Prehistoric Art in Europe: a Deep-time Social History

The prehistoric art of Europe covers a vastspectrum, from the earliest Ice Age cavepaintings more than 30,000 years ago at

sites such as Chauvet Cave to Iron Age metalworkand statuary contemporary with Roman civiliza-tion. It encompasses figurines, cave paintings,rock carvings, statuary, megalithic tomb decora-tions, metalwork, modeling in metal and clay,and various figured objects (Supplemental Figure1). How much prehistoric art there is in Europehas never been quantified, but a conservative es-timate is that there are at least 500 distinct artistictraditions.

In many ways, “prehistoric art” as a field ofstudy does not currently exist. This paper began

from a simple question: what art exists for pre-historic Europe, and what does it tell us aboutprehistoric society? Remarkably, it is almost im-possible to answer this question. Studies of pre-historic European art are deeply fragmented bymedium, period, region, language, and scholarlytradition. The dominant form of knowledge is nar-row but deep, made up almost exclusively of de-tailed studies of single bodies of art. At most, spe-cialist syntheses of areas (prehistoric art of Italy),periods (Paleolithic art), or forms (Prehistoric fig-urines) exist. The last general overview of Eu-rope’s prehistoric art was a generation ago (San-dars 1985); since then, the amount of known arthas easily doubled, and a new theoretical frame

PREHISTORIC ART IN EUROPE: A DEEP-TIME SOCIAL HISTORY

John Robb

Although many researchers have studied prehistoric European art, there has been virtually no attention paid to the broadprehistory of art as a specialized form of material culture; virtually all studies focus narrowly on single bodies of art. Thispaper presents a new approach to analyzing prehistoric art: quantitative deep time study. It analyzes a database of 211 arttraditions from across Europe and from 40,000 B.C. to 0 A.D. to identify changes in the amount, nature, and use of prehistoricart. The results reveal clear long-term trends. The amount of art made increased sharply with the origins of sedentaryfarming and continued to rise throughout prehistory. New forms of art arise in conjunction with new ways of life; “periodgenres” are closely tied into patterns of social change. There are also long-term shifts in aesthetics and the uses of art (suchas a gradual shift from arts of ritual and concealment to arts of surface and display). These results, though preliminary,show that a deep-time approach familiar from topics such as climate change is applicable to art; the resulting social historycan illuminate both art and its social context.

Muchos investigadores han estudiado el arte europeo prehistórico, sin embargo apenas se le ha prestado atención a la ampliaprehistoria del arte como una manifestación especializada de cultura material; casi todos los estudios que existen se centranestrictamente en un único tipo de arte. Este artículo presenta una nueva manera de analizar el arte prehistórico utilizando unestudio cuantitativo de tiempo profundo. Analiza una base de datos de 211 tradiciones artísticas europeas desde el 40,000 a.C.hasta el 0 a.C. para identificar cambios en la cantidad, naturaleza y uso del arte prehistórico. Los resultados revelan clarastendencias a largo plazo. La cantidad de arte producido aumentó radicalmente con los orígenes de la agricultura sedimentaria,y siguió aumentando durante la prehistoria. Nuevos modales artísticos aparecen a la vez que emergen nuevos modos de vida;“géneros de época” están estrechamente vinculados a patrones de cambio social. También hay cambios a largo plazo en laestética y los usos del arte (como un cambio gradual de las artes del ritual y la ocultación a las artes de superficie y ostentación).Estos resultados, aunque preliminares, muestran que un enfoque de tiempo profundo corriente en temas como el cambioclimático es aplicable al arte; la historia social resultante puede iluminar tanto al arte como a su contexto social.

John Robb ! Department of Archaeology, Cambridge University, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3DZ UK([email protected])

American Antiquity 80(4), 2015, pp. 635–654Copyright © 2015 by the Society for American Archaeology

DOI: 10.7183/0002-7316.80.4.635

635

636 AMERICAN ANTIQUITY [Vol. 80, No. 4, 2015

based in material culture studies has developed.Broad-scale social histories exist for many bodiesof non-Western art (Berlo and Phillips 1998; Bruntand Thomas 2012; Penney 2004), but none hasever been written for Europe’s prehistoric art.

This paper outlines an alternative approach,looking for major epochal changes in the amount,media, forms, and uses of art. This in turn requiresa completely novel methodology, one oriented to-wards broad, comparable knowledge rather thandeep, narrow knowledge. Using the corpus or tra-dition of art as a unit of analysis, a database of 211art traditions is analyzed quantitatively to bring tolight aggregate macro-patterns that would not beevident from traditional, single-corpus studies.

Why would it be useful to outline macro-pat-terns in prehistoric art’s social history? In the lastdecade, social scientists in many fields have begunto consider analysis at scales of “deep time.” Stud-ies of anthropogenic global climate change havefocused attention on human-environment interac-tions at long time scales. Even in the most hu-manistic fields, there are analytical narratives thatrequire study at scales beyond that of human ex-perience. In literary studies, art history, and Clas-sics, individual creativity has often been placedwithin a larger historical trajectory of styles, tra-ditions, social contexts, or “zeitgeist.” “World his-tory,” Annales history, and Marxism contrast theimmediacy of action with the slower evolution ofthe systems generating the possibilities of action(Braudel 1973; Wolf 1982). Archaeologists in-creasingly call for a multiscalar archaeology, in-cluding an anthropology of deep history (Bailey2007; Prentiss et al. 2009; Robb and Pauketat2012; Shryock and Smail 2011).

This paper represents an initial foray into thebig-scale social history of art. Investigating artregimes in broad, comparative terms does notmean reducing “normal” prehistoric art studies toa superficial and deterministic level. “Normal”studies of prehistoric art almost always focus onthe uniqueness of each form of art; but insistingthat each object of study can be understood onlyin terms of its individuality is as limiting as re-garding each as no more than an item in an ag-gregate database. Thus, the approach taken hereprovides a qualitatively distinct and complemen-tary form of knowledge. It poses several basicquestions: (1) did prehistoric Europeans make

similar amounts of art in all periods, or was it amore appropriate form of social action in somerather than in others? (2) Are there long-term pat-terns in the kinds of art that were made, or in ma-terials, techniques, and contexts? (3) Are therelong-term patterns in the social uses of art?

Art in Historical AnalysisLike most non-Western art, prehistoric Europeanart is not “art” in the modern sense of somethingexpressing an individual maker’s insights or valueswithin a network of patrons and aesthetic con-sumers. Instead, it encompasses many things:more or less formalized ritual paraphernalia, bodyornaments, decorations that make a place appro-priate for a given purpose, objects signifying thematerial embodiment of supernatural beings, andtraces of action (for instance, a rough sketch madeas a gesture emphasizing a narrative). The term“art” has often been controversial in anthropology(Layton 1991; Morphy and Perkins 2006). Exceptfor scholars studying how indigenous art is com-modified at the interface between colonial and in-digenous worlds (Küchler 2002; Myers 2002),most anthropologists prefer simply to discuss “ma-terial culture.” Here I follow the pioneering an-thropological work of Gell (1998) in defining artas a specialized form of material culture, a socialtechnology that accomplishes a wide range of psy-chological actions. In Gell’s view, art exerts anagency on people by affecting them in particularways. It is material culture designed to do rela-tional tasks. It can make remote spiritual or polit-ical beings present (as on a crucifix or a coin), re-assure the worried (as with the paintings in adoctor’s office), awe the viewers (as in Gell’s ex-ample of the Trobriand kula canoe prowboard),transform a person (as with a ritual mask), assertclass, taste, or cultivation (as with images intendedto be objects of connoisseurship), or assert theauthority of the state (as with elite propaganda).The question then shifts radically from symboliccontent to action, from “what does art mean?” to“what does art do?”

