Prehistoric rock engravings of the Fontainebleau Forest

Several thousand petroglyphs have been discovered in the forest, with earliest dating to the Paleolithic (very few examples), roughly 2000 to the early Mesolithic and almost 300 to the late Bronze Age.

The most readily visible to the casual observer are largely non-figurative collections of repetitive geometric patterns, usually found in larger rock shelters, some of which were inhabited by Mesolithic peoples.

The second, much smaller, group is a series of several hundred figurative engravings that were only recently discovered (2014) in a much more circumscribed area of the Fontainebleau Forest.

[2] A formal inventory conducted by volunteer archeologists documented the presence of such rock etchings in more than 2000 cavities of boulders in the Fontainebleau Forest.

Thus, the engravings “were technically simple to make with easy-to-access tools and therefore could have been carried out by a large number of people, during rather short periods of time.” [5] A less abundant group of largely figurative rock engravings was discovered by archeologists in 2014 in a smaller area (about 30 square kilometers[7]) within, roughly, the southeast quadrant of the Fontainebleau Forest.

Etched with shallow grooves,[7] these elaborate panels are small (often not exceeding 10 centimeters) and depict a rich set of images that are repeated across different sites.

These include human and semi-human figures as well as animals (birds, snakes, deer, oxen) and human-made objects (sleds, scepters, rattles and head dresses).

[8] Also etched with shallow grooves and located in small cavities, these engravings are rarely figurative and the size of the panels is somewhat larger on average than those of the Malmontagne school.

[9]:17 Furthermore, the apparently deliberate attempt to ‘hide’ the petroglyphs shows a desire for discretion, even secrecy, on the part of their creators and raises questions about the role they played in this Bronze Age culture.

[9]:97 Second, the presence of images of sleds being pulled by oxen shows that the Malmontagne peoples domesticated animals, meaning the etchings could not have been created earlier than the late Neolithic.