Preshistoric Art

Subdivided into two:

Neolithic Art
Neolithic Art, the art and architecture of the prehistoric period stretching roughly from 7000 to
3000 BC, and later in some regions. The Neolithic period began when humankind first developed
agriculture and settled in permanent enclaves; it ended when the discovery of bronze led to the
more advanced Bronze Age.

Pottery was the prime medium of Neolithic art; other important artistic expressions were statuary
of the universally worshiped Mother Goddess and megalithic stone monuments devoted to
religion or cults of the dead. Neolithic pottery has been found throughout the Neolithic regions,
from the Middle East through North Africa and the Mediterranean to Europe and the British
Isles. It is usually rather plain, with simple decorations—triangles, spirals, wavy lines, and other
geometric forms—incised on its rough or polished surfaces. Depending on the particular culture
of its origin, such pottery may be cast in forms that mimic baskets, gourds, bells, or leather sacks.

The most important Neolithic stone monuments are the menhirs (large upright stones, also called
megaliths) of Brittany in France and the immense stone circles of England, the most important of
which is Stonehenge, dating from about 3000 BC to about 1000 BC. These are extremely
significant landmarks in the development of art, because they represent the beginnings of
architecture in the West.

Paleolithic ‘ICE AGE” Art

Cave Painting, Lascaux
This portion of a cave painting in what is now Lascaux, France, was done by Paleolithic artists about 13,000 BC. The
leaping cow and group of small horses were painted with red and yellow ochre that was either blown through reeds
onto the wall or mixed with animal fat and applied with reeds or thistles. It is believed that prehistoric hunters
painted these in order to gain magical powers that would ensure a successful hunt.
Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York
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Chauvet Cave Art

The Chauvet cave paintings in southeastern France are some of the oldest and most spectacular examples of Ice
Age art ever found. The red and black drawings and engravings depict a wide range of animals, from the more
common horses and bison to the rarer lions and rhinoceroses. The paintings have been dated to 32,000 years ago.
Ministere De La Culture/Liaison Agency
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Venus of Willendorf
This so-called Venus figurine from the area of Willendorf, Austria, is one of the earliest known examples of
sculpture, dating from about 23,000 BC. The figure, which is carved out of limestone, is only 11.25 cm (4.5 in) high,
and was probably designed to be held in the hand. It is believed the Venus may be a fertility symbol, which would
explain the exaggerated female anatomy.
Ali Meyer/Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2007. © 1993-2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Aboriginal Rock Art

This rock painting from Queensland depicts a human figure (probably a woman) and an animal with young (possibly
kangaroos). The figures are painted in red ochre. The earliest Aboriginal rock paintings may date back more than
30,000 years. Although their meaning is a matter of debate, they exhibit remarkable consistency in iconography,
materials, and technique.
TMT Fuji/Liaison Agency
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Engraved Mammoth Tusk

This engraved mammoth tusk, dating from 25,000 to 30,000 years ago, was found at Dolní Věstonice, an important
archaeological site in the Czech Republic. An artist of the Paleolithic era is thought to have engraved it using a
sharp tool made of flint.
The Natural History Museum, London
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2007. © 1993-2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

I INTRODUCTION

Paleolithic Art, art produced from about 32,000 to 11,000 years ago, during the Stone Age. It falls into
two main categories: portable pieces, such as small figurines or decorated objects, and cave art. The
portable art was carved out of bone, antler, or stone, or modeled in clay. It has been found in much of
Europe, in Northern Africa, and in Siberia. Cave art, discovered primarily in northern Spain and
southern France, takes the form of paintings, drawings, and engravings on cave walls. A possible third
category comprises pictures and symbols engraved on rock surfaces in the open air, but very little of
this art has survived.

