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9 Chapter 1 Discovering Ice Age art European art enjoyed a renaissance during the final 5,000 years of the last Ice Age. The great friezes in the famous caves of Lascaux, Niaux, Pech Merle and Altamira were painted during this period and there was an extraordinary flourish in the decoration of objects, particularly in the Pyrenean region. The Swimming Reindeer is among the greatest of the many miniature or so- called ' portable' masterpieces found from this period, and one of just a few pieces produced as a sculpture rather than a three-dimensional carving to decorate a tool or weapon. The story of its discovery also brings to light the unveiling of a world of art unknown before the late nineteenth century. A precious find at Montastruc In the 1860s the French railway network was expanding rapidly. From the main Paris to Toulouse line, a spur was built to the north- east that would link Montauban and Rodez. For part of its length this line followed the left bank of the river Aveyron through a picturesque valley near the village of Bruniquel. Just downstream from there, the Orléans Railway Company purchased land for the tracks to run between the river and a steep limestone cliff called Montastruc Rock. Here, beneath the cliff overhang romanticized in a late nineteenth- century engraving ( Fig. 2), an employee of the railway company, Peccadeau de l'Isle, found the Swimming Reindeer. The work was then in two separate pieces, and would not be recognized as forming a single sculpture until 1905. We know very little about Peccadeau de l'Isle. Given his responsibilities for overseeing the construction of the railway, we may assume that he was a man with a reasonable level of education who, nonetheless, had to work for his living. In 1903 the archaeologist Emile Cartailhac described de l'Isle's work at Montastruc as ' thorough and very observant', but we can only guess at his motives for digging through a thickness of nearly seven metres of 2 Romantic view of Montastruc rockshelter, drawn by Louis Figuier and published as an engraving in his book Primitive Man( 1870).