Following the pioneer studies of Lartet, the history of the art of the Reindeer Period, as manifested in bone, ivory, and the engraved and sculptured horns of the deer, occupied the last thirty-five years of the life of Edouard Piette,(19) a magistrate of Craonne who pursued this delightful subject as an avocation. He was a pioneer in the interpretation of _l'art mobilier_, the mobile art. It must be remembered that in Piette's time the fourfold divisions of Upper Palæolithic culture so familiar to us were only partly perceived; his studies, in fact, related chiefly to the mobile art of Magdalenian times, and he undertook to follow its modifications in every successive grotto, beginning with his brochure _La Grotte de Gourdan_, in 1873, in which he first announced the idea which underlay all his later conclusions, that sculpture preceded line engraving and etching. He divided the art into a series of phases; that of the red deer (_Cervus elaphus_) he termed _Elaphienne_, that of the reindeer _Tarandienne_, that of the horse _Hippiquienne_, and that of the wild cattle _Bovidienne_. In concluding this early work of 1873, he remarked: "To write the history of Magdalenian art is to give the history of primitive art itself." He observed that in sculpturing the horn of the reindeer the artist was obliged to work in the hard exterior bone and to avoid the spongy interior; this defect in material suggested the invention of the bas-relief. The statuette he regarded as the assemblage of two bas-reliefs, one on either side of the bone. Thus he described the ivory head of the woman of Brassempouy, the only human face of Upper Palæolithic times which is even fairly well represented; also the two imperfect feminine torsos in ivory. In 1897, at the age of seventy, Piette undertook his last excavations, and the sum of his labors is preserved for us in the magnificent volume entitled _l'Art pendant l'âge du Renne_, published in 1907.