A Companion to Rock Art, First Edition. Edited by Jo McDonald and Peter Veth.© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

ABSTRACT

Among western European cave paintings and engravings, variation occurs in the themes and the relationships among them, and in the positioning of images in sites. In western Europe, the associations of the paintings and engravings changed through time and varied through space, such that the spatial confi guration at any time also varied. Further variation occurred in the importance of paintings and engravings in dif-ferent regions, here represented by the contrast between western Europe and the east Mediterranean. These contrasts between regions refl ect the emergence of different ideologies which had far - reaching effects on the historical trajectory of peoples in each region.

As a result of the history of archaeological research, it is sometimes diffi cult to escape the impression that the earliest paintings and engravings were made in the Upper Paleolithic caves of western Europe and that this expression of creativity was typical of what should be expected in the rest of the world. Much recent work has established that there are paintings and engravings that are probably contemporary with those in European caves at least in South Africa (Figure 4.1 ; consider the implications of the recent dating estimates for the art from Apollo 11: Wendt 1976 ; Miller et al. 1999 ) and in Australia (e.g., Veth et al. 2011 ). Moreover, both within Australia and between these three regions, there is substantial variation. Although it is now com-monplace to suggest that the production of paintings and engravings is universal, there is some reason to suppose that it has not always been so, with different earliest dates in different regions, and then with considerable differences between regions in

CHAPTER 4 Variation in Early Paintings and Engravings

Iain Davidson

52 IAIN DAVIDSON

what was produced. In addition, there were probably differences between the roles of paintings and engravings in the historical trajectories of behavioral variation. In this chapter, I want to highlight some of the variations within the Upper Paleolithic of western Europe, and contrast the abundant evidence there with the scarcity of evidence over the same time period in the east Mediterranean region (Figure 4.2 ).

APPROACHES TO MEANING IN PLEISTOCENE PAINTINGS AND ENGRAVINGS

Clottes recently emphasized three ways of getting at the meaning of Pleistocene paintings and engravings. His fi rst way is through studying “ the art itself, its themes,

Figure 4.1 African and east Mediterranean sites mentioned in text: 1, Apollo 11; 2, Blombos; 3, Klasies River; 4, Ksar ‘ Akil; 5, Levant sites, Skhul and Qafzeh; 6, North African sites, Oued Djebbana.

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VARIATION IN EARLY PAINTINGS AND ENGRAVINGS 53

its placement, the interrelations between the themes themselves and with the mor-phology of the cave ” (Clottes 2009 :195). In a suggestion that is more problematic, Clottes then appealed to ethnographic analysis of the “ beliefs and practices of hunter - gatherers elsewhere in the world ” (2009:195). The third of Clottes ’ s ways of understanding cave art is “ the context of the art ” (2009:195). I suggest that, in addition to these three approaches championed by Clottes, there are two more options, the fourth and fi fth, which are both concerned with broader questions of context. The fourth approach situates the painting and engraving practices in the evolution of behavior of the people in the region; that is, the context of broad archaeological time scales (Davidson 1997 ). The fi fth approach involves the interpre-tation of behavior in one region in relation to that in another – as discussed at greater length in this chapter – that is, the context of broad spatial scales.

Using the i mages d irectly The fi rst approach would include the studies by Fritz and Tosello in Chauvet Cave (Fritz and Tosello 2007 ; and as described in Chapter 33 by Clottes and Geneste), which considered the manner in which individual images were constructed and then the relationships among images on whole panels. P é rez - Seoane and Saura Ramos (2006) also considered a whole panel of paintings in Altamira, and discussed the relative sequence of producing these images from the evidence of the panel alone. Clottes himself studied the relationships among images produced at whole sites, as

Figure 4.2 Map of sites in the east and west Mediterranean regions mentioned in the text: 1, Altamira; 2, Chauvet Cave; 3, Cosquer Cave; 4, Pech Merle; 5, La Vi ñ a/River Nal ó n; 6, Parpall ó ; A, Ç atalh ö yuk; B, G ö bekli Tepe; C, Jericho; D, Mureybit; E, Hayonim. The two ellipses are the same size and indicate the reasons for referring to the east and west Mediterranean regions.