Applied to a single kind of object, this questionbecomes how specific design characteristics (suchas visibility, cost, skill, a material’s working qual-ities or semantic associations, the presence andnature of decoration, and so on) fit the object for

its social task. A key point here is that art is notmade by individuals so much as by art productionsystems. Gell (1998) pointed out that individualworks instantiate a prototype within a system of“distributed cognition.” Such systems are oftenformed of communities of practice (Wenger 1998)encompassed within larger “art worlds” of non-artists of various kinds (Becker 1984). They alsoinclude non-human actants such as raw materials,places, and material techniques (Latour 2005).The long-term history of such traditions is influ-enced by how they are reproduced, an interplaybetween social practices and their material features(Barth 2002). The theoretical unit of macro-his-torical analysis is thus not an individual work butthe tradition or corpus, in tandem with the socialunit making it and enabled by it.

These two shifts of perspective— regarding artnot as expressive of an artist’s meanings but ascontributing efficaciously to a social project, andseeing art as produced through social networks— are key steps toward creating a real social historyof art. They allow us to link big-picture changesin art with changing social needs. In doing so,they build on discussions in art history and an-thropology. In art history and visual culture stud-ies, theorists have traced how art acts on viewersto create habituated “ways of seeing,” which linkviewers to a larger social order (Alpers 1984;Baxandall 1972; Berger 1972; Mitchell 2006). Inanthropology, the parallel discussion has focusedon how the aesthetics of style and design integrateand express a group’s particular social values(Coote and Shelton 1992; Heyd 2012). In bothdiscussions, the point is to establish broad linkagesbetween the characteristics of art, the responses itrequires and develops in a viewer or user, and anencompassing social order.

Methodology and MaterialsIn the last decade, archaeologists have begun totake a theoretically sophisticated approach to Eu-ropean prehistoric art; pioneering works for Eu-rope include Bailey (2005), Bradley (2009), Gar-row and Gosden (2012), Jones (2011), Skeates(2005), and Wells (2012). What this study adds tothese works is extension into broad geographicscales and deep time. This study considers artfrom the early Upper Paleolithic at around 40,000

B.C. through the Mesolithic, Neolithic, Copper,Bronze, and Iron Ages. It ends at the Classicalperiod, or, in areas without a Greek or Roman pe-riod (such as Northern and Eastern Europe), at anarbitrary cut-off of 0 A.D. (Table 1). All areasfrom the Arctic to the Mediterranean and fromthe Urals to the Atlantic were included (Supple-mental Figure 2).

The theoretical perspective above originatesin anthropology and art history, and in focusedstudies of modern or historical cases. Implement-ing it archaeologically, and on an immensely largerand more varied historical canvas, requires anotherlayer of methodological creativity. As with ar-chaeological methods of any kind, we need proxydefinitions and measures for observing elusivephenomena. Such definitions and measures arenever entirely satisfactory; the real question iswhether they give us useful starting points for in-vestigating complex but potentially important data.Furthermore, the kind of meta-analysis undertakenhere requires lowest-common-denominator ap-proaches to encompass a very wide range of het-erogeneous, mushy data, rather than working witha small dataset of tightly controlled data. Ulti-mately, in an experimental approach such as this,although methods are inevitably approximate, theproof of the pudding is in the eating: does themethod reveal new patterns that tell us somethinginteresting about the past?

Here, we need two archaeological proxies. Thefirst concerns defining art archaeologically. Earlierin this paper, art was defined theoretically by itssocial function, rather than as a specific kind ofobject.1 Art is thus inherently a vaguely boundedcategory, as its social function may be elusive,ambiguous, contextually salient, and (perhaps al-most always) combined with other purposes; it isgenerally beside the point to fetishize the termand quibble over whether a given object is or isn’tart. Nevertheless, archaeologically, we need aworking definition to select objects for analysis.Although we can often investigate the contextualuse and social function of particular objects ar-chaeologically, this is challenging in a large-scalecomparative analysis due to variability in datacompleteness and quality. As a proxy definition,works of art may often be identified as objectsfor which particular effort and skill has been putinto representation, design, form, and appearance

Robb] PREHISTORIC ART IN EUROPE: A DEEP-TIME SOCIAL HISTORY 637


Table 1. European Prehistory: Context for this Study.

PeriodUpper Paleolithic

Mesolithic

Neolithic

Copper/Bronze Age

Iron Age

Dates (Approx.)a

40000–8000 B.C.

8000–5000 B.C.

5000–3000 B.C.

3000–800 B.C.

800 B.C.–0 A.D.

Major SocialDevelopmentsIce Age hunter-gatherers

Post-glacial hunter-gatherers

Sedentary farmingvillages; some groupshave marked ritualism

Increased trade,development of met-alwork, competitionfor political prestige;some incipient socialhierarchies

Trade around marginsof Classical world;some well-developedsocial hierarchiesand/or incipienturbanism

Art Traditionsin Database

24

12

75

69

31

Some Typical Art Traditions“Venus” figurines; painted caves inFrance and Paleolithic Spain; wide vari-ety of small carved animal and humanfigures and carved objects; engravedbone and stone plaques.

Lepenski Vir (Serbia) carved boulders;Northern Scandinavian forager rock arttraditions from Norway to Russia;carved bone, antler, and wood objects inBaltic and Russia (Lake Onega); Azilianpainted pebbles.

Balkan figurine traditions (Vinča,Cucuteni, Hamangia, etc.) extending toItaly and France; cave art (PortoBadisco, Italy; Levantine, macro-schematic and schematic art, Iberia);open-air rock art in Iberia, Britain,Ireland; megalithic art throughoutAtlantic Europe; a few Late Neolithicstatue-stelae traditions (e.g., Aveyron,France).

Rock art (Mont Bego, France;Valcamonica and Levanzo, Italy;Southern Scandinavia); local statue-ste-lae traditions from Ukraine to Iberia;figurines in Aegean, Sardinia, Malta,Iberia; Minoan and Mycenaean frescoes,seals, etc.; clay figures in Greece,Cyprus; figured metalwork and metalfigurines.

Rock art (Valcamonica, Italy andSouthern Scandinavia); Hallstatt and LaTéne (“Celtic”) metalwork; statuary instone and wood; figured pottery.

aNote that the dates for the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition vary significantly across Europe (from 6400 B.C. in Greece to4000 B.C. in Britain, Ireland, and Scandinavia). Moreover, terminology for the span between 3500 and 2400 B.C. also variesregionally; this period is variously known as “Neolithic,” “Late Neolithic,” “Copper Age,” and “Early Bronze Age,” oftendepending on which side of a national boundary it occurs. The term “Copper Age” is applied inconsistently across Europe,even within national traditions of research; for this reason, it has been combined with “Bronze Age” in the coarse-grainedcategories used here. In this analysis, data were analyzed both by archaeological period and by absolute chronological inter-val. Working in archaeological periods clarifies patterns associated with significant archaeological changes, notably the tran-sition to agriculture (as the sixth millennium B.C. contains significant amounts of both Mesolithic foragers and Neolithicfarmers). Working in real chronological intervals clarifies patterns that happened in a discrete time horizon; this is most obvi-ously true for widespread developments characterising the third millennium B.C., which otherwise get dissolved into hetero-geneous categories of “Neolithic,” “Copper Age,” and “Bronze Age.”

in order to create a particular social effect. Suchobjects are most obvious in the traditional archae-ological categories of art (rock art, cave paintings,architectural and megalithic art, figurines, sculp-tures, two-dimensional drawings and designs inmedia such as bone and stone, three dimensionalmodeling in media such as clay, stone and wood,and plastic and two-dimensional figuration onmetalwork). There are certainly objects corre-sponding to a Gellian definition of art that falloutside these categories (for example, many Ne-olithic stone axes, whose functionally superfluoushigh-gloss polish certainly connotes a “technologyof enchantment”).2 But these conventional archae-ological categories encompass most archaeologi-cally preserved material, which would fall underthe theoretical definition of art discussed earlier,and they rarely encompass anything that shouldnot be understood in such a sense.