II DISCOVERY

Paleolithic art was first discovered in the 1860s, when French paleontologist Edouard Lartet found
portable decorated objects in caves and rock shelters in southwestern France. The objects were
recognized as ancient by their proximity to Stone Age tools and the bones of Ice Age animals. The
discoveries triggered a craze for digging in caves in search of objects, but little attention was paid to
the drawings on the walls.
A local landowner’s discovery in 1880 of Paleolithic paintings in the Spanish cave of Altamira was
greeted at first with skepticism by archaeologists. In 1895 walls covered with engravings were
discovered in the cave of La Mouthe, in the Dordogne region of southwestern France. Rubble had
previously blocked the entrance to this cave, and Paleolithic deposits in the rubble indicated that the
cave paintings were of considerable age. In 1901 engravings were found in the cave of Les
Combarelles and paintings in nearby Font de Gaume, in the same region of France as La Mouthe. In
1902 archaeologists publicly recognized the existence of cave art. Thereafter, numerous new sites
were revealed, and discoveries continue, especially in France and Spain. In 1994 a Frenchman named
Jean-Marie Chauvet discovered a cave in the Ardèche Valley of southeastern France. The Chauvet cave
contains paintings of a wide variety of animals that date back 32,000 years, making them the oldest
cave paintings yet discovered.

Until recently, very little Paleolithic art had been found outside of caves. But since 1981,
archaeologists have discovered a number of outdoor sites in Spain, Portugal, Australia, and South
Africa. In 1994, along the River Côa in northeastern Portugal, explorers came across rocks engraved
with human figures, horses, ibex, and wild cattle. The artists apparently hammered dotted outlines of
the animals and then connected the dots with scored lines. Archaeologists estimate that these
paintings are about 20,000 years old. Scientists now believe that such art may have been quite
common, although little of it has survived erosion by wind and rain.

III SUBJECT MATTER

Paleolithic art usually is classified as either figurative—that is, depicting animals or humans, or
nonfigurative, taking the form of signs and symbols.

The most commonly depicted animal species in Paleolithic art vary according to period and region.
Cave art most often portrays horses and bison, although mammoth or deer dominate at particular
sites. Fish and birds are occasionally found in cave paintings or engravings, but are far more plentiful
in portable art. Representations of insects and plants have been found in only a few portable objects.

Nearly all animals in cave paintings are drawn in profile, most of them adults of a recognizable species.
Many of these images are incomplete or ambiguous, however, and a few are of imaginary creatures,
such as the unicorn depicted in a cave in Lascaux, France. The number of figures represented in cave
paintings ranges from a few in some caves to several hundred in caves such as Lascaux or Les Trois
Frères, also in France. Because of the difficulty of demonstrating a deliberate relationship among
drawings, scholars have identified only a small number of scenes, or pictures in which figures interact.
More often, juxtapositions appear coincidental, and in some cases images are layered on top of each
other.

Human images are rare in cave paintings but more frequent in portable art. Small female statuettes
known as Venus figures, with exaggerated breasts, abdomen, and hips, have been found principally in
central Europe. The so-called Venus figurine from the area of Willendorf, Austria (23,000? BC,
Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria) is one of the best-known examples.
Signs and symbols are far more abundant in cave art than depictions of humans or animals. Markings
range from a single dot or line to a large panel of complexly grouped linear marks. In some cases
these signs are totally isolated in a cave, but in other cases they appear alongside figurative images.
The simpler symbolic motifs, including handprints outlined in colored earth, are abundant and
widespread. Some scholars believe that the more complex series of marks, found in only a few places,
could be ethnic markers for groups of Paleolithic people.

IV THE MEANING OF CAVE ART

Scholars first thought cave art was purely decorative, with no complex meanings. As they made
further discoveries, meaningful patterns began to emerge, raising certain questions. Why did artists
depict a limited range of species? Why do so many paintings, drawings, and engravings appear in
inaccessible places within caves? Why were some caves decorated but apparently not inhabited?
Mysterious symbols, figures that are purposely incomplete or ambiguous, and certain associations of
figures all seem to indicate that there is some underlying meaning to this art. Although most of these
questions remain unanswered, scholars have explored a number of theories.