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54 IAIN DAVIDSON

in his studies at Cosquer Cave (Clottes et al. 1992 ) and Chauvet Cave (Clottes 2001 ). Sauvet (2005/2006) extended the analysis of panels to compare panels of Franco - Cantabrian images among a number of sites. It would also be desirable to be able to provide convincing evidence of change through time in the imagery at single sites as a basis for providing a sound foundation for the interpretation of stylistic changes during the time of production of these paintings and engravings, but there are very few sites where this is possible. One site which does stand out in this regard, however, is Parpall ó in eastern Spain (Davidson 2012b ). This site has the benefi t of having paintings and engravings on small slabs, or plaquettes, of stone which were found stratifi ed in the sediments of the site, and so can be dated by radiocarbon assays (Davidson 1974 ; Bofi nger and Davidson 1977 ). There is a complete analysis of these plaquettes which demonstrates variations within a predominantly consistent iconic tradition (Villaverde Bonilla 1994 ; see Figure 4.3 ).

Appealing to e thnography The second approach, involving the appeal to ethnography, has a tradition going back to the fi rst French recognition of the antiquity of cave art when Cartailhac and Breuil (1906) used one - third of their presentation about the cave of Altamira for a comparison with rock art around the world. Although that approach was necessary in the intellectual environment existing at the end of the nineteenth century (Moro Abad í a and Gonz á les Morales 2005 ; Moro Abad í a 2006 ;), it is more problematic in the twenty - fi rst century because the behavior of present - day people is the outcome of the dynamic processes documented by archaeology. A potentially circular argu-ment arises if we use that cumulative and changing behavior as an explanation of the archaeological record. Nevertheless, there is a large literature which does this, includ-ing, for example, the recent interpretations of Upper Paleolithic cave paintings and engravings through indications that there may have been shamanic practices associ-ated with altered states of consciousness (Davenport and Jochim 1988 ; Clottes and Lewis - Williams 1998 ; Lewis - Williams 2002 ; Grosman et al. 2008 ; Whitley 2009 ) – a view that has also been subjected to substantial critique (e.g., Noble and Davidson 1993 ; McCall 2007 ; VanPool 2009 ). VanPool (2009) , in particular, identifi ed sha-manism and priesthood as different ends of a continuum of ritual practices and of the social roles in such rituals. It is ritual that transforms the personal experiences of shamans into a social role – without the ritual there would be no expression in paint-ings and engravings of the phenomena associated with the experiences of shamans.

In several recent papers, Sauvet, Layton, and colleagues have adopted a compara-tive approach that seeks to put Upper Paleolithic assemblages of paintings and engravings into a context of similar assemblages around the world (see Sauvet et al. 2000, 2009 ). These attempts depend on an argument of Layton ’ s (2000) that there are structural differences between the assemblages of rock paintings associated with shamanism and those associated with totemism, on one hand, or completely unrelated to particular religious systems on the other. These studies seem to demonstrate that there are more possibilities for interpretation than just shamanism.

By contrast, our appeal to Rappaport ’ s (1999) work on ritual (Ross and Davidson 2006 ), which I discuss below, is concerned with the general principles of under-standing ritual rather than any cultural specifi cs. Unlike the other examples, I am

VARIATION IN EARLY PAINTINGS AND ENGRAVINGS 55

comfortable that our use appeals to replicable principles that do rely on assumptions about the very behavior we are trying to discover. This extraction of principles is the essential key to extracting relevant models from ethnographic data.

