INTRODUCTION

The art of Palaeolithic tool makers, in the Pleistocene or Ice Age, was practically unknown when my grandfather was born in 1886.  The Altamira Cave in Spain could not be dated and could hardly be believed when it was found in 1880.  Almost everything we have and all that study has been able to ascertain belongs to the twentieth century.  Even today dating the retreat of the glaciers, how quickly they disappeared, and the extinction of species like the saber-toothed tiger is not quite exactly certain.  

Within our own lifetimes, however, when new and astonishing caves appear in France at Chauvet, for example, each discovery is new and exciting: Le Chauvet is older and has different animals, yes, but Lascaux, the awe-inspiring cave of my own youth (WW II did delay its publication), astonished us by the style and size of the big bulls, by the animals being for the most part right side up (as we would think), and by the Pit of the Dead Man, to name just three things.  We await the next discovery with bated breath.
And we can't even now be sure of drawing the line between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons (go to the Web for that, but be aware, too, that a kind of Society in Defense of the Neanderthal is a recent phenomenon).  Watch out, too, for pronouncements about Males and Females (we just don't know, really, what their rôles and POVs were, or whether they were all alike in all the regions).  We don't know who drew the animals (only those with some kind of shaman status or all the hunters?), but I'd bet on males making spear throwers.  Be aware, however, that not all Forest People or all Mountain People are alike, and anthropologists emphasize that modern hunter-gatherers and ancient ones cannot be assumed to have thought or behaved alike.  We can bank on the females having and nursing the babies.
Some facts seem to hold.  The earth was sparsely populated and communication limited to face-to-face speech or signs such as recognizable notches on trees.  Travel was on foot (swimming streams).  Hunting, of course, was important for meat, hides, fat; there is no evidence of ice-age bows, however, though some punches and hooks and eyed needles have been found (no one went naked through a still glaciated winter, and they followed herd animals not only for food but to lead them).  They were good at fire; it was the carbon left in the hollowed sides of stones used for lamps in the caves that dated Lascaux.  We don't know how elaborate the syntax of speech may have become, but like speech the beauty of their drawings and carvings, so far exceeding utility, testifies to their being Ourselves.  Though not all peoples have flint for cutting or caves for (I think we must say) sanctuaries, very important tribal places. we all sympathize, relate to one another, in radically specific ways.  And we all mate successfully.

Where this course was used, at three different universities and in three generations, there were course-sequences also for East Asia, for sub-Saharan Africa, for South America, too (and the University Prints, which originated at Harvard, also had prepared boxes of prints for all the regions).  Some time in the last decade they went out of business: naturally—how do you compete with Wikipedia and its Commons and with all the aspects of Google?  Now that the prints are all Public Domain, we can use them here.  I'll use small scans of the prints (all of which I have) for you to click on to see them in their original size.  Why not color?  There are places where not everyone has access to broad-band, large monitor, full color computers.  I want this project to be for everyone.  Print it out.  I don't want to profit from 60 years of teaching.  We have such riches!  Yet they are not equally distributed on the Web, and to put together text that makes sense you don't want just the most stunning things.
Another thing: I have tried to write a text that is easily translated to every other language, and please feel free to translate it.  I have tried not to make it biased, but I don't want to argue or to lie: it is impossible to give women, for example, a "fair share".  And, though I know more than my mother did about Africa, for example, I don't know the history, and to learn ANY history well takes a very long time and at close range.  The best I can do is to try to set a good example, as good as I can make it, with the art history that I have been learning all my life (and for which there were University Prints).

THE LECTURE

The lectures are based on the University Prints that were selected, and their sequence was determined by what needed to be said.  Particulars are included because they answer questions that were asked repeatedly.  The text printed here was last revised in 1998.  It does not include class discussion, of course.