According to a theory popular in the early 20th century, Stone Age people drew pictures of animals for
the purpose of affecting real animals in some way. Those who supported this theory saw ritual and
magic in every aspect of Paleolithic art. They concluded, for example, that ritual destruction was the
reason for the large number of broken decorated objects found on cave floors, and that superimposing
darts or other weapons on the images of some animals may have been intended to ensure successful
hunting. However, ritual breakage is still a debatable theory, and the arguments for ritual painting of
weapons are not conclusive either. Very few Paleolithic animal figures have weapons drawn on them,
weapons also appear on some human figures, and many caves have no images of this type at all.
Other problems with the theory include the absence of any clear hunting scenes and the fact that
animal bones found in many decorated caves are not of the same species as those depicted on the
walls.

Another popular theory proposes that cave art served as fertility magic. According to this theory,
humans drew pictures of animals that they hoped would reproduce and provide food in the future. Yet
artists very seldom indicated the gender of the animals shown, and genitalia are rarely emphasized in
the drawings. Copulation appears in only one or two questionable examples. Some scholars are
exploring a variation on this theory: that cave art was created in a ritual of renewal and that redrawing
a picture each year, sometimes directly on top of an old drawing, was intended to ensure the return of
that species each spring.

Two French scholars, Annette Laming-Emperaire and André Leroi-Gourhan, put forth a theory in the
late 1950s that cave art had been created in carefully composed configurations within each cave. They
saw the animal pictures not as portraits of animals, but as symbols. Because images of horses and
bison, the most common by far, were typically concentrated in central panels, they concluded that
these two dominant images represented a basic duality, which they understood to be male and
female.

Some researchers are currently attempting to develop criteria for identifying the work of individual
artists, who may have been women or men. Other researchers have found that the most richly
decorated panels appear in caves with especially good acoustics, suggesting that sound played an
important part in any ceremonies that might have accompanied the making of cave art.

Many other theories are under investigation, but no single explanation is likely to apply to all
Paleolithic art, since it comprises artwork created over a period of at least 20,000 years and from
widely varying parts of the world.

V METHODS AND MATERIALS

Paleolithic artists made objects from a variety of materials. They made simple forms by modifying
natural objects—making holes in teeth, shells, and bones, or carving them to form beads or pendants.
Beads, bracelets, and armlets were also made out of ivory. Engraved drawings appear on small flat
stones, flat bones, the shafts of bones, and antlers. The vast majority of Paleolithic statuettes are
made of ivory or soft stone, but a few clay figurines of humans and animals have survived.

Art on cave walls was created using an astonishing variety of techniques. Some images incorporate
the natural contours of the rock or of mineral formations known as stalagmites to represent or
accentuate parts of animal figures. Other marks come from fingers pressed into a soft layer of clay
that covered the rock. In some caves, finger lines trace recognizable figures in clay. Work in clay,
found only in sites in the Pyrenees Mountains of southwestern Europe, also includes engravings in cave
floors and low-relief figures modeled in artificial clay mounds. Cave artists modeled bison in high relief
in the French cave of Le Tuc d’Audoubert, while at the cave of Montespan, also in France, a three-
dimensional bear sculpture was formed out of about 700 kg (about 1500 lb) of clay.

Wall sculpture, in both low and high relief, has only been discovered in the central regions of France,
where the limestone could be shaped. Traces of red pigment remain on almost all wall sculptures,
evidence that, like most portable art, they were once painted.

The red pigment used to paint on cave walls consists of iron oxide, found in clays and ores, while the
black pigment is manganese or charcoal. These materials were usually available locally. Analysis of
these pigments has revealed that artists used recipes to prepare paint, combining pigments with talc
or feldspar to increase their bulk and adding animal and plant oils to bind the materials.

One of the simplest methods available to paleolithic painters would have been to apply the pigment
with their own fingers, but researchers believe cave artists also developed specific tools for painting.
Experiments suggest that animal-hair brushes or crushed twigs would have made good tools. Lumps of
pigment discovered on cave floors could have been used as crayons, but were more likely sources of
powder, as they do not mark rocks well. To produce some of the dots and figures as well as the hand
stencils (made by placing the hand flat on the cave wall), artists must have sprayed paint (a solution of
powdered pigment, water, and possibly some form of oil used as binder) directly from their mouths or
through a tube. Artists also painted figures on the ceilings of caves. In some caves, the ceilings were
too high to reach without a ladder or scaffolding. At Lascaux, cave walls show holes where scaffolding
may have been attached.