Having defined art, the next question concernsthe units of art and how one studies them com-paratively. Counting every figurine and petro-glyph in Europe not only is impossible practically,but also misses the point theoretically. As arguedabove, the operative unit of art is not the individ-ual object but rather the art production systemgenerating it. To follow Gell (1998) once again(cf. his discussions of Deschamp’s oeuvre, ofMaori architecture, and of Marquesan carvings),the material correlate of an art production systemis the coherent corpus or body of art it produces.Thus, as an archaeological proxy, the unit ofanalysis here consists of the corpus or traditionof art. This is defined as a historically localizedway of making a specific kind of art object for aspecific purpose. What gives coherence to a tra-dition? It has historical and geographic unity(thus, similar objects made by people in widelyseparated places or historical contexts would notcount as a single “tradition”). Beyond this, it isgenerated by similar practices of production anduse. This definition encompasses archaeologicallyidentified traditions of several kinds: (1) well-bounded, homogeneous traditions where practicesgenerated conformity to an obvious standard (forinstance, Breton megalithic art, Valcamonica IronAge rock art, and most Balkan Neolithic figurinetraditions); (2) traditions generated by commonpractices but whose products are distinctly het-erogeneous visually (such as Central Mediter-

ranean Neolithic figurines); (3) bodies of art gen-erated by highly local recombinations or exag-gerations of generally known elements, whichinclude only one or a few unusual objects (forinstance, the British Neolithic “Folkton Drums,”the German Bronze Age “Nebra Sky Disk,” andthe Danish Iron Age “Gundestrup Cauldron”);and (4) traditions defined by a distinctive visualstyle applied to varied objects rather than a singlekind of object (e.g., La Téne metalwork).

Putting this definition into action involves mak-ing decisions about whether a particular group ofobjects should be counted as a single tradition,lumped with other groups, or split into distinctgroups. In most cases, this proved relativelystraightforward, as a historically coherent groupof objects or sites also displayed archaeologicaland stylistic coherence. For example, Western Eu-ropean Upper Paleolithic “mobiliary art” wascounted as several distinct categories based bothon geographical and chronological grounds andon thematic and material criteria, which probablyreflect different social functions: finely made,highly detailed animal carvings were distinguishedfrom expediently executed, sketchy engravingson flat fragments of bone, careful carvings ofwomen in stone, highly schematized flat repre-sentations of women, small clay “action art” fig-urines made to explode when heated, geometricengravings and paintings on animal bones, and anumber of other groups. In a few cases, alternativereadings of the record are possible, but these aredistributed throughout the database rather thanconcentrated in particular regions or periods.Moreover, archaeological identifications of arttraditions seem relatively consistent across na-tional traditions of research and hence unlikely tosignificantly bias analysis. The single biggestmethodological caveat of using art traditions as aproxy measure is that this analysis discusses thedensity and variety of art not in terms of objectsknown but in terms of how many different kindsof object are known.

This analysis is based on a broadly representa-tive sample of 211 art traditions gleaned frompublished literature and from visits to major sitesand museums (Supplemental Table 1). Literatureconsulted includes general syntheses (Sandars1985), reports on individual art traditions, andarea-, genre-, and period-based syntheses (Bailey


2005; Biehl 2003; Bradley 1997; Bradley et al.2002; Casini et al. 1995; Casini and Fossati 2004;Clottes 2002; Clottes and Lewis-Williams 1998;Gosden et al. 2008; Groht 2013; Helskog andOlsen 1995; Lawson 2012; Leroi-Gourhan 1982;Marshack 1972; Mithen 1987; Nash 2012; Robb2008, 2009; Sanchidrián 2005; Scarre 2007; Shee1981; Talalay 1993; Ucko and Rosenfeld 1967;Wells 2012). Tables 1 and 2 give an overview ofthe sample, which is listed fully and illustrated inthe Supplementary Materials. To maximizebreadth of coverage, data collected for each arttradition were necessarily coarse-grained categor-ical variables. For each tradition, basic informationon its form, material, themes, location, and datewere recorded; these data were then analyzed bothqualitatively and through simple descriptive sta-tistics. How representative is this sample? Theprehistoric art of Europe includes a large numberof unstudied, insecurely dated, and/or poorly pub-lished corpora. Based on what is known fromareas for which more exhaustive coverage is avail-able, such as the Central Mediterranean (De Mari-nis et al. 2012a, 2012b; Evans 1971; Fugazzolaand Tinè 2003; Giannitrapani 2002; Graziosi 1974;IIPP 1992; Lilliu 1999; Malone 2008; Skeates2005; Vella and Cilia 2005), a comprehensive sur-vey of archaeologically known prehistoric art inEurope would ultimately encompass perhaps 400to 600 corpora. This sample thus represents a size-able proportion of what exists, it includes datafrom all regions and periods, and it encompassesall major known forms of art. At the general leveldiscussed here, sample biases should not affectthe broad historical patterns drawn from it.

Does the Amount of Art Vary Historically?Or, Farming Made Us Artists

Did prehistoric Europeans always make art ormake it to the same extent? Perhaps the most strik-ing finding of this survey is that how much materialart Europeans made changed dramatically throughprehistory. Although some Paleolithic cave art isdeservedly famous, the popular image of art as aPaleolithic specialty is misleading. From the be-ginning of the Neolithic, with the advent of asedentary farming lifestyle, the number of knownart traditions rose tenfold (Figure 1). This is evenclearer if we calibrate simple counts of art’s abun-

dance in each period, as the archaeologically de-fined periods of prehistory have widely varyingdurations, ranging from the Upper Paleolithic(about 30,000 years) to the Iron Age (between 300and 800 years, depending on location). The picturechanges even more dramatically if we calculatehow many art traditions are known per millennium(Figure 1). As this shows, there is both a quantumleap in art at the advent of the Neolithic and asteady rise throughout later prehistory.

As a proximate cause for this trend, there arefar more archaeological sites known for the Ne-olithic and later periods than for Paleolithic andMesolithic hunter-gatherers. Yet this fact in itselfpoints to two underlying causes. With the adventof farming, Europe experienced both marked pop-ulation increases and new uses of material culture.Neolithic sites are more readily identified thanearlier ones in part because they are more mate-rially substantial. Compared to foraging popula-tions, Neolithic farmers were “thing-heavy,” witha new dependence on material things to symbolizeidentities, draw social boundaries, and forge so-cial relations (Gamble 2006; Hodder 2012; Ren-frew 2001; Robb and Harris 2013). This is di-rectly relevant to the social history of art. It shouldnot be supposed from Figure 1 that the Neolithicwas a “creative explosion” in a simple sense: Pa-leolithic and Mesolithic people may have beenequally rich in non-material arts such as music,narrative, and myth, or in the arts of portable, or-ganic materials such as wood, feathers, and skin(whether their own or animal). Instead, the growthin art reflects a “material explosion,” a quantumincrease in how many things people made, used,and accumulated. But this increased materializa-tion of the projects of identity and context hadcognitive consequences too. Expressing some-thing that was previously fluid or ephemeral indurable materials or fixed places is not a trivialchange; a change of material medium changesthe historical characteristics of an idea, its net-work of relations, its attachment to persons, itsreproducibility, durability, circulation, and con-trollability (Barth 2002; DeMarrais et al. 2004).Non-portable technologies such as pottery andlarger stonework opened up new and lasting fieldsof skill and resources for action. Beyond the in-creasing materialization of social relations, seden-tary village life posed new social challenges.