A paper by Conkey (1980b) about hunter - gatherer aggregation sites is a well - known example of this sort of extraction of principles, and is also one of the most infl uential papers about how symbols were used to differentiate between groups. Conkey generalized from ethnographic studies that an important part of the hunter - gatherer adaptation to the environment was the use of aggregation sites – places where otherwise dispersed hunter - gatherer groups came together. She reasoned that evidence for such a patterning of behavior might be identifi able in the archaeological

Figure 4.3 Continuing iconicity through the sequence at Parpall ó . Drawings from Villaverde Bonilla ( 1994 : 95, fi g. 1); graphs drawn from counts in Villaverde Bonilla ( 1994 :95, table 14). This fi gure has been clarifi ed relative to an original version in Davidson (2012a) .

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56 IAIN DAVIDSON

record of the Upper Paleolithic hunter - gatherers of Europe. To study this, she looked at the supposedly decorative marks on bone artifacts from northern Spain. Studying the marks on such artifacts, she found that there was a restricted range of design elements.

Further analysis showed that these elements were usually combined according to certain “ structural principles. ” Conkey argued that if a particular site had been visited by people who aggregated there from different locations (and left behind their marked bones), then this should be refl ected in the distribution of patterns, on the one hand, at the aggregation site (in her case study, Altamira Cave), and, on the other, at “ dispersion ” sites elsewhere on the landscape. Specifi cally, she predicted that:

1 The diversity of pieces at Altamira will be greater than at any other single (hypoth-esized dispersion) site.

2 Most design elements of the core Magdalenian engraving repertoire . . . will be present everywhere or at least be widespread.

3 There will, however, also tend to be design elements and structural principles that are unique to Altamira.

4 Elements and principles lacking at Altamira should tend not to occur elsewhere. (Conkey 1980b :616)

Her analysis of the design elements on bone verifi ed these predictions. The predic-tions, derived from the principles established in the ethnography, should be generaliz-able to many other situations.

Building on Conkey ’ s work, Galt - Smith (1997) argued that, although Conkey ’ s study showed the importance of aggregation sites in hunter - gatherer adaptations, the ethnographic examples did not offer clear evidence that “ style ” was used in the way she assumed. Galt - Smith explicitly examined this by classifying the behavior of modern people in Central Australia in relation to the locations where rock art was found. He showed that there are two different types of aggregation sites: Aggregation A – those that involved major ceremonial meetings of people from different regions; and Aggregation B – those that involved more local totemic groupings. A third cat-egory comprised the dispersion sites. He was able to link the variation among rock art characteristics to ethnographically identifi able aggregation sites and dispersal sites, and showed that the patterning for the engraving (petroglyph) sites was different from that for the painting (pictograph) sites. He showed that the concept of “ aggre-gation sites ” was not as simple as it seemed to be in the ethnographic studies that Conkey used, and this added a new dimension to Conkey ’ s analysis.

Studies of the i mmediate c ontext Conkey ’ s (1980a, 1997) work is also an example of contextual studies where the paintings and engravings are situated in relation to other aspects of the archaeology. More recently, Conkey has undertaken extensive work away from the painted caves in order to try to establish what the behavior of the community of painters was outside the caves (Conkey 1997 ). In other relevant work, Gilman (1984) proposed theoreti-cal models of the interactions between subsistence, demography, social obligations, and ritual; Jochim (1983) sought explanation in the spatial, environmental, and ecological relations that emerge when considering the distribution of all cave

VARIATION IN EARLY PAINTINGS AND ENGRAVINGS 57

and mobiliary art sites in western Europe; my own work looked at changes through time in relation to faunal exploitation as discussed below (e.g., Davidson 1999 ); that of Guthrie (2005) looked at the insights that could be gained by taking a fi ne - grained approach to the detailed representations of animals to show the meticulous ethologi-cal knowledge of the painters and engravers; and many others have sought to put paintings and engravings in their local archaeological context (e.g., Fortea P é rez 2005/2006 ).

