Global Prehistory

30,000-500 BCE

Objectives:

1.1: Discuss whether the earliest representational images and shelters of the Paleolithic period can be considered works of art and architecture.

1.2: Summarize the diverse forms and potential meanings of the Paleolithic cave paintings and sculptures.

1.3: Describe the changes in prehistoric art and architecture that resulted from the social and cultural changes of the Neolithic period.

1.4: Explain the construction and uses of megalithic architecture.

Guiding Questions

• Why make art when, in the prehistoric world, there are so many more important things to do?

• What aspects of prehistoric art have continued through the ages?

• What possible meanings might prehistoric art have had for its original audience, and how do those contrast with the meanings prehistoric works have for audiences today?

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Essential knowledge

Common Features and Concerns

• Period of time are defined in terms of geological areas or major shifts in climate and/or environment (ice ages, desertification, tectonic shifts).

• Defined in terms as “lithic” or “stone ages”: Paleolithic (old stone age), Mesolithic (middle stone age), and Neolithic (new stone age)

• Earliest people were hunter-gatherers living in small groups. Survival is major concern, resulting in production of practical objects.

• Objects and ritualistic tools were used perhaps to encourage the availability of food sources.

• The first artworks established include items such as fired pottery, painting and incised graphics (on rocks primarily), sculpture (mostly female and animal figurines, and architecture (stone megaliths).

Global Occurrences

• In populations, not in connection with each other, humans have commonalities, and are aware of astronomical cycles (equinox and solstice) and take advantage of local materials (stone, clay, jade).

• Humanity began in Africa and radiated outwardly around 77,000 years ago.

• Our first art is in the form of rock paintings and carved natural materials. Art making is associated with food production, settlement, status, and burial.

Global Occurrences

• Paleolithic communities arose in West, Central, South, and Southeast, and East Asia between 70,000 and 40,000 BCE. Cave paintings can be found in variety of sites in these locations.

• In China ritual objects are made from jade, the beginning of a 5,000 year tradition in this medium.

• Neolithic tombs and memorials can be found across Asia, specifically relating to steles found in Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

• In modern day Japan the Neolithic Jomon people were prolific in ceramic arts.

• In addition to Japan, and China, ceramics were popular in modern day Iran beginning around 8,000 BCE, and more refined vessels developed after the invention of the pottery wheel in 4,000 BCE.

Global Occurrences

• Lapita people in the South Pacific created pottery with geometric designs that appear throughout the region in the Neolithic era.

• In Europe, Paleolithic and Neolithic art come in the form of cave paintings, small figurines, and megalith monuments.

• In the America’s, sculptures can be seen from animal bone and hardened clay portraying animals and human sacrifice, as well as female fecund sculptures.

Interdisciplinary Collaboration

• Carbon-14 dating system gives rise to theories about early humans.

• Modern cultural practices are used for the basis for those of ancient humans.

• Widespread spiritual approach establish theories of the function and meaning of prehistoric art.

• Archaeology supports how people, cultures, and art have traveled across the globe.

• Art history uses basic methods of comparing art, imagery, materials, and techniques to identify patterns globally.

PALEOLITHIC ART

Old stone age

Paleolithic Art

• Our earliest technology-chop branches, cut meat, smash bones for marrow. Flakes off the original stone could have been used for small knives.

• Deliberate shape-humanly made with uniform blows.

• Others like this are found globally, and are always made of stone.

• Does this hand axe indicate a natural artistic sensibility of humans?

Handaxe, lower paleolithic, about 1.8 million

years old, hard green volcanic lava (phonolite),

23.8 x 10 cm, found at Olduvai Gorge,

Tanzania, Africa © The Trustees of the British

Museum

Aurignacian Art

• Europe (especially Southern France, Northern Spain, and Swabia in Germany) include over two hundred caves with Aurignacianpaintings, drawings and sculpture that are among the earliest examples of representational image-making.

Video In Notes

The Caves

• The caves at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc, Lascaux, Pech Merle, and Altamira contain the best known examples of pre-historic painting and drawing.

