About Rupestre.art
How it started
Rupestre.art began in front of a painted wall. I visited the replicas of Chauvet and Lascaux, and standing in those halls I was amazed. I walked out wanting one thing: more. Where else had people painted like this? How far do these caves reach across the world?
So I did what anyone does — I searched. I expected the first result to be an interactive map, a full database of all the cave paintings in the world: something to explore, pick a point and read what waits inside. There was nothing like this. A few static maps in books, a few academic PDFs, and that was it. Nothing interactive, nothing you could explore.
So I decided to build it.
What it's for
Rupestre.art exists to make cave art easy to discover and easy to learn about. This art is real, it is astonishing, and it is scattered — across journals, museum sites and old books. Here it lives on one map: every site placed, dated and sourced, whether you come out of curiosity or for research.
You don't need to be an archaeologist here. Explore the map, follow a timeline, roll a random site — and learn as you go: what was painted, how it was made, and how we know its age. Then take it further: many of these places can actually be visited, and each one says honestly whether you'll stand before the original, a replica, or neither.
And if the atlas does its job, you'll leave with questions it cannot answer. What did these images mean to the people who painted them? What were the artists trying to say, deep in the dark, with ochre and charcoal? Nobody knows for certain — and once you start wondering, the art has you.
How it is made
The catalogue is curated by hand: sites are added one by one, sources first, and every fact on a site's page carries a citation you can open and check. The links are re-checked regularly so the citations don't become outdated, and the claims are reviewed against the sources that are supposed to support them.
The photographs are the one automated step — they are fetched from Wikimedia Commons through its public API, never taken from museums' or photographers' websites, and only under free licenses, each shown with the attribution its license requires. A person decides which photos stay and which are removed. And for sites whose imagery holds living cultural significance to Indigenous communities, the atlas shows a drawn glyph instead of photographs.
Every site has a one-to-five "spectacle" rating. It is our own judgment of how impressive the art is, following written rules — and there is no limit per level: if ten sites deserve the top rating, all ten get it.
We also keep it honest: photos of replicas are labelled as replicas, and anything we cannot verify is left out.
The site is built with Next.js and Leaflet over OpenStreetMap tiles, statically generated in four languages, with no tracking beyond anonymous performance metrics.
About me
I'm Călin, a software developer — and, since those two cave visits, I also run an atlas of Ice Age rock art in my spare time.
Corrections make it better. If you spot an error — a wrong date, a misattributed photograph, a site that deserves to be here and isn't — once pointed out, it gets fixed.