Within villages, art was important in mediatingincreasingly routinized networks of ritual knowl-edge and differentiated identities. On a largerscale, the geography of knowledge changed; forexample, in circumscribed, sedentary groups, styl-istically differentiated figurine types with denselocal concentrations multiplied: these reflect thelocalization and boundedness of ritual networks.One major new role, associated with social land-scapes of increasing fixity, was to create particularkinds of ritual places, whether caves in Iberia,rock-cut tombs in Sardinia, or open-air ritual sitesand megalithic tombs along the Atlantic seaboard.

After the Neolithic, art production continuedto accelerate (Figure 1). In some ways this maybe a predictable effect of the accumulation of newmedia (for instance, statuary was added primarilyin the third millennium B.C. and figured metal-work in the second millennium B.C.). But it alsoreflects at least two deeper social causes. One isthe accelerating pace of social change, which mayhave meant a faster turnover of art traditions (andhere it is worth recalling that our metrics reflectthe number of different kinds of things produced).More importantly, particularly with increasing so-

cial hierarchy, the diversity of social relations in-creased and, with it, the mediating and mobilizingfunctions performed by art.

“Period Art” and Regional Art WorldsDid people make the same kinds of art in all peri-ods? The answer is no (Table 2, Figure 2). Someforms of art are perennial. For example, anthro-pomorphic figurines are known in all periods,though the dominant medium shifts from stone,bone, or ivory in the Paleolithic to clay in the Ne-olithic and metals in the Bronze Age. Small dec-orated objects are equally perennial. Parietal artoccurs in all periods, though the balance shiftsdistinctly from cave art to open-air rock art overtime: in the Upper Paleolithic, Mesolithic, andNeolithic, cave art accounts for 53 percent of pari-etal art; in the Copper, Bronze, and Iron Ages, itaccounts for only 25 percent.3

Beyond such shifts of balance, there are distinctperiod-specific genres. Metalwork unsurprisinglyadds considerably to the traditions of modeledobjects known for the Bronze and Iron Ages. “Ar-chitectural” art on built structures was also rela-


Figure 1. Art traditions over time. Dashed line: total art traditions in sample. Solid line: art traditions per millennium.

tively unknown before about 4000 B.C. It is notsurprising that highly mobile Paleolithic andMesolithic foragers did not make much installationart. More surprisingly, architectural art is generallyabsent from sixth and fifth millennium Neolithiccontexts as well (the only exceptions being someplastic decoration on Balkan and Hungarianhouses), and when it appears, it is part of the wide-spread fourth–third millennium monumentaliza-tion of the funerary landscape; its role is almost

entirely that of making megalithic and rock-cuttombs fit for their ritual purpose. Architectural artin domestic contexts is mostly a late developmentconfined to elite contexts (e.g., Minoan, Myce-naean, and Akrotiri frescoes).

More strikingly, statuary is entirely unknownbefore about 3000 B.C. except for the Mesolithicdecorated boulders of Lepenski Vir, Serbia. Be-tween 3000 and 2000 B.C., there are at least 11distinct but related local traditions of anthropo-


Figure 2. Art traditions (a) by period; (b) by chronological interval.

a

b

morphic stone statues (sometimes called statue-stelae or statue-menhirs). These evolve conver-gently in multiple places in Western Europe fromdecorated menhirs and are clearly related to awidespread monumentalization of the landscapethroughout Central and Western Europe at thistime. These create a distinct peak of statuary inthe third millennium B.C., followed by a troughin the second millennium. Over the next millen-nium, where statue-stelae traditions continue intothe Bronze Age (e.g., Iberia, Italy), they graduallyevolve from representing generic cosmologicaland ancestral figures at funerary ritual sites to rep-resenting specific people as grave markers (García1999). The Iron Age resurgence of sculpture seemsdue both to a range of native traditions aroundthe margins of the Classical world (from Tartessiansculptures in Iberia to Hirschlanden in Germany,varied stelae traditions in Italy, and Monte Pramain Sardinia) and to the widespread ritual use oflarge wooden anthropomorphs across Northernand Western Europe. The other major shift ingenre occurs in the later Bronze and Iron Agewith the rise of distinct visual styles, which areapplied to multiple kinds of objects (see below).

In this broad picture, almost no body of art isabsolutely unique; they occur in groups of histor-ically related traditions. These macro-traditions(Table 3), the building blocks of large history,bundle together particular forms of art, media,styles, and contexts. Macro-traditions provide re-gionally shared repertories of possible meaningsand forms of action. They form fuzzily boundedenvelopes, which recombine readily with othercultural forms, rather than delimited “packages”or “cultural areas.” Grouping art in macro-tradi-tions sometimes tells us about actual cultural dif-

ferences that arose in distinct ways of life; for in-stance, the group of Arctic forager rock art tradi-tions extending from northern Norway to northernRussia is widely recognized as very different fromthe contemporary agriculturalist rock art of south-ern Scandinavia. Similarly, the Levantine art ofNeolithic eastern Spain differs from anything incontemporary Europe in technique, style, and im-agery, but it strongly resembles contemporaryNorth African art; a particularist historical expla-nation is probably needed here. More commonly,however, these regional macro-traditions tell usabout fuzzily bounded, shared ways of life. Themost striking example of these is the statue-stelaemacro-tradition of the third millennium B.C. En-compassing about a dozen local groups, statue-stelae traditions share a medium, stone, aestheticstandards, gender symbols, and a general associ-ation with death and ancestors, but they depictdistinctly local dress and were probably used inslightly different ways in different places. Theythus tell us not about diffusion from a single pointof origin (contra Mallory 1989), but about the co-alescence of a period-specific art production sys-tem. When the social need for this form of actionpassed, they disappeared or were repurposed toserve other social needs.

Art and Social Context: Some Long-Term Trends

Did art serve the same social purposes throughoutEuropean prehistory? Art is a heterogeneous col-lection of social technologies, and in all periodsit accomplished many social tasks. Moreover, thedata here are coarse-grained and preliminary. Nev-ertheless, some major changes appear in broad


Table 2. Genres of Art by Period.

Upper Copper Bronze Iron Genre Paleolithic Mesolithic Neolithic Age Age Age TotalArchitectural art (including megalithic art) 0 0 9 0 6 1 16Cave art 6 0 4 1 1 0 12Rock art 1 4 4 2 2 2 15Statuary (including statue-stelae) 0 1 7 4 5 10 27Figured objects (two-dimensional representations 4 2 9 2 16 13 46

or designs on surface of objects)Modeled objects (three-dimensional representations 1 3 13 1 12 0 30

or designs on objects)Figurine (human or animal) 12 2 29 5 12 5 65Total 24 12 75 15 54 31 211

outline, allowing us to formulate the rough con-tours of a social prehistory of art, a series of broad-brush hypotheses about the changing use of visualculture. Paleolithic and Mesolithic Art: Mobility and FluidityBy and large, the Paleolithic and Mesolithic soci-eties of Europe consisted of small groups of highlymobile hunter-gatherers, and this mobility is re-flected in the high proportion of mobile rather than

fixed art. Small engraved and modeled objects faroutnumber the more famous cave art sites; mostPaleolithic groups did not use art to define fixedplaces in the landscape. Indeed, there has beensome suggestion that parietal art occurs mostly inareas that were glacial refugia, perhaps placeswhere populations were circumscribed (e.g., notonly southern France and Iberia, but southern Italyas well). Discussions of parietal art’s role havetended to focus on its content or meaning (Uckoand Rosenfeld 1967), but in terms of its social


Table 3. Macro-Traditions of Prehistoric Art in Europe.