Hearths sometimes provided light in caves, but deep within caves artists would have needed a
portable source of light. Archaeologists have found only a few dozen stone lamps, suggesting that
torches were more often used for light. Fragments of charcoal on cave walls offer evidence that
torches were burned inside caves.

The size of cave paintings varies enormously, but some of the largest exceed 2 m (6.5 ft) in length,
and drawings of bulls at Lascaux measure as long as 5.5 m (18 ft). Small figures commonly appear
together with large ones in seemingly random relationships, with no ground lines or other landscape
elements to unify them in a single picture.

VI DATING

Since the late 1940s scientists have used a process known as the radiocarbon dating method to
determine the date of many archaeological finds with a fair degree of accuracy; the process analyzes
the carbon contained in an object. Since 1989, advances in radiocarbon dating have allowed scientists
to obtain this information even from minute amounts of pigment, so that the method can now be used
to pinpoint the age of cave paintings. These tests have revealed that certain figures on the same walls
were created at different times, accumulating gradually over a long period of time.

Most of the oldest art found in Europe and Asia consists of small animal and human figurines. These
figurines were carved from ivory and stone about 32,000 years ago and excavated at sites in
southwestern Germany and Austria. The first cave paintings close to this age were discovered in 1995
in the Chauvet cave in France. Tests on charcoal from paintings of woolly rhinoceroses and bison in the
cave indicate that these images, although similar in style and sophistication to much later cave art, are
about 32,000 years old, making them the earliest dated paintings in the world.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2007. © 1993-2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

The Mystery of Ice Age Art

Who were the world's first artists? Why did they create art? In an article for Encarta Yearbook,
archaeologist Paul G. Bahn examines the cave art of Europe in search of answers to these questions.

The Mystery of Ice Age Art

By Paul G. Bahn

In late December 1994 three French spelunkers (cave explorers) squeezed themselves into a
crevice in a cliff in the Ardéche Valley in southeastern France. Inside, they discovered a huge,
well-preserved cave with about 300 ancient wall paintings and engravings (figures cut into the
stone). The images included lions, bison, bears, mammoths, rhinoceroses, and horses, as well as
renderings of human hands and different types of symbols and designs. The find greatly excited
archaeologists and other scholars, as the paintings proved to be the oldest examples of cave art
ever discovered.
Archaeologists and anthropologists have been studying this type of art for more than a century. It
is known as Paleolithic art, because it dates from the end of the Paleolithic period of the Stone
Age, from about 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. It is also sometimes referred to as Ice Age art,
because most of it was created before the last Ice Age ended about 10,000 to 13,000 years ago.
The recent discovery, dubbed the Chauvet cave after one of the explorers who found it, is one of
the biggest in a growing list of Ice Age art finds.

History of Ice Age Art

The existence of Ice Age art was first established and accepted through the discovery of small
decorated objects—beads, figurines, small carvings, or engravings on pieces of stone, bone,
antler, or ivory—in a number of caves and rock-shelters in southwestern France in the early
1860s. Archaeologists refer to these objects as portable art because they can be transported.
Edouard Lartet, a French scholar, and Henry Christy, a London industrialist, were the main early
figures in the field of portable Paleolithic art. Working together, their finds included a bear's
head engraved on an antler, discovered in Massat in the French Pyrenees, and a mammoth
engraved on a fragment of mammoth ivory, from the Dordogne region of France. The objects
were clearly ancient, since they were found with early tools of stone and bone, and with the
bones of Ice Age animals.
Wall paintings were slower to achieve recognition as Paleolithic art. A major site for cave
drawings was found in Spain at the cave of Altamira by a local landowner in 1879, but experts
were slow to recognize the art as authentic. After a number of other discoveries, including one at
La Mouthe in Dordogne in 1895, experts legitimized the cave drawings as Paleolithic art. With
more and more people looking for such sites, discoveries became more common and still
continue in Europe—even today, an average of one such cave per year is found in France and
Spain.