Studies of the b road c hronological c ontext In a previous paper, originally presented in 1993 (Davidson 1997 ), I suggested that there were some hints of a common process in the late Pleistocene emergence of painting and engraving in different parts of the world, but that the outcomes were different in different regions. This paper was written in the context of a developing argument about the consequences of the emergence of language at about the same time as the emergence of symbol use (Noble and Davidson 1996 ). The fi rst part of the process was the marking of individuals through beads and so on (outlined in Davidson and Noble 1992 ). This was particularly relevant in the context of two features of what I was suggesting was the emergence of language as a means of com-munication using symbols. These were the recognition of individual selfhood and the need to mark membership of an “ in group ” in the context of confusions arising from the conventional nature of the use of symbols. Beads were present in Europe from before 34,000 years ago (White 2007 ). But, as with other forms of symbol use, Europe does not have priority: beads are known from Blombos 75,000 years ago or more, and as early as 92,000 years ago in the Levant (Bar - Yosef Mayer 2005 ), and possibly earlier in North Africa (Vanhaeren et al. 2006 ); they have also been found in Australia at dates earlier than those in Europe (Balme and Morse 2006 ; Veth et al. 2011 ). Second was the marking of segments of society within open social networks (derived from Strehlow 1970 ), which Gamble (1982) had used to interpret stylistic similarities among Venus fi gurines of 30,000 (calibrated) years ago (following Gvoz-dover 1989 ). Third was the marking of closed social networks through identifi cation of a central place – marking corporate ownership (a characteristic which coincided with Rosenfeld [ 1997 ] writing of “ corporate identity of groups ” ). I argued this on the basis of the distribution of sites with large numbers of painted or engraved plaquettes (Davidson 1989a ), and it is an element of the argument of others (Bahn 1982 ; Jochim 1983 ).

Studies of the b road s patial c ontext I have suggested previously (Davidson 1997 ) that the relative absence of all forms of “ art ” in the Upper Paleolithic of the east Mediterranean region was not a coincidence, but represented a different ideology in relation to the environment; a difference related to the emergence of agriculture in the east, but not in the west, Mediterranean region (see also Davidson 2006 ). In the same volume, Bar - Yosef (1997) documented the few late Pleistocene artistic expressions in the Near East, and argued that the scarcity was unlikely to be a product of lack of sites or of taphonomy. Rather, he suggested the reasons probably lay in the social realm. Socioeconomic

58 IAIN DAVIDSON

changes led to restructuring of social groups, and complex symbolic behaviors enhanced group cohesion and played a role in resolving confl ict. In this chapter, as a variant of that view, I argue that people use symbolism to work out their social relations with each other: Conkey (1989) would have said that the art has a more active agency in the social changes. Against Conkey, it must be said that objects cannot have agency, but they appear to have that role when people use them in particular ways. This opposition may well be at the root of some of the mystery associated with the ritual use of objects: the agency of people getting transferred to the object or the ritual act.

RITUAL PAINTING AND ENGRAVING IN THE WEST MEDITERRANEAN REGION 1

At the root of interpretation is the need to understand the behavior associated with such marking, the recognition criteria for ritual, and the implications of ritual behavior in understanding behavior. Through the analysis of ethnographic accounts, Rappaport ( 1999 :24 – 26) characterized the practice of ritual by “ the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers ” . From this, the minimal conditions for recognizing ritual require at least (1) invariance and (2) repetition. Rappaport identifi ed fi ve other key features of ritual in addition to these: (3) specialized time; (4) specialized place; (5) stylized behavior or stylized form; (6) performance and participation; and (7) a form which can hold and transfer a canonical message. Rappaport insisted that all seven should be present for a behavior to be classed as ritual. Some of these are more easily identi-fi ed in archaeological contexts than others, but given the particular diffi culty of identifying how the form of a ritual might carry a canonical message, and in the absence of all information about such a message, the goal might be said to be to identify the likelihood that a ritual identifi ed through the fi rst six criteria could have carried a canonical message. Ross (2003) worked out how to apply Rappaport ’ s conclusions to archaeological contexts of painting and engraving.