• Renderings of animals and some humans that employ a complex mix of naturalism and abstraction.

• The paintings discovered in 1994, in the cave at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc in the Ardéche valley in France, are more than 30,000 years old.

• Images found at Lascaux and Altamira are more recent, dating to approximately 15,000 B.C.E.

• The paintings at Pech Merle date to both 25,000 and 15,000 B.C.E.

What can we really know about the creators of these

paintings and what the images originally meant?

Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc

• 1,000 feet in length with two large chambers.

• Carbon samples date the charcoal between 30,340 and 32,410 years before 1995 when the samples were taken.

• Drawings depict other large animals including horses, mammoths, musk ox, ibex, reindeer, aurochs, megaceros deer, panther, and owl (scholars note that these animals were not then a normal part of people's diet).

• The cave is littered with the skulls and bones of cave bear and the track of a wolf

*Apollo 11 Stones

• Anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) developed in Africa more than 100,000 years ago; of these, a small group left the Continent around 60,000-80,000 years ago and spread throughout the rest of the world.

• Art is not only a much older phenomenon than previously thought, but it has its roots in the African continent.

• Examples include necklaces made of perforated seashells and engraved stone and ostrich eggshell.

• Despite distance and time early human art is remarkably similar.

• We do not know if early humans understood the concept of art, but we use this umbrella term to describe prehistoric findings.

*Apollo 11 Stones

Quartzite slabs depicting animals, Apollo 11

Cave, Namibia. Image courtesy of State

Museum of Namibia

•The oldest scientifically-

dated rock art in Africa.

•Dates from around 26,000-

28,000 years ago and is

found in Namibia.

•Named Apollo 11, after

NASA’s successful moon

landing mission.

•Consists of seven painted

stone slabs depicting a

variety of animals painted in

charcoal, ochre and white.

• Depicting felines and/or

bovids.

• Examples show patterns that have been classified as cross-hatching.

• fragments show evidence of engraving. Two of these, dated to 77,000 years ago

• evidence for symbolic thought and language?

• in order for the meaning of this motif to be conveyed to others, language is a prerequisite

• Blombos engravings are not isolated occurrences

Incised ochre from Blombos Cave, South

Africa. Photo by Chris. S. Henshilwood © Chris.

S. Henshilwood

• Personal ornamentation and engraved design are tied to with the development of human cognition.

• Humans have had the motivation to adorn and to inscribe people and items, and to make things visually important.

• Carving or inscribing is a tradition that goes far back into African prehistory. However, the techniques and subject matter resonate over the millennia.

Fragments of engraved ostrich eggshells from

the Howiesons Poort of Diepkloof Rock Shelter,

Western Cape, South Africa, dated to 60,000

BP. Courtesy of Jean-Pierre Texier, Diepkloof

project. © Jean-Pierre Texier

Lascaux *Great Hall of the Bulls.

Lascaux, France.

Paleolithic Europe.

c. 15,000-13,000 B.C.E.

Rock Painting

Hall of the Bulls, Caves at Lascaux

• One of 350 sites (mostly in northern Spain and southern France ) like this. Neanderthals and Home Sapiens Sapiens (Modern Humans) existed here.

• Discovered in 1940. Original site is closed to the public. Lascaux II is the recreated site.

• Cave spaces range widely in size and ease of access.

• Hall of Bulls is large enough to hold about fifty people.

• Cave is made of white calcite (non-porous, dry rock) made perfect canvas for drawing and painting.

• Made with charcoal and ochre we find images of horses, deer, bison, elk, a few lions, a rhinoceros and a bear.

• There are also abstract markings-series of dots and lines in a variety of configurations.

• One human-like figure.

Hall of the Bulls, Caves at Lascaux

• Animals are rendered in what has come to be called "twisted perspective," in which their bodies are depicted in profile while we see the horns from a more frontal viewpoint.

• Sometimes entirely linear-defining the animal's contour

• Animals are also rendered in solid and blended colors blown by mouth onto the wall.

• Artists also carved lines into the soft calcite surface. Some of these are filled with color—others are not.

• Hundreds of stone tools also found at the site.