Cave Art Locales

Important finds are not limited to these two countries, however. Portable art objects are found
from North Africa to Siberia, with large concentrations throughout Europe. Tens of thousands of
artifacts are known. Some sites yield few or no objects, while others contain hundreds or even
thousands of items of portable art.
The distribution of cave art is equally patchy, although it is most abundant in areas which are
also rich in decorated objects, such as the Périgord region in southwestern France, the French
Pyrenees, and northern Spain. Cave art has been found from Portugal and the very south of Spain
to the north of France. A few sites have been found in southwestern Germany, and there are
concentrations in Sicily and other areas of Italy. A handful of caves are also known in the former
Yugoslavia, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Russia.
The current total for Europe is about 300 cave painting sites. Some contain only one or a few
figures on the walls, while others like Lascaux in southwestern France or Les Trois Frères in the
French Pyrenees have many hundreds.
In the past few decades rock art of similar age has also been discovered in many other parts of
the world. In southern Africa, the Apollo 11 cave was excavated in Namibia in 1969, with
animal paintings on small slabs dating to about 27,500 years ago. Beginning in the 1980s, rock
shelters were investigated in various parts of Argentina and Brazil that contained paintings
dating back at least 11,000 years.
One of the most notable finds came in 1993 in Australia where, at the Carpenter's Gap rock-
shelter in the remote Kimberley region, what seemed to be a fallen fragment of painted wall was
found. Charcoal found in the same layer as the fragment has been dated to more than 39,000
years ago, which would suggest the painting is at least that old. Dates obtained from a rock
varnish covering some other Australian engravings suggest that the drawings may date back
more than 40,000 years, making them the oldest known examples of rock art in the world.
Further study is needed to confirm these dates.
However, for all the years of study and further discoveries, many questions remain about this
most ancient type of art. Who were the artists? How did they produce the art? And perhaps most
importantly, why? What purpose did the art serve a people whose lives were short, arduous
struggles to survive? Experts hope that discoveries such as the Chauvet cave will help answer
these questions in the future.

Treasures of the Chauvet Cave

The 1994 discovery by Jean-Marie Chauvet, a warden with the Regional Archaeological Service
in the Ardèche region of France, and two companions was groundbreaking for a number of
reasons. First, the cave appeared completely intact, since its original entrance was blocked
sometime during the Ice Age. This meant that the cave floor was just as the Paleolithic artists left
it, making it possible to study any footprints, tools, bones, and pigments that remained on the
floor.
Second, although the cave's images included the animals found most frequently in European cave
art (horses, bison, wild ox, deer), they were dominated by tremendous figures of rhinoceroses
and big cats (such as lions). Images of these animals are known in other caves, but are extremely
rare and tend to occur in hidden or remote areas rather than in central panels. Previously only
about 30 images of rhinoceroses were known from other cave art finds. The Chauvet cave
suddenly provided at least 60 more such images, many of them with a thick black stripe around
their waist never seen before.
Third, the cave's figures displayed great skill, a mastery of several painting techniques, and a
whole range of ways of showing perspective. Specialists therefore assumed, through comparison
with art in other caves, that the paintings and engravings here belonged to some of the later
stages of the last Ice Age, from more than 20,000 to perhaps 12,000 years ago. However, when
charcoal from three figures—two “fighting” rhinos and a bison—underwent radiocarbon
analysis, it produced dates of 30,000 to 20,000 years ago, far older than expected and the earliest
direct date for any paintings in the world.

Ancient Artists

The people who produced these paintings and other works were Stone Age hunter-gatherers,
some of the earliest of modern humans. Living before the spread of modern agriculture, these
humans were forced to move around in search of food. Caves were a natural source of shelter
from the elements, and it is believed that the early people incorporated certain caves into their
seasonal visits to different parts of Europe. However, very little is known about the social
structures or culture of these peoples, sometimes referred to as Cro-Magnon. Experts view the
cave art as perhaps the only way to learn more about these ancestors of present-day Europeans.

