Ashley...more on paleo art BEFORE Lascaux
di...@my-dejanews.com
this subject, here's more, actually the web is full of this stuff. Your idea
that totemism was the earliest religion of humans is one entertained by some
archaeoligists, it is an interesting idea and forms a component to many
religions even today, not just "primitive" ones. The word here is
Nuministic, a feeling that a certain spot is holy. Strictly a human feeling?
Who knows? This article appeared in 1996. This piece has been cut for
length.
Pip
n French in Archéologue-Nouvelle Archéologie, 1996
The shockingly ancient dates recently obtained for the paintings of the
Grotte Chauvet have focused new attention on the often ignored cultural
developments of early Upper Paleolithic, the 20,000 or so years between the
first traces of symbolic representation (ca. 40,000 years ago) and the
painting of Lascaux (ca. 17,000 years ago). This long stretch of cultural
evolution, comprised of two archaeological cultures, the Aurignacian
(40-28,000 years ago) and the Gravettian (28-22,000 years ago), has yielded
an abundance of representational objects and images.
By far the most distinctive representations in the Gravettian are the female
statuettes and bas-reliefs. Although Gravettian female figures are found
throughout Europe, they show regional differences in form and technique. They
are sculpted from a variety of materials, including ivory, limestone,
steatite, and calcite, and their surfaces were often poliushed to a high
lustre. Certain examples were even modeled in clay and kiln-fired.
The past few decades have seen an enormous increase in the sample of female
figures, especially in the USSR. The extraordinary 26,000 year-old site of
Avdeevo has yielded to Govozdover and her collaborator Gennadi Grigoriev
nearly as many of the figurines as all of the sites of this age in Western
Europe combined. Many of the Avdeevo statuettes were purposely buried in
pits, sometimes more than one to a pit. Strangely, in some cases different
fragments of the same broken statuette were buried in carefully dug pits
several meters apart. Gvozdover's careful analysis concludes that most of
these statuettes, carefully sculpted from the tusks of 10,000 pound woolly
mammoths, depict women in the terminal stages of pregnancy and frequently in
birthing postures.
Gravettian sites have also yielded numerous animal engravings, often done in
a rather stiff style characterized by unfinished lower limbs and a lack of
the use of perspective. Finally, there are the famous Gravettian hand
stencils, found both in living sites and in shallow-to-medium depth caves.
One French cave, Gargas, had more than 150 hands stencilled on its walls. In
the underwater cave of Grotte Cosquer recently discovered near near
Marseilles, the charcoal-based paint used to spray the numerous hand stencils
has now been radiocarbon dated to about 27,000 years ago.
Given what preceded the painting of Lascaux 17,500 years ago, we should not
be particularly surprised to find a complex technological underpinning to the
creation of this remarkable site. A wooden scaffold was constructed at
Lascaux to provide access to the walls. In addition, recent research by
Pamela Vandiver of the Smithsonian Institution reveals that most of the
colors used on the walls at Lascaux had been artificially created by heating
naturally occurring clay minerals (especially ocher) to temperatures of 1000
degrees Celsius; once again, an example of symbolic necessity being the
mother of technological invention.
The commitment of labor and technological innovation and creativity to
symbolic ends implies a fundamental adaptive and evolutionary role for early
symbolic representation. "Art," far from being merely a spare-time diversion
served a number of critical social and technological functions in Cro-Magnon
cultures of the last Ice Age. Two- and three-dimensional representation was
an invention, and like all inventions it had to be coherent with and useful
to its cultural and historical context in order to be adopted. I presume
that, on several occasions prior to the Upper Paleolithic, the ability to use
lines and materials to represent natural objects was recognized and perhaps
even accomplished in isolated instances.
University of Miami archaeologist Heidi Knecht has argued that, in turn, the
depiction of concepts through graphic representation has powerful
implications for technological innovation. The ability to simulate visually
things that do not yet exist is essential to any degree of innovation.
Material forms of representation, by conferring the ability to render
tangible, to communicate, and to discuss social relations and technological
possibilities, would have had powerful implications for the evolutionary
fitness of Cro-Magnon populations. Indeed, modern human culture in any of its
diverse forms would be unimaginable without the kinds of material symbols
that humans first deployed 40,000 years ago.
D'autres ouvrages à consulter:
Clottes, J. 1990. L'Art des objets au Paléolithique. Paris: Ministère de la
Culture.
De Beaune, Sophie A. 1995. Les Hommes au temps de Lascaux. Paris: Hachette.
Delporte, H. 1993. L'Image de la femme dans l'art préhistorique. Paris:
Picard.
Knecht, H., Pike-Tay, A. et R. White (eds.). 1993. Before Lascaux: the complex
record of the early Upper Paleolithic. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
Kozlowski, J. 1992. L'Art de la préhistoire en Europe orientale. Paris: CNRS.
Vialou, Denis. 1991. La Préhistoire. Paris: Gallimard.
White, R. 1992. Beyond Art: toward an understanding of the origins of material
representation in Europe. Annual Review of Anthropology 21:537-564.
White, R. 1993. Préhistoire. Bordeaux: Presse Sud-Ouest.
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