• Holes in some walls may have supported tree-limb scaffolding to reach the top of the cave.

• Assistant artists may have mixed pigments and held animal fat lamps to illuminate the space.

• Fossilized grain pollen has been found, brought in by early visitors.

Video in notes

Hall of the Bulls, Caves at Lascaux

• Do images evoke the spirit of the hunt?

• Do they communicate a story?

• Why does the humanoid figure have a bird head? And why is it drawn so crudely?

• Original cave closed in 1963. The replica is 200 yards away. Original is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

• Caves shows human need to communicate in the form of images since our beginnings.

Rock Art in North Africa

• Concentration of rock art exists in Algeria.

• Most famous is Tassilin’Ajjer .

• Water and wind erosion have cut “forests of stone” leaving smooth cave-like spaces at the base of cliffs ideal for carving and painting.

• Environment was once much wetter with a large extent of flora and fauna as witnessed in the numerous rock paintings.

• More than 15,000 rock paintings and engravings, dating back as far as 12,000 years are located in this region.

• Depicts herds of cattle and large wild animals such as giraffe and elephant, as well as human activities such as hunting and dancing.

• Famous for its Round Head paintings which were first described in the 1950s.

• Around 9,000 years old, some of these paintings are the largest found on the African continent, measuring up to 13 feet in height.

• At this site there are figures with recognizable weaponry or clothing

Painted rock art depicting five red figures, from Jabbaren, Ajjer Plateau, Djanet, Tassili, Algeria. 2013,2034.4248 © TARA/David Coulson

Video in notes

*Running Horned Woman

Pigment on Rock

Tassili n’Ajjer, Algeria

c. 6,000-4,000 B.C.E.

*Camelid Sacrum in the shape of a canine

14,000-7000 B.C.E.

Tequixquiac, State of Mexico

Animal Pelvic Bone

National Museum of Anthropology,

Mexico.Photo © Jorge Pérez de Lara

• One of the earliest artifacts from Mesoamerica.

• Carved from a now extinct animal.

• May have been used as a make that housed the spirit of a hunted animal in the context of a religious/spiritual ceremony to contact an otherworld spirit.

• Why is this bone used instead of rock?

• Why a dog?

• Why is this an important piece?

NEOLITHIC ART

New stone age

Neolithic Revolution

• The way we live today, settled in homes, close to other people in towns and cities, protected by laws, eating food grown on farms, and with leisure time to learn, explore and invent is all a result of the Neolithic revolution, which occurred approximately 11,500-5,000 years ago.

• The ability to plant and harvest crops and to domesticate animals brought humanity into a new era.

• People now have the ability to have an abundance of food, friends (outside of family), and a comfortable home.

Neolithic Art

• Sculpture became bigger.

• Pottery became more widespread.

• Alcohol was first produced.

• Architecture, and its interior and exterior

decoration, first appears.

• People to perform very hard work for

extended periods of time.

• Good evidence for religious practice.

• People were often buried under the floors of homes, and in some cases their skulls were removed and covered with plaster in order to create very life-like faces, complete with shells inset for eyes and paint to imitate hair and moustaches.

• Sixty-one plastered skulls that have been found, there is a generous number that come from the bodies of women and children.

• Is this a religious rite, or a way to memorialize someone special?

• Found in Palestine, Syria, and Jordan.

Skulls with plaster and

shell from the Pre-Pottery

Neolithic B, 7,000-6,000

B.C.E., found at the

Yiftah'el archeological site

in the Lower Galilee, Israel

• Hand thrown pottery

• Stylized

• Frieze of aquatic birds runs around the top. The parallel lines of their necks suggest a whole flock on the water's surface

• Underneath are running dogs with long, narrow bodies.

• The main part of the vase is decorated with large panels divided up with meander patterns. These may symbolize the settlement of the land by men, showing the borders of fields and villages and watercourses

*Bushel with ibex motifs, 4200--3500 B.C.E.,

Susa, Iran, painted terra-cotta, 28.90 x 16.40

cm, excavations led by Jacques de Morgan,

1906-08 (Musée du Louvre, Paris)

• The center panel is the majestic figure of a goat.