How Ice Age Art Was Made

Paleolithic art was produced in many different ways. The so-called portable art was made out of
natural objects—fossils, teeth, shells, or bones—as well as materials such as stone, clay, or ivory.
These materials were either used as a surface for paintings or engravings, or worked to make
jewelry, figures, and other items. Cave art comprises an astonishing variety and mastery of
techniques. The simplest method of marking cave walls was by running fingers over them,
leaving traces in the soft layer of clay. This technique, perhaps the most ancient of all, probably
spans the whole period and may have been inspired by the abundance of clawmarks of cave-
bears and other animals on the walls.
Engraving, as in portable art, is by far the most common technique on cave walls, with incisions
ranging from the fine and barely visible to broad deep lines. Scratching and scraping were also
used at times, where the wall was too rough for fine incisions, or to create a difference in color
between the light scraped area and the darker surroundings. The tools used for engraving varied
from crude picks to sharp flakes of a type of rock called chert. Statues carved into clay and
limestone walls are limited to a few regional examples.
The simplest way for Ice Age artists to paint walls was with their fingers, and this was certainly
done in some caves. But normally paint was applied with some kind of tool, although none of the
tools have survived. Experiments suggest that animal-hair brushes or crushed twigs would have
been the best tools to use. In some cases, the paint was sprayed, either directly from the mouth or
through a tube. This method was used to produce dots and hand stencils—a way of leaving a
handprint by placing the palm against the rock and blowing paint onto it and all around it.
The vast majority of cave figures drawn with pigment are simple outlines. A number have some
infill—some of the animals in the Chauvet cave, for instance, display a very sophisticated use of
shading. The two-color and multicolor figures of the end of the Ice Age, such as the bison on the
ceiling at the Altamira cave, are rare in comparison with engravings and outlines.

Three Categories of Cave Subjects

Ice Age drawings are normally grouped into three categories, although there is some overlap and
uncertainty in defining them: animals, humans, and nonfigurative or abstract (including “signs”).
Fully-developed scenes are hard to identify in Ice Age art, since it is often impossible to prove
that figures are associated, rather than simply next to each other. For example, contrary to
common belief, there are absolutely no clear hunting scenes. Only very few definite scenes of
any kind have been found.
Ice Age art is neither a simple catalogue of the animals in the artists' world, nor a random
collection of artistic observations of nature. It has meaning and structure, with different species
dominating in different periods and regions. The vast majority of animal figures are adults drawn
in profile. Most of them are easily recognizable, although many are incomplete or ambiguous,
and a few are quite simply imaginary, such as the two-horned “unicorn” found at Lascaux. Most
of these figures seem motionless—in fact, many may well be wounded, dying, or dead.
Animated drawings are rare, most of them appearing toward the end of the Ice Age, although the
very early Chauvet cave also has some, such as the “fighting” rhinos.
One central fact of animal drawings is the overwhelming dominance of horse and bison among
Ice Age depictions, although other species, such as the mammoth or deer, may dominate at
particular sites. Carnivores such as cats or bears are rare in most sites, with the exception of
Chauvet, where they are very prominent. Fish and birds are far more common in portable art than
in wall art. Insects and recognizable plants are limited to a very few examples in portable art.
Depictions of people can be divided into definite humans, “humanoids,” and “composites.”
Definite humans are scarce in wall art—portable art accounts for over 75 percent of Ice Age
human depictions. Genitalia are rarely depicted, so that one usually has to rely on breasts or
beards to differentiate the sexes, and most drawings of humans are left neutral. Clothing is rarely
clear, and details such as eyebrows, nostrils, navels, and nipples are extremely uncommon. Few
figures have hands or fingers drawn in any detail.
“Humanoids” comprise all those figures interpreted, but not positively identified, as being
human, such as grotesque heads, “masks,” and “phantoms” that could be either animal or human.
“Composites” are figures that have clear and detailed elements of both. In the past all such
figures were automatically and unjustifiably called “sorcerers” and were assumed to be
“shamans” or medicine men in masks or animal costumes. But they could just as easily be
imaginary creatures, such as humans with animal heads. In any case, such composites, the most
famous being the “sorcerer” of Les Trois Frères, are fairly rare, occurring in only about 15 sites.
The nonfigurative markings of Ice Age art have often seemed uninteresting or impossible to
explain or define. Today, researchers believe that these marks may have been of equal, if not
greater, importance to Paleolithic people than the recognizable figures. Nonfigurative marks are
two or three times more common than figurative, and in some areas far more common. The
category covers a tremendously wide range of motifs, from a single dot or line to complex
shapes.
In the past, some shapes were assumed to be pictographic (representing objects) on the basis of
what they looked like, such as huts, clubs, or birds. However, it is impossible to know whether
these are real objects or abstract designs or both.
The simpler markings are more abundant and widespread, since they could be invented in many
places and periods. The more complex forms, however, show great variability and are more
restricted in space and time. Some researchers believe they can be seen as “ethnic markers,”
perhaps delineating social groups of some kind. The marks were not set down at random, but
follow some set of rules, like the animal figures. What those rules might be is the thorniest
problem in Ice Age art.

