of an inner chamber. De Sautuola published the discovery but the paintings were regarded as fakes because they were so fresh and modern in appearance. Gradually other painted sites were found but it was not until 1904 that his detractors admitted they had been wrong and accepted the antiquity of sites with painted and engraved pictures on the walls.