• Painted with simple shapes, triangles and circles.

• The horns are painted with an oversized abstract motif. Possibly serving to identify the vase and its owner as belonging to a particular group or a family.

Video In Notes

*Anthromorphic stele, 4th millenium BCE.

Arabian Peninsula, Sandstone. Courtesy of

National Museum of Saudi Arabia, Riyadh, 998.

• Al-Magar is the site of the first Neolothic settlement in the Arabian Peninsula. Evidence also shows the site populated as far as 50,000 years ago.

• A vertical, commemorative stone.

• Simple and abstract desgin.

• Part of a group of several dozen steles, all with distinct clothing and appearance, found in an area that extends from present-day southern Jordan to Yemen.

• Associated with religious or burial practices.

• The statues of most common animals found at Al-Magar are sheep, goat, dogs, ostriches, falcons, fish and horses.

This horse (among others) found at the al-

Magar site dates approximately to 9,000

years ago, challenging the commonly

accepted data of 3500BCE in Central Asia.

• Two distinct types of ritual jade objects: a disc, later known as a bi, and a tube, later known as a cong.

• Main types of cong have a square outer section around a circular inner part, and a circular hole.

• The meaning and purpose of bi and cong remain a mystery.

• Found in many burial sites, sometimes by the dozen.

Video in notes

*Jade Cong, 3300-2200 B.C.E., Liangzhu, China.

Carved Jade. British Museum.

• Jade discs have been found carefully laid on the bodies of the dead.

• The term bi is applied to wide discs with proportionately small central holes.

• Placed in prominent positions, often near the stomach and the chest of the deceased. Other smaller, and inferior bi would be aligned with the body.

• Clearly had an important ritual function as part of the burial process.

• Stone workers employed jade to make

prestigious, beautifully polished versions of

utilitarian stone tools, such as axes, and also

to make implements with possible ceremonial

or protective functions.

• A group of Neolithic peoples grouped today as

the Liangzhu culture lived in the Jiangsu

province of China during the third millennium

B.C.E. Their jades, ceramics and stone tools

were highly sophisticated.

Video in notes

*Stonehenge

Wiltshire, UK

Neolothic Europe

c.2500-1600 B.C.E.

Sanstone

Video in notes

• 97 feet in diameter, trilithons: 24 feet high

• The people who began work on Stonehenge were contemporaries with the first dynasties of Ancient Egypt, and their efforts predate the building of the Pyramids.

• At least three phases of construction. When and how constructed is up for debate.

• First phase of construction occurred around 3100 BCE, when a great circular ditch about six feet deep was dug with a bank of dirt within it about 360 feet in diameter, with a large entrance to the northeast and a smaller one to the south. This circular ditch and bank together is called a henge.

• Within the henge were dug 56 pits, each slightly more than three feet in diameter, called Aubrey holes, after John Aubrey, the 17th century English archaeologist who first found them.

• These holes were originally filled with upright bluestones or upright wooden beams. If the Aubrey holes were filled with bluestones ,it involved a great deal of effort as each weighed between 2 and 4 tons and were mined from the Preseli Hills, about 250 miles away in Wales.

• The second phase of work at Stonehenge occurred approximately 100-200 years later and involved the setting up of upright wooden posts, possibly of a roofed structure, in the center of the henge, as well as more upright posts near the northeast and southern entrances.

• During this second phase at Stonehenge the site was used for burial.

• At least 25 of the Aubrey holes were emptied and reused to hold cremation burials and another 30 cremation burial pits were dug into the ditch of the henge and in the eastern portion within the henge enclosure.

• The third phase of construction at Stonehenge happened approximately 400-500 years later.

• The remaining blue stones or wooden beams which had been placed in the Aubrey holes were pulled and a circle 108 feet in diameter of 30 huge and very hard sarsen stones were erected within the henge; these were quarried from nearby Marlborough Downs. These upright sarsen stones were capped with 30 lintel stones.

• Each standing stone was around 13 feet high, almost seven feet wide and weighed around 25 tons.