In the context of the cave paintings and engravings of the Upper Paleolithic of western Europe (see Figure 4.2 ), I have pointed out that, at the site of Parpall ó , there was repeated production of paintings and engravings on stone plaquettes which used the same conventions of iconicity over more than 10,000 years (see, e.g., Dav-idson 2012b ). These characteristics meet the fi rst six of Rappaport ’ s criteria for ritual, and a similar case could be made for the production of paintings and engravings deep in caves in Cantabria and France. The implication is that the production of, at least, some of the paintings and engravings probably involved ritual, and the communica-tion of meanings beyond those carried by the images themselves.

Pursuing this argument further, the painting and engraving at Parpall ó show that the relationship between symbolism and the environment changed through time (Davidson 1999 ). In particular, at Parpall ó there was a marked change in the relations between the animals represented in the paintings and engravings on stone plaquettes found stratifi ed in the site and the animals whose bones were found in the same layers (Davidson 1989b ). This change took place about 20,400 cal BP at precisely the

VARIATION IN EARLY PAINTINGS AND ENGRAVINGS 59

boundary between the layers related to the Solutrean stone industries and those related to the Magdalenian stone and antler industries.

Considering the evidence across Cantabria and southwestern France, the relation-ship between symbolism and the environment varied across space (Davidson 2005 ). It is commonplace to acknowledge that the animals painted or engraved on walls or objects do not correspond directly to the species whose bones are found at the site (an argument that was well represented for southern Africa by Vinnicombe 1972 ). In Europe, this is most commonly mentioned in relation to the abundance of reindeer bones and the scarcity of reindeer images (see, e.g., Clottes and Lewis - Williams 1998 :42). Altuna (1983, 1984, 1994) demonstrated for the Vasco - Cantabrian region that the principle applied to a wider range of species. Others have summarized the evidence for southwestern France and northern Spain (Rice and Paterson 1985, 1986 ). My more detailed analysis of the data assembled by Rice and Patterson showed that the pattern of over - and under - representation varied both within regions and between regions, and varied according to the species being considered (Davidson 1999 ).

Finally, when the body of evidence for chronological change and spatial variability was considered, it showed that as the relationships between people and their environ-ments changed through time, they also changed across space (Davidson 1989a ). Before the change about 20,000 years ago at Parpall ó , there were relatively few sites with paintings and engravings on plaquettes. After that date, there were many more. It seems to be that whatever the ideological change that took place at that time, it also corresponded with either an increase in population or, at least, a spread of the associated ideology. There are arguments that these events correspond with popula-tion expansion (Bocquet - Appel and Demars 2000 ; Gamble et al. 2004 ), but the evidence from Parpall ó suggests that it was not only that (Davidson 2006 ). We might also speculate that demographic pressures led to the adoption of new ideologies, but supporting data are absent.

Thus, although there is a case for the use of ritual that involved invariance and repetition in particular places, it seems very likely that the messages that were com-municated through the ritual were not unchanging. As I have suggested with respect to the ritual belief systems in Australia (Davidson 2010 ), in societies dependent on oral transmission of knowledge, the production of permanent marks on the environ-ment may allow those marks to be used as mnemonics and to establish the ritual importance of the mark makers, but it does not prevent change in the knowledge associated with them. In fact, changes in the knowledge imparted through the marks may be made possible by the power that comes from making the marks as a ritual performance. The performance of the ritual may provide the legitimation of the information imparted through the marks, but it does not guarantee the faithful transmission of information from one episode to another. This fl exibility is part of the distinctive adaptation of modern humans, and the west Mediterranean evidence seems to suggest that the production of paintings and engravings was part of the way people adjusted their social interactions in the context of changing environmental conditions before and after the Last Glacial Maximum.