NamePaleolithic mobiliaryart

Near Eastern/Balkan

Atlantic megalithic art

Boreal/Baltic foragerart

Statue-stelae

White figurines

Central EuropeanBronze Age

Southern Scandinavian

Alpine Iron Ageimagery

Hallstatt and La Téne

Region and PeriodFrom Iberia to Russia, and south to southernItaly; Upper Paleolithic (mostly 30k–10kya)

Southeastern Europe to Hungary and Italy;Neolithic (sixth–fifth millennia B.C.)

Iberia, western France, Britain, Ireland,Germany; Neolithic (later fifth–third millen-nia B.C.)

Rock art traditions from Alta (Norway) toWhite River (Russia); Mesolithic (mostlyfifth through first millennia B.C.)

From Ukraine to Iberia, particularly Alps, S.France, N. Italy; Late Neolithic/ Copper Age/Early Bronze Age (mostly third millennium B.C.)

6–7 related traditions in Aegean, Sardinia,Malta, southern Spain; Late Neolithic/Copper Age/ Early Bronze Age (third millen-nium B.C.)

From Poland to Netherlands, and south to PoValley and Hungarian plain; Bronze Age(second millennium B.C.)

Open-air rock art from S. Norway, S.Sweden and Denmark; later Bronze Age toIron Age (second–first millennia B.C.)

Alps; Iron Age (earlier first millennium B.C.)

Central and Western Europe; Iron Age (firstmillennium B.C.)

NotesRelated traditions of carved female and animalfigures, carved objects, and engraved designson bone and stone plaques

Western end of Neolithic clay figurine macro-tradition spanning Europe to South Asia; oftenfemales and animals

Principally geometric art

Images of animals, hunting, sea-craft, birds;Baltic and Lake Onega rock art and carvedobjects

Tabular anthropomorphic statues, normallygendered, with local styles and clothing;mostly in death-ritual contexts

Mostly female or ungendered figures, largerthan earlier figurines and in stone, often whitemarble

Urnfield and related traditions of metalwork;vessels, ornaments, weapons, razors, andobjects such as Trondholm “sun-chariot”decorated geometrically and with cosmological motifs

Major themes include boats, hunting, warfare,and cosmological rock art narratives

Related image-world spanning Valcamonicarock art, Hallstatt rock art, situla art, Sopronpottery imagery, etc.

Widespread styles of metalwork decoration

role, it seems clear that cave art created rituallyimportant places, often in intentionally other-worldly, inaccessible, or liminal places. Much ofit seems to have been created through the accu-mulation of images in repeated participatoryepisodes, and participation and performance mayhave been more important than the end result.Shamanism may have been involved with someart, but the evidence can be read both ways and, inany case, there is no reason to suppose that thismust be a general explanation (contra Clottes andLewis-Williams 1998; Helvenston et al. 2003).Mobiliary art clearly served varied roles. Finepieces reflecting considerable investment of timeand skill include most of the misleadingly named“Venus” figurines, as well as small animal carvingssuch as the Vogelherd horse and French and Span-ish spear-throwers carved with ibexes, deer, andsimilar animals (Bahn and Vertut 1988); their ma-terials (mammoth ivory or particular kinds ofstone) may have been symbolically important.Carefully made objects such as the “Venuses”would have been curated and circulated; theysometimes have high canonicity in form (Leroi-Gourhan 1968). They have the broadest spatialdistribution of Paleolithic art, suggesting a role inlinking people across widely separated groups (assuggested originally by Gamble 1982). In contrast,many expedient pieces are typically flattish bonesor stones with shallowly incised designs. They usecommonly available materials such as animal boneand limestone and show little investment in legi-bility, precision, or visibility; they do not seem tohave been curated. These pieces served some ritualpurpose for which evident skill was not central;the point was the act of making an image or anexpedient mnemonic or narrative purpose, not theappearance of the finished product. Some art mayhave served didactic (Mithen 1987), mnemonic,or calendrical (Marshack 1972) purposes, but,again, there is no reason to think that all art did. Interms of Paleolithic art production systems, theoverall impression is that archaeologically knownart is a small material component of an active rituallife; in it we see the paraphernalia used in ritualoperations, with broad, decentered, often idiosyn-cratic networks of ritual practitioners.

Were there Paleolithic ways of seeing? Animalscertainly dominate the representational repertory.It has often been pointed out that the animals de-

picted are often not those most important as food,suggesting that animals were “good to think”(Ucko and Rosenfeld 1967). Both parietal andmobile art commonly includes abstract iconicsigns as well as representational imagery. Thismay suggest that ritual knowledge was layered,with some layers fairly evident, and others morehighly encoded, ambiguous, and accessible onlyto some practitioners or under specific conditions.Images of people are less frequent but occur con-sistently; the parietal and engraved mobiliary artof France contains about 200 human and humanishimages (Amna Jabeen, personal communication2014). Interestingly, they tend to be drawn usingsystems of depiction commonly employed for an-imals; for instance, while almost all later traditionstend to draw humans frontally (e.g., facing theviewer), Paleolithic art usually draws humans asseen from the side, in the same way animals aredrawn (Fritz 1999). This suggests that animalsformed a kind of visual classificatory system towhich humans were assimilated. A continuity be-tween humans and animals is also suggested bysporadic examples of human-animal hybrids. Un-like Classical hybrids such as centaurs, satyrs,and harpies, which join discrete segments of hu-mans and animals in intentionally paradoxicalcombinations underlining the fundamental differ-ence between them, Paleolithic hybrids mergepeople and animals much more seamlessly; theyshow beings whose human and animal character-istics alike are evident throughout the body (aswith figures such as the “Lion Man” from Ho-henstadel, which shows a carnivore in a humanposture). They thus use hybridity to underline afundamental continuity between humans and an-imals. This tradition continues into the Mesolithicthrough things such as the Lepenski Vir fish-an-thropomorphs (Srejovic 1972) and Mesolithicmasks at Star Carr and elsewhere allowing dancersto “become” red deer (Conneller 2004). Interest-ingly, Paleolithic artists were fully capable of rep-resenting humans unambiguously as humans whenthey saw fit, notably in “Venus” figurines; thissuggests several alternative ontologies, whichcame into play in different contexts (Robb andHarris 2013). One further possibility concernstransformability and gender. Many “hybrids” areexplicitly represented as male, often ithyphalli-cally; few or none are shown as female, while the


really unambiguous humans are usually female.This may perhaps hint that the ontological capacityfor spirit/animal transformation may have beengendered. The Neolithic: Art in the Ritual Mode of ProductionWhat happens to art as Europe turns to farming?Most obviously, the amount of art made andknown archaeologically skyrockets. The art pro-duction systems of Neolithic Europe suggest whatSpielmann (2002) has called the “ritual mode ofproduction”: ritual was an end in itself, motivatingcraft production and exchange. In Europe, mostof what we define as Neolithic art is clearly thefigured objects used in rituals, possibly in a quitematter-of-fact way more like a medical technologythan a venerated saint’s image or an admired OldMaster. Much art is made skillfully; for example,most figurines are made with skill commensuratewith that shown in local pottery traditions. Yet artis not often integrated into political or economicsystems of value. Art rarely uses special or im-ported materials. Mobile art was not treated assomething particularly valuable; for example, al-most all figurines are found deposited and brokenin ordinary midden deposits, with little attempt topush the boundaries of skillful manufacture, todevelop something visually striking, or to curatethe result. Indeed, breaking them may sometimeshave been part of their purpose (Chapman andGaydarska 2006). Art that served the purpose offraming places— in caves, in burial sites such asSardinian domus de janas tombs and the mega-lithic tombs of Iberia, France, and Ireland— rarelycelebrated the role or status of particular individ-uals or groups; it is often not particularly visibleor costly in materials or skill. Indeed, as figurinesand their discard show, the ritual life constructedthrough art often occurred at “domestic” or habi-tational sites and formed part of the daily routinesof living.