[M 182] In Austria, there's an otherwise insignificant village named Willendorf.  The 5-inch statuette, the "Venus of Willendorf", that was found there almost exactly 100 years ago is one of the oldest pieces of representational art in the world; for a time she was unique, then such statuettes began to be found elsewhere.  The contexts of recent finds are dated as much as 30,000 years ago.  If made of ivory they may be longer, or if from a different kind of stone the surface will be different, but they all share certain features: the arms and legs are not rendered with as much attention as the body, and many of them have no face or the face is very sketchy.  We now have several dozen of them, some of them from Russian Siberia; those may be later, but they are the same kind of statuette.  Steatopygy as such can be an adaptation for survival (maximum fat storage), but the emphasis on the pubic triangle suggests concern for fertility.  We call these figures "Venuses", but that's a kind of joke; the love goddess in Roman mythology is called Venus, and the figurines have big breasts and emphasized pubes, but the nickname is misleading; we don't know whether, like Venus and the Greek Aphrodite, they named and told stories about such figures, like the story of Venus and Adonis--that kind of story.  A figure that has a name, that you worship and tell stories about, is a god or goddess, a deity.  But the "Venus of Willendorf" might be more like a fetish, a thing that sort of embodies something, without its having a name.  Yet the meaning was very important, because they made them for thousands of years.  Remember that this is stone worked with only stone tools, so the figurines would not have been made unless they were of great importance.

[M 221]  The "Venus of Laussel" is not a figure in the round but a stone relief and perhaps nearly a millennium later.  She is just as steatopygous and nearly as faceless (a face without features), but her arms are not wrapped over her breasts, as on the figurines, and in one hand she holds a ram's(?) horn towards her face as if about to drink from it.  This representation does suggest a goddess (with a name and stories and a particular cult), so we cannot say for sure that the figurines are mere fetishes.  Indeed, we cannot be certain of any particulars concerning these early people and their art.

[1501]  The first cave that was actually discovered is Altamira in northern Spain, discovered just over 100 yrs ago; at first no one would believe how old it was.  The dates of the last ice age were not known then, and by chance the animals in the cave at Altamira happened to be species, such as bison, which may not live in Spain anymore but are not extinct.  However, within 10 years, they had found caves in France where the animals, such as cave bear, saber-toothed tiger, woolly rhinoceros, mammoth, were known to be animals that became extinct with the big climatic change.  But they still didn't know exactly how long ago that was; the dates were pinned down definitively after WW II, when Carbon 14 dating came in.  Carbon 14 dating becomes less accurate as you go further back, but the dates were so uncertain forty years ago that their estimates had differed by hundreds of thousands of years.  We now know that Altamira is one of the latest painted caves, upper Magdalenian in terms of its tool-types, with painted animals in more than one color and some modelling, with foreshortened horns.  The colors are natural earths, mixed probably with fat, applied with fingers and handmade brushes of some kind.  Since these caves are not dwelling places, what are they?  I agree with the English anthropo-/archaeologist, N. K. Sanders, that we could rightly regard them as, in effect, the cathedrals of these people, because each cave was used over a period of thousands of years.  You have paintings on top of earlier paintings which are on top of still earlier paintings, and you have continuity of tradition throughout all these periods.  Change is very slow when people are not stimulated by other peoples. 

[M 158]  This is the cave at Lascaux, in the French Dordogne region, and it is the most attractive and the most easy to appreciate as art of all the caves; there is a white calcite deposit, from when there was water in an interglacial period running through this cave carrying a lot of lime, which coated the whole cave, so these artists had a white background to work on.  You can see that in more recent times the water has come up to a certain level--there's one place in the cave where the artist, having this water line, has drawn reindeer as if they were swimming in the water; such a drawing seems to have been done for its own sake.  The cave at Lascaux has some simple black outline and some black-silhouette animals, and these are older; these go back to 20,000 or 15,000 BC.  But it also has animals, like the horses, that are done with shading and with 2 colors and with all 4 legs shown in 3/4 view, which date from the last millennia before the end of the Ice Age: Late Palaeolithic.  Palaeolithic means the old kind of stone tools, made exclusively from flaking flint.  The essential difference is that these people were hunters and gatherers, and Neolithic (new stone, ground as well as flaked tools) people were settled villagers, but the classification by tool-manufacture remains convenient. Each of these caves has its own style; the people who used it may have come here at certain times; they migrated seasonally.  They had to follow the animals which moved north in the summer and south in the winter.  So they came into these caves and they did whatever they did do in the caves--we have no way of knowing whether only the males did, or whether the whole group did, or if only the elders did, or all the age groups.  There are parallels among other simple economies for all of those alternatives.  These are traditional; they probably all belong each to one big clan group, because each cave has its own tradition, and each region has its own tradition.  They were used for more centuries than any cathedral in Europe has been.  They are profoundly sacred places.  Sacred means set apart from material, ordinary, daily life--more than that we cannot say.