There is a persisting notion that the Upper Paleolithic lasted until the end of the Pleistocene at 10,000 years ago (e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Paleolithic, accessed February 23, 2012; for the persistence in the more professional

60 IAIN DAVIDSON

literature, see, e.g,. Pettit 2005 :126). Both the direct dating of the paintings (e.g., Gonz á lez Sainz 2007 ) and the dates from sites with reindeer bones and Magdalenian stone industries (e.g., Kuntz and Costamagno 2011 ) suggest that the phenomena generally included in the Upper Paleolithic in western Europe did not survive the abrupt cooling of the Younger Dryas (cf. Aura et al. 2011 ). Both ended shortly after 13,000 cal BP (Steffensen et al. 2008 ). Everything was different after that event in the west Mediterranean, where the practice of making paintings and engravings almost disappeared (for a discussion of some of the issues this raises, see Gonz á lez Morales 1991 ).

We know about the way in which people worked out their symbolic relationships with their environments and with each other in much detail for the western end of the Mediterranean, but we know very little about the way in which people worked out the symbolic side of such relationships for the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

PLEISTOCENE PAINTING, ENGRAVING, AND RITUAL IN THE EAST MEDITERRANEAN

In the east Mediterranean, the terminology in current use has the Upper Paleolithic ending about 24,000 cal BP and replaced by the Epipaleolithic (Kebaran and Natu-fi an), which lasted until about 11,500 cal BP (chronology derived from Goring - Morris and Belfer - Cohen 2010 ). The comparison between the Pleistocene paintings and engravings of east and west Mediterranean regions, therefore, is made more diffi cult because scholars working in one region do not generally concern themselves with issues that arise in the other, and there are incompatible naming conventions: but we may not be guilty of comparing apples with pears if people talk about apples in one region and Malus domestica in another. The archaeology of the Upper Pleistocene in the east Mediterranean has yielded few examples of engraving and none of painting (summarized in Bar - Yosef 1997 ), though there are some objects which may (or may not) be symbolic that pre - date the Upper Paleolithic, such as the Middle Pleistocene carved stone from the Acheulean site of Berekhat Ram (d ’ Errico and Nowell 2000 ), and the Upper Pleistocene engraved fl int from the Mousterian site of Quneitra (Mar-shack 1996 ). All of the engravings are on portable objects: animal bones with multiple parallel notches from the Mousterian of Kebara and the Aurignacian of Hayonim (Davis 1974 ) and a similar object from Ksar ’ Akil (Tixier 1974 ) dating to about 33,500 cal BP (Mellars and Tixier 1989 ); a single iconic image, possibly representing an equid, from the Aurignacian of Hayonim (Marshack 1997 ) dating 30,000 – 33,000 cal BP (Anna Belfer - Cohen personal communication; and see Bar - Yosef et al. 2005 ); a bone fragment with multiple parallel incised lines from Ohalo II dated to about 23,000 cal BP (Nadel 1994 ). My experience looking at material from sites such as Klasies River in South Africa suggests that, among marked bone objects, there are two categories: those with notches, such as the Kebara, Hayonim, and Ksar ’ Akil pieces, and those with incised lines, such as the piece from Ohalo.

In the later period, there is a limestone pebble with fi nely incised lines in geometric patterns including some in “ ladders. ” This comes from Urkan e - Rub, a site with early Kebaran stone industries but associated with a radiocarbon date of 17,600 cal BP , said to be too recent for the assemblage (Hovers 1990 ). There is also a group of

VARIATION IN EARLY PAINTINGS AND ENGRAVINGS 61

fi nds from the early excavations at the cave site of Ö k ü zini in Turkey, which appear to lack stratigraphic attribution (Otte et al. 1995 ) such that the suggested date of about 14,750 cal BP (Marshack 1997 ) is diffi cult to justify. One pebble has a series of “ ladder ” - like engravings, similar to those from Urkan e - Rub and also to those from the pebble from Hayonim Terrace with a slight similarity to a limestone slab from Hayonim. Both engraved pebbles have been attributed to the Natufi an, which is now agreed to date from about 15,000 to 11,500 cal BP (using the Goring - Morris and Belfer - Cohen 2010 chronology).