The communities of practice making Neolithicart were probably similar to those making otherthings; figurines almost always closely mirror thefabrics and techniques of local pottery styles.Many networks making art seem to have beenquite local, to judge from the plethora of spatiallybounded corpora. In a social landscape as well-bounded as many Neolithic landscapes are, this

is hardly surprising. The nature of communitiesof practice making art may also account for oneof the most striking features of Neolithic art: it isremarkably heterogeneous. By and large, sizeableand homogeneous corpora occur only in Balkanvillage sites, such as in Central and NorthernGreece, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Ser-bia, where dozens of stereotypically similar fig-urines may occur, a sign that the size and perma-nence of the resident group allowed a substantialcommunity of practice and hence a fairly contin-uous tradition to guide people making figurines.Elsewhere it was different. In southern Greece,figurines are both fewer and more varied (Talalay1993); Italian Neolithic figurines are both ex-tremely variable and found in small numbers persite, suggesting rather undirected reproductionamong thin, perhaps infrequently mobilized, ritualnetworks (Robb 2008). Only a handful of humanrepresentations are known for Neolithic Britainand Ireland, and no two are alike. As in Barth’s(1987) New Guinea example, such variabilityprobably reflects rituals being performed by small,dispersed networks of ritual participants, perhapsat relatively long intervals.

As visual culture, Neolithic art was layered orencoded; while it sometimes includes representa-tional imagery, in most Neolithic parietal art allor most of the repertory is made of signs soschematized as to be uninterpretable without priorknowledge. This is particularly true of the rockart of Britain, Ireland, and Iberia and the mega-lithic art of Western Europe (Shee 1981); the lattercontextually recombines a small range of schema-tized icons, much as in Walbiri iconography(Munn 1973). In the Neolithic cave of PortoBadisco, Italy (Graziosi 1980; Whitehouse 1992),painted images become increasingly abstract asone penetrates deeper into this remote, windingcave, forcing ritual initiates to think in terms ofincreasingly arcane knowledge. Similarly, anthro-pomorphic designs in Breton tombs occur prefer-entially in the back of the central chamber (Shee1981) and in unlit areas (Bradley 2009), suggest-ing the presencing or epiphany of a supernaturalfigure as one proceeds into the tomb. The overallimpression is of an aesthetic of depth and layers.To the extent that art reflected or created inequality(which is most likely in hypertrophic ritual sys-tems such as “Temple period” Malta and the Irish


Boyne Valley decorated tombs such as New-grange), it tended to be a hierarchy of ritual knowl-edge, unaccompanied by any particular economicor political stratification.

In another aspect of a “way of seeing,” Neolithicart differs sharply from Paleolithic art in how itdeals with animals. It contains few hybrid human-animal figures; there is usually a clear conceptualboundary between humans and animals, both wildand domestic. This probably reflects new relationswith animals that evolved with the advent of herd-ing; animals became property and controllable so-cial valuables rather than inhabitants of the forestand spiritual peers. Wild animals remained a sourceof prestige or spiritual value, however. Thus, para-doxically, outside the circum-Arctic macro-tradi-tion, virtually all the art in Europe that actuallyshows hunting scenes (as opposed to just ani-mals)—art at Italian sites such as Porto Badisco,Levantine Iberian art, and art at major Bronze andIron Age complexes such as Valcamonica (Italy)and Bohüslan (Sweden)—was actually made byfarmers, in many cases people who lived almostentirely on domesticates. Art at these places tiedinto narratives through which farmers constructedhunting as a social drama.The Third Millennium Transformation: Surfaces, Narratives, and the Visualization ofPrestigeFrom about the third millennium B.C. onward,there was a broad change in how European soci-eties worked. The transition is a messy one, vary-ing in timing and configuration regionally, but inalmost all of Europe, the basic nature of societychanged deeply between 3400 B.C. and 2400 B.C.This endogenous social change has been variouslyinterpreted as a cultural shift from ancestry to ge-nealogy (Barrett 1994; Thomas 1999), as the riseof individual prestige competition (Shennan 1987),as a shift from “corporate” to “network” societies,from “group-oriented” to “individualizing” chief-doms, or from societies regulated by ritual to onesregulated by prestige (Braithwaite 1984; Robb2007; Thorpe and Richards 1984), and as a changein embodied forms of political personhood (Robband Harris 2013). Some key features are: (1) therise of metals, which are used first as a technologyfor enhancing social bodies and as social valu-ables; (2) increasing levels of exchange and inte-

gration between regions; (3) a monumentalizationof the landscape, including more elaborate burials,formal extramural burial and ritual sites, and newforms of installation art, such as megalithic art,open-air rock art, and statue-stelae; (4) an increas-ing symbolic focus on the individual, for instancein burials (both single and collective) accompaniedby status kits of personal objects; and (5) muchclearer and more evident gender symbolizations,often focusing on weaponry for males and orna-ments, breasts, and clothing for females.

A continent-wide shift in social relations wouldinevitably involve striking changes both in specifickinds of art and in general ways of seeing. Thedata analyzed here suggest several distinctchanges. Most obviously, there is a change in thebalance of genres of art. Metalwork, an importantnew genre, is discussed below. Rock art is impor-tant in the Bronze and Iron Ages, with the densestconcentrations for all of prehistoric Europe knownin Alpine Italy and southern Sweden. Rock arteverywhere seems basically to be an egalitarianart. It is made with openly accessible materials,little spatial restriction, a low entry threshold interms of the skills and techniques required, and alow ceiling for social distinction (in terms of skilldeployed, architectural elaboration, and visibility).Indeed, most Bronze and Iron Age rock art is sur-prisingly unobtrusive visually. It is often partici-patory and accumulative rather than exclusionary,governed by a single master design, or associatedwith personal status. It may have been made bysubgroups engaged in particular gendered or age-related journeys or tasks; in terms of its socialroles, it may lie somewhere between performativeritualized gestures and props and informal narra-tive graffiti. Rock art is sometimes about economiccapital, depicting ploughs, horses, oxen, weapons,and boats. However, boat images seem to be moreabout integrating groups than giving prominenceto individuals (Ling 2012), and other referencesto the same subjects— such as actual weapons themselves— display far greater ranges of socialdistinction than does the rock art. The massiveconcentration of Iron Age rock art in Valcamonica,Italy, should perhaps be related to its position in aside valley off main Alpine routes, directly outsideof, and perhaps intentionally constructing differ-ence from, the hierarchical, Orientalizing societiesof the Etruscans and Veneti.