•  As I said in one syllabus, we don't know how to interpret the pregnant animals.  Pregnancy goes with certain species, almost all of the horses being pregnant but almost none of the bison.  There are some species where we have almost entirely female animals (horses), other species where we have usually only male animals (bison), also some caves where we have more of one species and fewer of another species.  The variables are hard to interpret; whether the female horses are fertility magic or rather hunting magic basically depends on what school of thought you belong to.  There are some linear drawings that the French archaeologist, Leroi-Gourhan, believes are stylized female vulvae but the Abbé Breuil, who studied both of these caves, believed that they are symbolic representations of traps that animals would step into.  Some of the animals have lines drawn on them.  Breuil, Windel, Laming thought that they were darts (using blowpipes) to kill the animals, but Leroi-Gourhan thinks that they are phallic, so you can think whichever you prefer.

             Lascaux is also exceptional in that almost all the animals are, as we would say, right side up.  In most of the caves, there are no such compositions, not even to the extent of right side up; in those caves it's clear that each animal was painted for the sake of the image itself, not as a part of a herd.  At Lascaux they do draw herds--these little black animals here are a group, this late group of reindeer are a group.  Things that are obviously interesting and exciting that we cannot possibly really know about fascinate us.  The caves are fascinating.  The black horses are quite early, the polychrome horses and the reindeer are quite late, and the big black bulls are probably the earliest of all.  Some of them are solid black and some of them are outline; they're almost lifesize, very powerfully drawn.
            It's much easier to take photographs of Lascaux than of other caves.  The perfect preservation at Lascaux is also due to the dripping of water full of lime that has made a thin, transparent layer, like the surface of a stalactite, of calcite deposit on top of the paint--another clue as to how old they are.

[M 159] One can't enter the Lascaux cave now, because the bacteria level from people breathing got so high that the paintings were coming off the walls because of things growing in them, so they had to shut the cave.  When you went into the grand gallery, at one point there's a place, after this narrow passage that you had to crawl through, where there's a deep pit, called the Pit of the Dead Man for this remarkable scene at the bottom of the pit.  You have a bison here, disemboweled (I'd like to know how Leroi-Gourhan thinks that can be a phallic symbol when what it produced was not babies but guts hanging out.  I rather think that there's more hunting magic than abstract fertility in most of these paintings), then we have what is obviously a human male, but the lack of face in his case is that he's bird-headed, and beside him is a stick that is also a bird.  There are various interpretations of this scene but I'll give you the one that I like best--the bird on the stick may be a totem of his tribe, it may be his own personal hunting symbol; the object, the bird on the stick, is what we call a throwing stick--the hooked head is where you can put a loop or thong on a dart and it throws the sharp projectile with much greater speed and momentum than just casting it with your hand.  A hunting man's personal object of great value--he probably made it when he was being raised to manhood--and himself (his bird's head) are identified.  The bird is his totem.

[M 223] Among many hundreds of engravings here all tangled up all over the ceiling of the Trois Frères cave, is a partly human figure with horns, and nearer the mouth of the same cave is the painted and engraved figure called "The Sorcerer".  Is it human? It has human feet.  Is it an animal?  It holds its front legs in an animal position.  It has a tail.  Is that face a man?  Or, is it a man dressed up in animal clothing, like a Siberian shaman? Maybe.  At any rate, what we have here is a figure that is ambiguous, that looks both human and non-human, and it meant something quite important, though we can't say what it meant: it's male (as you can see!), and it really looks as if it is wearing some kind of a mask--a face, with antlers "borrowed".  Grahame Clark's book has an 18th-century drawing of a Siberian shaman, which I can show to you, if you wish, for comparison.