This evidence for painting or engraving in the region during the Paleolithic is sparse compared to other regions (Hovers 1990 ; Bar - Yosef 1997 ), but the fact that bones were marked as well as stones means it is unlikely that archaeologists have failed to notice examples or that there has been differential destruction of painted or engraved objects. This makes it very diffi cult to argue for a role for such creations in ritual activities. There is some invariance, and a little repetition, but it is diffi cult to see how these can be construed to fi t with the requirements for “ specialized time or place. ” Nor are they particularly stylized in their form or their implied behavior, and it is diffi cult to construct an argument that they involve both performance and par-ticipation. Up to the beginning of the Natufi an, about 15,000 years ago, it seems likely that there was a fundamental difference between the east and west Mediter-ranean regions in ritual activities, with much ritual in the west and little in the east. In the west, the rituals were related to the symbolic representation of resources and, in the east, even if the evidence for ritual has been underestimated, it was not related to resources in the same way however prominent it was. Atkinson and Whitehouse (2011) have identifi ed two extremes of religious experience which occur in the modern world: one involves frequent repetitions of doctrinal utterances, often involv-ing religious leaders (priests) and generally low arousal of the faithful during religious experiences; the second involves infrequent repetitions, lack of dynamic leadership but high arousal during religious experiences. I have suggested (Davidson 2012a ) that the fi rst, high arousal type, was probably the pattern of the west Mediterranean in the Upper Paleolithic, and the second, low arousal type, was that of the Epipaleo-lithic in the east Mediterranean. I suggest that this pattern of ritual was related to the emergence of agriculture in the east (as Atkinson and Whitehouse also speculate), and the ritual activity in the west was part of the reason for the lack of emergence of agriculture in the west.

From the time when Garrod (1932) fi rst gave the name Natufi an to an archaeo-logical assemblage, it was shown to include carved and engraved objects and other symbolic markers (Garrod 1930 ; Belfer - Cohen 1991 ; Bar - Yosef 1998 ; Bar - Yosef and Belfer - Cohen 1999 ). One of the distinctive differences from what had come before was the presence of burials in groups (Belfer - Cohen and Hovers 1992 ), sometimes with substantial grave goods (for example, with dentalium shell head - dress at Mugharet el - Wad; Garrod 1932 ) and including burial with dogs as grave goods (Davis and Valla 1978 ). Burial with animals may have begun a little earlier (Maher et al. 2011 ). Sometimes there was suffi cient care shown in the interment to allow interpretation of the special status of the individual (Grosman et al. 2008 ), but on other occasions there was little except the archaeological context to suggest that the bodies were actually buried (see how this point is used in a different sense by Belfer - Cohen and Hovers 1992 ). Most importantly, the Natufi an was the context in

62 IAIN DAVIDSON

which settlements with built structures fi rst indicated a strong sedentary component to living patterns. Within those settlements, such as Wadi Hammeh (Edwards 2008 ), there were both visual markings, such as engraved slabs (with almost identical designs from Shukbah and Eynan; Noy 1991 : 563) and mortars, and also patterns of associa-tion of material culture items that suggest at least routinized behavior if not ritual disposal. Whatever the interpretation of the signifi cance of beads (Davidson and Noble 1992 ; Kuhn et al. 2001 ; Balme and Morse 2006 ), relative to earlier periods, the early Natufi an saw a great increase in the presence of beads, although it decreased in the late Natufi an (Bar - Yosef Mayer 2005 ).