The other major genre of landscape art in thisperiod is the statue-stela, discussed earlier. Theseare large (approximately life-sized) anthropomor-phic human statues, which appear across Europein 10–15 discrete enclaves during the third mil-lennium B.C. (Casini and Fossati 2004). They arefound in ritual sites, usually associated with deathand sometimes incorporated into megalithic sites.They represent males, females, and smaller un-gendered beings. Statue-stelae exemplify devel-opments in art and society in several ways (Robb2009). They form part of the monumentalizedlandscape typical of this period, which involvedthe construction of visible, permanent places otherthan habitations, often associated with death andancestry. Aesthetically, they reduce the corpore-ality of the body to a flat, uniform surface for dis-playing a small range of gendered icons of identitysuch as weaponry and ornaments. These referencethe same handful of key symbols circulatedthrough trade, habitually worn in life, depositedas grave goods, and central to social dramas ofself-identification and comparison. They tie intothe burgeoning use of metal and other ornamentsas body art and the visual aesthetic of gleamingsurfaces as a metaphor for social value. Statue-stelae thus induce the viewer to see the bodythrough a new, Bronze Age conception of personalprestige.

Art continues to serve prominently as a materialcomponent of ritual activities, but the use of artin ritual changes its character. For example, theNeolithic Balkan/Near Eastern figurine macro-tradition involved low-material investment andcuration, probably quite specific rituals, and quitefragmented or locally bounded communities ofritual practice, resulting in many distinct localstyles. In the second millennium B.C., particularlyin Central and Northern Europe, the nature of rit-ual shifts. In place of localized ritual enclaves,broad horizons of ritual practice, and probablymythology as well, develop. This is visible inshared symbolisms found from northern Italy toScandinavia, which referenced a coherent suiteof cosmological symbols such as the sun, water-fowl, horses, snakes, boats, and carts (Bradley2006; Kaul 1998). Metal objects showing thesewere reproduced in imported, high-skill materials,closely associated with individuals (e.g., weapons,ornaments, other personal possessions such as ra-

zors), used in display, and curated. Ritual practicessuch as the votive deposition of valuables in lakesand bogs were also widely shared. Thus earlierritual art probably served to bound mostly egali-tarian local groups; the Bronze Age emergence ofbroad regional horizons of ritual practice andmythology represents a new use of ritual to linkelites across groups.

In terms of a Bronze Age “way of seeing,” theart database suggests three important develop-ments in context and aesthetics. First, art was de-ployed differently in landscapes. Except for theAtlantic fringe of western Iberia and the BritishIsles, there is little open-air rock art before theend of the Neolithic (and much of this AtlanticNeolithic art actually dates to the third millenniumB.C.); after the Neolithic, there is very little caveart, particularly in deep caves. Similarly, exceptfor the high-altitude Mount Bego rock carvings(France) (de Lumley 1996), Bronze and Iron Agerock art is usually found within frequented land-scapes, often not far from settlements. Effectively,art moved out into the open.

Secondly, the visual aesthetics of art shiftedtoo. As noted above, parietal art before the BronzeAge often consists mostly or exclusively of highlyschematized iconography. In contrast, Bronze andIron Age art consists increasingly of recognizable motifs— people, horses, deer, weapons, wheels,footprints, boats, ploughs, and so on. While manyarchaeologists might object that “non-representa-tional” signs are simply representational signswhose meaning remains inaccessible to archaeol-ogists, this really misses the point: Bronze Ageand Iron Age art has equally simplified but stillrecognizable motifs, and Paleolithic/Neolithicartists were certainly capable of carving complexor recognizable motifs if they desired. Indeed,their motifs remain equally abstract when executedin paint as when they are carved, and some abstractNeolithic motifs are quite elaborate. The real ques-tion, therefore, is about the role of iconographicabstraction and schematism as a visual strategy(Munn 1966, 1973). Paralleling visual strategiesin other material culture such as pottery and axes(Robb 2015), Paleolithic and Neolithic art useshighly abstracted signs that require layers of priorsocial knowledge to interpret. Bronze and IronAge art uses a “flat,” more readily accessible style— perhaps indicating a shift in role from


closed rituals of knowledge to open participation.Finally, art becomes more explicitly narrative.

Up through the Neolithic, with a few historicallyparticular exceptions from other macro-traditions(e.g., Levantine art, Arctic Mesolithic art), mostparietal art consists of separated, individual motifs;while these might be governed by rules of associ-ation or superimposition, there are very few“scenes” in which motifs are grouped in a clearassociation implying logical relations among thethings depicted. From the Bronze Age onwards,parietal art becomes increasingly narrative. Therepertory of key symbols that form the staple ofBronze and Iron Age art— weapons, ploughs, boats— themselves reference and imply actions,stories, or kinds of person. Beyond this,Bronze/Iron Age art increasingly features motifscombined to create recognizable scenes— fighting,hunting, ploughing, dancing, riding, even simplypeople holding objects. Indeed, this trend towardsrepresentational narrative depiction characterizestwo-dimensional art of all kinds (such as insetscenes on stelae, pottery, and metalwork).

These trends are partial and have many excep-tions; but they do suggest that the social uses ofart evolved millennially over deep prehistory associety changed. These three changes suggest ageneral shift from an art of depth and layers, ofencoded, ambiguous, polysemic, or revealedknowledge, to an art of surfaces, a more open,accessible, narrative form of knowledge. As a so-cial technology, new forms of art were not simplyabout displaying value; the narratives they impliedand the shared reactions and knowledge theyevoked and created linked people and contributedto political changes in personhood throughout thisperiod (Robb and Harris 2013).

The Arts of Hierarchy (Second Millennium–First Millennium B.C.)

Many Bronze and Iron Age societies remainedrelatively egalitarian down to the dawn of the his-torical era, and the visual and aesthetic culture ofthe later Bronze and Iron Ages continued thetrends described in the previous section withoutmarked rupture. However, social hierarchies de-veloped in some areas of Europe. Where they did,art adapted as well. For example, art served therole of personalizing value and expressing social

distinction. Where statue-stelae survived beyondthe third millennium B.C., they gradually shiftedtheir semantic territory from landscape and an-cestry to the performance of an elite persona. Inboth the Lunigiana and Daunian traditions in Italy,statue-stelae acquire more elaborate decoration— ornate clothes and ornaments, a panoply of armsand armor rather than a simple weapon. In Iberia,Late Bronze Age stelae acquire imagery suggest-ing the biographical narrative or cursus honorumof a local elite. As noted above, emergent hierar-chy is also visible in the imagery and finely craftedmaterials of an elite ritual koine. Through bothworn objects and handled objects such as swordsand scabbards, over time, visual patterns in Bronzeand Iron Age art increasingly expressed distinction(Wells 2012).

Much as Bronze and Iron Age rock art seemsan inherently egalitarian medium, metalwork be-came the chosen art of stratification. Metal local-ized value in a way that was politically control-lable (Earle 2002). Metal objects were portableand made good gifts or trade objects. Obtainedthrough long-distance trade, metals offered re-strictable access, particularly for gold objects.Metalwork required specialized skill to produce,and it was exceeded only by textiles in its abilityto accumulate labor and skill into a highly visible,body-enhancing form. Aesthetically, by the MiddleBronze Age, there was already a millennium-longtradition of associating metal’s shining visual qual-ities with social value. Importantly, except perhapsfor vessels such as cauldrons, most metal objectswere personal paraphernalia, objects of displayand performance: weapons, armor, clothing fit-tings, and ornaments.