[M 152] [M 1, above]  Several caves and portable objects have depictions of woolly mammoths,  and we ought to remember, too, the long-haired rhinoceros at Font de Gaume, because that is some of the evidence that we are really dealing with Ice Age art, woolly rhinoceroses being extinct as long-haired pachyderms*.  On the other hand, way out in Asian Siberia, Russian archaeologists found a deep-frozen mammoth in the permafrost of Siberia, with its fur, so they may have lasted longer, but not much longer, in that part of the world--they're certainly extinct today.
*Actually, there ARE woolly rhinoceros; Google them.

[M 230]  In the Late Palaeolithic period, just before the end of the Ice Age, 15,000-10,000 BC, there are also sculptures besides the female sculptures.  Here, at Le Tuc d'Audoubert we have a bison just like the bison at Altamira, and of the same date, modelled in clay, from deposits on the floor of the cave.  Remember that no one taught the earliest artists to do something.  It is one thing to draw or carve an image, another thing to form one out of shapeless material.

[M 181]  Some of the animals are small personal objects, like the spear thrower we already saw.  This doesn't seem to be part of a spear thrower.  It's a bison made of reindeer antler; those are the tines for legs.  There is even the germ of a story, a bit of a story: the animal is reaching back to lick something off of its shoulder; it isn't just an image relating to hunting or fertility or whatever; it tells us something about how human beings observe the animal and relate to the animal.  Notice too the skill of the artist in representing in limited depth, since this is not fully three-dimensional, how the bison turns his head and reaches back, to flick the fly from its shoulder, and adapting the shape of the bison to the natural shape of the reindeer antler.  A most elegant and delightful little piece of work, only 4-5 inches long.

[M 1, lower image]  The picture on the Lorthet antler is engraved, and here, too, you have the skillful turning back of the head.  This seems to be a stag calling out to his harem of does; its mouth is open, perhaps calling out in anxiety.  And notice the shading, made with little flecks of a sharp point.  Why are there fish together with the stag?  I don't know, unless it's to represent an animal migration when the whole herd has to cross a stream, as you have seen on Nature or Nat'l Geographic.  But I'm just making up stories; that's OK, if it's plausible.  After all, we have the same central nervous system as the people who made these.  This is lovely drawing, closely observed animals.

[M 184] When the glaciers started receding (and it must have taken 500, a thousand, years, so you might not notice it in one lifetime) we find that, instead of these tribes moving seasonally like the Laplanders, there were just small groups making small tools. We also see some things that were absent before.  These paintings in eastern Spain (and both of these are in eastern Spain, but remember that, until the ice cap receded way up, Gibraltar was a bridge, so eastern Spain and the parts of northern Africa opposite were continuous) are what we call Capsian art after a site called El Gafsa in North Africa.  Notice that here we have the figures drawn conceptually, particularly the human beings, and instead of random animals, we have animals and humans in groups: stories, compositions.  And these are the first pictures of bows and arrows.  They are hard to date, because they are on cliff faces, so we lack the closed contexts of caves, with organic matter that we can use C-14 on.  These rock overhangs are what the French call abris.  We think they are somewhere around 8,000 B.C.  It's what people used to call "Mesolithic"--i.e., "Meso- (middle), between the "Palaeo-" (old) and "Neo-" (new) "-lithic" (stone) Age.

 The Maglemose amber animals from Denmark also fit into this slot.  Amber, of course, comes from the Baltic and is especially pleasant to handle, since it feels warm to touch.  These people lived near water for access to fish; their stone tools were mostly small blades and scrapers.

[N 3] [N 2] In Africa, over a widish range of dates, some as early as 8,000 B.C., others as late as 5,000 or 4,000, we find comparable rock face paintings.  In the later ones, you begin to see animals in enclosures, and indeed these later paintings reflect a Neolithic way of life at dates comparable with the Middle East--these people are keeping animals, not just hunting them, but herding and raising them, the same as people do today.  The giraffe from Libya is drawn differently, in a soft clayey surface, but a beautifully drawn giraffe.

 

The remainder of the pre-Urban sections will be given their own post