A new imagery, where the animals represented do not appear to have been domes-ticated, emerged in the Pre - Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) at sites such as G ö bekli Tepe (Peters and Schmidt 2004 ) and Mureybit (Cauvin 1977 ). This imagery is complex in a variety of different ways and included fi gurines, which for the fi rst time in the region were made in clay (Rollefson 2008 ; but for earlier use of ceramics to make fi gurines, see Soffer et al. 1989 ). There is no sign of the emergence of agriculture or related practices in the western region, but it was out of this new symbolic envi-ronment that agriculture emerged in the east (cf. Cauvin 2000 ). The symbolic relationships that developed in the west Mediterranean region related people with their resources and related people with each other. Such relationships made it unlikely that people would move toward agriculture. But the broader point of this argument is to suggest that there may be important processes operating in past human behavior that can be understood by recognizing the signifi cance of variation in symbolic behavior across broad geographic regions.

In order to move further in such arguments, it is necessary to have an understand-ing of the sorts of theoretical contexts in which artistic systems interact with human belief systems. I have suggested that there is strong evidence of ritual related to the production of painted and engraved images in the west Mediterranean region, but that before about 15,000 years ago there is relatively little evidence of such rituals in the east Mediterranean. Ritual behavior, of course, frequently involves intangible behaviors such as singing or dancing so that may have been there in abundance. The point is, though, that without the enduring material presence, the character of the ritual is likely to have been different.

Elsewhere I have argued (Davidson 2012a ) that all of these discussions support the proposition that in seeking to understand the different outcomes at the end of the Pleistocene in the economies of the societies at different ends of the Mediter-ranean, we have tended to pay too little attention to the symbolic context of those societies as they evolved over the millennia. What this discussion has shown is that among non - agricultural peoples in different parts of the Mediterranean basin, the behavior associated with painting and engraving was quite different, probably involv-ing different ontologies, different ritual intensities, and different religious modes.

CONCLUSION

This argument leads to a number of important conclusions:

1 The history of painting and engraving and ritual in the Late Pleistocene is complex and variable between regions.

VARIATION IN EARLY PAINTINGS AND ENGRAVINGS 63

2 The paintings and engravings of the European Upper Paleolithic are only one manifestation of the several different symbolic worlds of the late Pleistocene.

3 The differences between the uses of painting and engraving in the east and west Mediterranean regions probably refl ect ontological, ritual, and religious differ-ences between the societies in those regions.

4 People without agriculture may have had a variety of different ontological systems which changed as they worked out their relationships with each other and with their environments, as shown by Australian archaeology (Balme et al. 2009 ; Veth et al. 2011 ).

5 Changes in ontology through time may be the key to understanding how some people altered their relationship with the resources of the environment so much that they became agriculturalists and pastoralists.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the following people who discussed these ideas with me, pro-vided PDFs, or otherwise assisted in the preparation of this chapter: Jane Balme, Daniela Bar - Yosef Mayer, Anna Belfer - Cohen, Simon Davis, Philip Edwards, Manuel Gandara, Erella Hovers, Bob Layton, Jo McDonald, April Nowell, Nikki Stern, and Peter Veth. An earlier, and slightly different, version of this chapter will be published elsewhere (Davidson 2012a ). I am responsible for the fi nal form of the arguments.

NOTE

1 After delivery of my paper in Tarasc ó n, a questioner disputed my attribution of the Franco - Cantabrian region to the “ west Mediterranean. ” The River Nal ó n, in Asturias province, is about 650 km from the Pleistocene shore of the Mediterranean quite close to Parpall ó . Parpall ó is about the same distance from Cosquer Cave and further from Les Eyzies. The distance between Jericho and G ö bekli Tepe is about 700 km and between Ç atalh ö yuk and G ö bekli Tepe it is about 530 km. By contrast, the distance between Barcelona and Beirut is about 3,000 km. At these scales, the contrast between the regions, despite variations within them, can be captured well by referring to the west and east Mediterranean. The point is that the variations within regions occur in ontological worlds that are different between regions.

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