With such possibilities for aesthetic intensifi-cation, it is no surprise that metalwork eclipsedall other forms of art as the preferred medium ofstatus. Three related patterns in the art databaseunderline this. First, later prehistory sees the in-vention of wearable art (Table 4), principally ineye-catching decorated and modeled metalwork(Wells 2012). Wearing metal objects formed animportant component of gendered, age-related,and group persona (Sørensen 1997). It is clearthat this is not a case of art’s development beingdriven by new technologies, but the converse;metals initially developed in large part as a socialtechnology for enhancing the body (Robb and


Harris 2013), and wearable art clearly formed acomponent of a widespread late prehistoric projectof body presentation. Secondly, the late BronzeAge and Iron Age see the invention of new formsof art not tied to single objects. These consist ofhighly distinctive, skill-intensive visual styles thatare deployed on multiple kinds of object— mostparadigmatically Hallstatt and La Téne metalwork(Gosden et al. 2008). As a social innovation linkedto networked elite status (and thus possibly thefunctional ancestors of modern corporate styles),these used art as a visual “branding” strategy(Becker 2014). Finally, the form that unique artobjects take changes. Earlier in prehistory, one-off items tend to be simply objects without com-paranda, unique but not particularly valuable orspectacular, suggesting very local, heterogeneouscommunities of ritual and expressive practice (e.g.,the Brno Upper Paleolithic “puppet,” the Knock(Ireland) Neolithic carved axe head, the BritishNeolithic “Folkton drums”). Now, one-off piecesoften draw ideas from known macro-traditions ofcraftsmanship, symbolism, or genre, but developthem to uniquely skilled or elaborate levels (e.g.,the Gundestrup Cauldron, the Mycenaean shaftgrave gold masks, the Nebra sky-disk, the Trond-holm “sun chariot”). These spectacular virtuosopieces are clear “technologies of enchantment”(Garrow and Gosden 2012; Gell 1992) producedthrough patron-specialist relations, perhaps tradedvast distances, circulated and deposited ceremo-nially, embodying wealth, and summing up entirevalue systems. Their biography was probablymore exalted than that of their possessors.

ConclusionsEurope’s prehistoric art has a big history. A deep-time, synthetic analysis reveals trends in materials,contexts, uses, and aesthetic styles, which are un-observable through the traditional mode of study-

ing single corpora, media, or periods. These trends,in turn, can be put in relation to broad histories ofsocial change and the changing relations betweenpeople and material culture.

Even a first, approximate analysis conductedby tabulating traditions of art as a proxy measurerevealed several important trends. The amount ofart prehistoric Europeans made was not constant;it increased dramatically with the Neolithic, andit continued to increase throughout later prehistory.Neolithic art, to a great extent, took the form ofparaphernalia for ritual operations, its localizedand heterogeneous character reflecting the frag-mented communities of practice of the Neolithicsocial landscape. The social transition of the fourthand third millennia B.C. brought in new kinds ofart, particularly statuary. It also brought in newvisual strategies and contexts— a movement fromarts of encoded ritual knowledge, often in inac-cessible contexts, to arts of surfaces, using morerepresentational iconography such as weapons,boats, and hunting, which carried implied narra-tives of personhood and, increasingly, was com-posed in narrative scenes itself. Ritual art increas-ingly linked elites across communities, andwearable art in metals enhanced the personhoodof important people. Even in such broad outlines,a real social history of art shows how changes inart enabled new kinds of social relations— not justsocial hierarchy, but also the earlier and perhapsmore intriguing consequences of sedentism andthe great social changes of the fourth and thirdmillennia B.C.

This conclusion opens up three principal newdirections of research. Empirically, this study isbased on a sample of art, and much prehistoricart is poorly known, dated, or published. Would acomprehensive study with deeper detail confirmthese patterns or reveal new ones? Theoretically,most archaeological studies of art either regard itas simply a conventional category meaning “pet-


Table 4. Modes of Interaction with Art.

Upper Copper/ Iron Use Paleolithic Mesolithic Neolithic Bronze Age Age TotalArt fixed in place 7 (29.2%) 5 (41.7%) 24 (32.0%) 24 (34.8%) 14 (45.2%) 74Art to be handled 17 (70.8%) 7 (58.3%) 50 (66.7%) 39 (56.5%) 12 (38.7%) 125Art to be handled/worn 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 1 (1.3%) 6 (8.7%) 5 (16.1%) 12Total 24 12 75 69 31 211

roglyphs, cave paintings, figurines, and so forth,”or they regard art as a symbolic expression ofcognitive meaning or content. In contrast, this pa-per argues that art is a particular kind of materialculture, a social technology, and that the real keyto understanding it is to examine its material char-acteristics and its social uses and contexts. Byshowing how patterning in art’s material qualities,formal characteristics, and settings can relate tothe evolution of its social tasks, this study mayprove to be a starting point for studies groundedin social theory and material culture theory. Fi-nally, looking at the history of art production sys-tems breaches the traditional focus on individualcreativity to show how people and things formsystems of distributed action, which can them-selves structure history. This in turn opens newhorizons for an archaeology of scale, in whichcreativity at a human scale both reproduces andchanges people and the deep-time systems of hu-man–thing relations. Deep histories such as theone sketched out here do not determine or obviatelocal histories; they help us to understand theiruniqueness.Acknowledgments. I am grateful to many colleagues acrossEurope for information on individual bodies of art, to SheilaKohring for help in searching for information, and to DaciaViejo Rose for translating the abstract into Spanish. OliverHarris, Robin Osborne, Guillaume Robin, and David Wen-grow provided helpful comments on drafts, as did RobinSkeates, Marit Munson, and an anonymous reviewer. Noneof these people are to blame for errors or opinions expressedin the final product. Some data were compiled under projectsfunded by the Leverhulme Trust, to which I am grateful forsupport.

Supplemental Materials. Supplemental materials are linkedto the online version of the paper, accessible via the SAAmember login at www.saa.org/members-login.

Supplemental Table 1. Art Traditions Included in ThisAnalysis.Supplemental Figure 1. Image Gallery of Prehistoric Artin Europe.Supplemental Figure 2. Map of Europe.

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Notes1. Thus, if a sculpture were used to produce a purely phys-

ical effect (to hammer a nail, for instance) we would not ana-lyze it as art, while if a “utilitarian” object such as an axewere used primarily to create a psychological impression— toimpress someone, to create an impression of primitiveness, associal capital for a collector, and so forth— presumably itshould be understood as art.

2. Pottery decoration presents particular dilemmas. I ex-plicitly reject a traditional Western assumption that “decorativearts” such as pottery are “crafts” rather than “art”; theoretically,all styles of pottery decoration, including simple geometricmotifs, burnishing, and so forth are part of a visual strategy in-tended to have social effects. However, non-representationalpottery designs were excluded here on practical grounds, given

that including probably well over a thousand decorative potterystyles would skew the database completely and obscure pat-terning in all other media. As a practical compromise, I includepottery with plastic modeling and representational designs suchas painted and incised scenes, anthropomorphs, and so on.

3. The shift is even more marked (from 67 percent to 25percent) if we exclude the “Mesolithic” open-air rock art tra-ditions, all of which come from Northern Scandinavia/Russia,as belonging to a particular macro-tradition of representationdifferent from most of the continent; see below.

Submitted June 20, 2014; Revised January 8, 2015;Accepted April 21, 2015.

654 AMERICAN ANTIQUITY [Vol. 80, No. 4, 2015]

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Prehistoric Art in Europe: a Deep-time Social History