How do we know if something is a remnant of a religion or not? How can we, now, with our ideas about the world, say if something from ages ago (say the Lascaux Cave) is a leftover from some ancient religion? How could people thousands of year from now, unearthing a church, determine if the place had religious meaning or not? There must be some hard-and-fast way of figuring out ... but what does it entail?

One clue might be the art on the walls-- how it is done, what sort of composition it has, and if there are recurring figures of any kind. The main thing is to look for something that might be representing a deity or object of worship. The cave at Lascaux doesn't seem to have such objects of worship-- there are many animals of several kinds, but no animal seems to be more important than the others, at least from a visual point of view. The bulls, horses, and deer are for the most part drawn in groups, with no particular reigning figure. The composition of the images is also fairly uniform-- that is, most of the figures are of similar sizes and similarly distributed throughout the paintings, with no special treatment for any one being. There really doesn't seem to be an object of worship in these caves, so perhaps the purpose of the paintings was more spiritual (in the sense of general reverence) or cultural (in the sense of "these are the things we like to kill and eat") rather than precisely religious.

The frequency of use is another clue to the purpose of these caves. They weren't the popular hang-out spots, but rather a place visited seldom by few people. This points to a rite of passage, perhaps, or some sort of inner sanctum. This could be religious, but the group worship aspect of traditional religions is contradicted by the lack of evidence of large groups. It is quite possible that the caves were the retreat of the priest figures, and they came out to minister to the masses -- but not particularly likely. It seems to me that it is much more likely that these cave paintings had a connection to some rite of passage, becoming a man or woman, rather than a strictly religious purpose.