In 1940, four teenagers discovered the Lascaux cave. The tourist appeal of this monument to prehistoric cave art was considerable: between 1948 and 1963, a million visitors flocked to Montignac. The town prospered accordingly, and even changed its name to Montignac-Lascaux. However, the cave’s fragile climatic equilibrium suffered from over-exploitation by tourists. In 1963, the cave was closed to the public, depriving the world of an exceptional heritage and the people of Montignac of the driving force behind their economic development.

How do you show Lascaux to visitors without giving them access to Lascaux? In 1983, the solution was found, 300 metres from the cave: Lascaux 2, a concrete facsimile that reproduces, on a scale of 1, the volumes, reliefs, and monumental paintings of the cave. Lascaux 2 is a resounding success: with almost 300,000 visitors a year, it will remain the most visited site in Dordogne until 2016. At every level, the copy works like the real thing: even today, visitors to Lascaux 2 claim to have seen the original. In the media, we now hear people talk about “the Lascaux caves.” In this way, Lascaux is moving from the singular to the plural, while its multiplication into cultural offerings continues. In 2012, facsimiles of the Lascaux 3 exhibition began touring. In 2016, the Lascaux 4 replica opened in Montignac, succeeding Lascaux 2 as the most visited site in Dordogne. In 2021, at the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, visitors can virtually explore the 3D digitization of the cave. Today, Lascaux is available in a panorama of analog and digital copies, online and in museums, from Montignac to Shanghai, via Paris and Chicago.

In this paper, I propose to present the results of my research into the multiplication of Lascaux to restore this invisible heritage to the public. I will introduce the epistemological significance of the gesture of substitution, before addressing the underlying museological issues. How can we restore a “carbon copy” of a site that consists of a succession of original states and original experiences; should the act of substitution be confined to the mechanisms of analogy, at a time when new communication media make it possible to go beyond the experience of the original by providing a version of Lascaux optimized for mass tourism? What does the future hold for the cave, as digitization technologies encapsulate reality to bend it to all the uses that the original is no longer able to assume?

These questions about heritage copying have been at the heart of my research since my master’s degree, and right up to today in my doctorate, where I’m studying this particular case of the Lascaux caves by investigating the image professionals who participated in the production of seven analog tour devices.