The Search for Meaning

The first and simplest theory put forward to explain the existence of Paleolithic art was that it
had no meaning: It was just casual doodling, graffito, play activity—mindless decoration by
hunters with time on their hands. This “art for art's sake” view arose from the first discoveries of
portable art, but once cave art began to be found it rapidly became clear that something more was
involved.
There are patterns in the paintings that require explanation, patterns that are repeated at different
sites and in different periods, suggesting that certain common beliefs or systems of thought
influenced individual artists. The art's inaccessibility in caves, the limited range of species
depicted, crowded and empty panels, mysterious signs, and many figures that are purposely
incomplete or ambiguous all combine to suggest that there is complex meaning behind both the
subject matter and the location of Ice Age figures.
At the beginning of this century, a new kind of theory took over. Experts began to argue that the
art was utilitarian, that it had a definite function. These theories were based largely on newly
published accounts of Australian Aborigines, which inspired researchers to compare these
“primitive” users of stone tools with those of Europe at the end of the Ice Age. The Aborigines
were said to perform ceremonies in order to multiply the numbers of animals, and for this
purpose they painted likenesses of these species on rocks. The researchers postulated that the
same purpose lay behind the art of both cultures.

Art as Magic

“Sympathetic magic,” including hunting magic, operates on the same basis as pins in a wax doll:
The depictions of animals are produced in order to control or influence the real animals in some
way. Ritual and magic were seen in almost every aspect of Ice Age art—breakage of objects,
images “killed” ritually with images of spears, or images even physically attacked.
This type of thinking led to many errors on the part of some archaeologists, as the theory was
stretched and adapted to fit the evidence, or facts were carefully selected to fit the theory.
Overall, there are very few Ice Age animals with spears drawn on or near them, and many caves
have no images of this type at all. The “spear” images (or whatever they are) also occur on some
human and humanoid figures. Moreover, the animal bones found in many decorated caves
usually are not the same as those species depicted on the walls. It is clear that the artists were
not, by and large, drawing what they had killed or wanted to kill.
Another aspect of some hunting societies that might be reflected in the cave art is shamanism. A
shaman is an individual who acts as a link between this world and the spirit world, a task usually
performed by means of dances and symbolic trances. Ice Age images might therefore be “spirit
animals,” rather than copies of the real thing. This explanation is currently popular with some
experts, but in fact it rests on the basic assumption that Ice Age people had shamanic religions.
Even if true, how shamanism might tie in with the production or content of the art remains pure
speculation.
An additional popular and durable explanation of much Ice Age art is that it involves “fertility
magic.” The artists depicted animals in the hope that they would reproduce and flourish to
provide food—a different kind of sympathetic magic. Once again, examples were selected which
seemed to fit the idea, and researchers often saw what they wanted to find, such as animals
mating and an emphasis on human sexuality as well.
Overall, however, few animals are sexually identified, and genitalia are almost always shown
discreetly. As for mating scenes, in the whole of Ice Age art there are only a couple of possible
examples, and they are extremely doubtful. Similarly, where humans are concerned, few figures
have their genitalia marked, and the one or two claimed depictions of copulation are very
sketchy. It is clear that the greater part of Ice Age art is not about either hunting or sex, at least in
an explicit sense.
The next major theoretical advance, however, introduced the notion of a symbolic sexual
element. In the 1950s two French scholars, Annette Laming-Emperaire and André Leroi-
Gourhan, concluded that the caves had been decorated systematically rather than at random.
They based their interpretation on all the figures in a cave rather than on a selected few. Wall art
was treated as a carefully laid-out composition within each cave, and the animals were not
portraits but symbols.
It was a major advance, but unfortunately there are many exceptions to these theories. The very
central and prominent cats and rhinos in the Chauvet cave, discovered after Leroi-Gourhan died,
have further shown just how wrong he and Laming-Emperaire were. Moreover, their scheme
worked on a presence/absence basis, not on abundance, so a single horse figure was seen as the
equivalent of a mass of bison, or vice versa. Other variations such as color, size, orientation,
technique, and completeness were also ignored. Recent detailed studies, both of individual caves
and of regional groups, stress that each site is unique and has its own “symbolic construction”
adapted to its own shape and size.
Leroi-Gourhan's other key approach was his discovery of repeated “associations” in the art, and
his claim that there was a basic “dualism.” Laming-Emperaire believed the horse to be
equivalent to the female and the bison to the male; for Leroi-Gourhan, it was the other way
around. The numerically dominant horses and bison, concentrated in the central panels, were
thought to represent a basic duality that was assumed to be sexual. This idea was then extended
to the signs, which were considered male (phallic) and female (vulvar). More recent studies have
confirmed the fundamental role and opposition of horses and bison.
The work of these two scholars completely changed the way in which Ice Age art is studied. The
images could no longer be seen as simple representations with an obvious and direct meaning,
but as being full of conceptual ideas.
The most recent attempts to puzzle out the meaning of Ice Age art have gone off in many
directions. One researcher is investigating the shape of the wall surface beneath each figure,
trying to understand why in some caves a high proportion of horses, deer, and hand stencils are
on concave surfaces while an equally high percentage of bison and cattle are on convex areas.
Another expert is seeking detailed and firm methods by which to recognize the work of
individual artists, artists who just as easily could have been women as men. Other researchers are
investigating the acoustics in different parts of the cave. Some caves show a clear
correspondence between the richest panels and the best acoustics, suggesting that sound played
an important part—perhaps for ceremonies that accompanied the production of the art.

A Vast Artistic Output

No single explanation can account for the whole of Ice Age art. In time span, it comprises at least
two-thirds of known art history, covering at least 25,000 years and probably far more. It has been
found all over the world and ranges from beads to statuettes, from simple figures on rocks to
complex signs hidden in the inaccessible corners of deep caves. Almost every basic artistic
technique is represented, with everything from realism to abstraction. Not all of it is necessarily
mysterious or religious, although some cave art is almost certainly linked to ritual and ceremony.
The astounding cave paintings that Ice Age artists left behind provide a window into early
human history, but experts are also rethinking their overall importance. Since 1981 it has become
apparent that Ice Age people also produced rock art outside in the open air. This art has naturally
been almost totally lost to time, surviving only in exceptional circumstances. Six sites with Ice
Age animal engravings have been found so far in Spain, Portugal, and the French Pyrenees.
These open-air engravings probably represent “normal” Ice Age art, while the art in caves was
probably produced sporadically and rarely, and should no longer be seen as characteristic of the
period. Nevertheless, there is a great deal still to be learned from these remarkable works about
how primitive humans thought and lived.
The next few years should prove to be exciting times for the study of Ice Age art. High-tech
advances in radiocarbon dating, such as the use of accelerator mass spectrometry technology,
means that it is now possible to obtain precise dates from very tiny pigment samples, the size of
a pinhead. New and different discoveries will continue to be made, such as the Chauvet site and
the location in the early 1990s of the Cosquer cave in France, which can only be reached through
an underwater tunnel. Unfortunately, few of these incredible caves can be visited by the public,
either because of the physical difficulty of access or the risk of damage or pollution. Accurate
facsimiles of the caves have been created both physically (Lascaux) and on media such as the
World Wide Web, so that eventually everyone will be able to enjoy this remarkable but infinitely
fragile heritage.
About the author: Paul G. Bahn is an archaeologist specializing in prehistoric art and the author
of Journey Through the Ice Age (1997) and The Cambridge Illustrated History of Prehistoric Art
(1997).
Source: Encarta Yearbook, July 1997.
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