• This ring of stones enclosed five sarsen trilithons set up in a horseshoe shape 45 feet across. These huge stones weigh up to 50 tons each.

• Bluestones, were erected in a circle, half in the outer sarsen circle and half within the sarsen horseshoe.

• At the end of the phase there is some rearrangement of the bluestones as well as the construction of a long processional avenue (The Avenue), consisting of parallel banks with exterior ditches approximately 34 meters across, leading from the northeast entrance to Stonehenge, leading to the banks of the Avon river.

Video in notes

Questions

• Who planned the henge and who organized whom to work together in its construction? Neolithic villages, are few and so many lie underneath later Bronze Age, Roman, Medieval and modern cities. Villages that have been explored show simple farming hamlets with very little evidence of widely differing social status. This means the first phase of Stonehenge’s construction was an egalitarian endeavor, highly unusual for the ancient world.

• Who were the people buried at Stonehenge during its second phase? Nearly all the burials were of adult males, aged 25-40 years, in good health and with little sign of hard labor or disease. A burial at Stonehenge surely was a mark of elite status and these remains may well be those of some of the first political leaders of Great Britain. Meaning having the means of social distinction must have been desirable.

Conclusions

• The third phase involved tremendous planning and organization of labor. But, it also entailed an entirely new level of technical sophistication, specifically in the working of very hard stone. For instance, the horizontal lintel stones which topped the exterior ring of sarsen stones were fitted to them using a tongue and groove joint and then fitted to each other using a mortise and tenon joint, methods used in modern woodworking.

• The upright sarsens were dressed differently on each side, with the inward facing side more smoothly finished than the outer.

• The outer ring of sarsens were subtly modified to accommodate the way the human eye observes the massive stones: upright stones were gently widened toward the top which makes their mass constant when viewed from the ground.

• The lintel stones also curve slightly to echo the circular outer henge. The trilithons in the horseshoe are arranged by size; from smallest to largest creating a kind of pull inward to the monument, and dramatizes the outward Northeast facing of the horseshoe.

A Solar and Lunar Calendar?

• The sunrise of the summer solstice is exactly framed by the end of the horseshoe of trilithons at the interior of the monument, and exactly opposite that point, at the center of the bend of the horseshoe, at the winter solstice sunset, the sun is also aligned.

• The longest and shortest days of the year, are the turning point of the two great seasonal episodes of the annual calendar.

Video in notes

The Normanton Down Barrows lie on the crest

of a low ridge just to the south of Stonehenge.

Excavation of the barrows has produced

several rich finds, including beads and other

personal ornaments

Bluestone outcrops in the Preseli Hills of south-

west Wales, the source of the bluestones at

Stonehenge

Castlerigg Stone Circle stands one mile to the

east of Keswick and was built around 3000 BC.

It is set on a low hill with magnificent views of

the mountains of Skiddaw and Blencathra.

One of Dartmoor's most enigmatic features are

the standing stones which sit on the remote

hilltops surveying the centuries as they speed

by. The sad fact is that in the whole of the

Dartmoor National park there are only 12

which are left intact and stand on the open

moor.

Orkney Islands is littered with stone structures.

The Ring o' Brodgar is the most famous among

them.

One of the most famous circles in the British Isles, Rollright in Oxfordshire consists of 77

stones. According to a legend, the Rollright Stones were once human beings: the army of a

King whose story is explained in the King Stone page. There are other legends, though;

one is that the King's Men are uncountable. A baker who tried to ascertain their number

by placing a loaf on top of every stone was not successful, because he did not have

enough loaves. Another story tells that at midnight on New Year's Day the stones go

downhill to drink at a spring in Little Rollright spinney

Arbor Low, in the Peak District, Derbyshire,

England, consists of about 50 large limestone

blocks, quarried from a local site, which form

an egg-shaped circle, with monoliths at the

entrances, and possibly a portal stone at the

south entrance.

The Callanish Stones are situated near the village of Callanish on the west coast of the isle

of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland. Situated on a natural ridge that has a north-south

orientation, the Callanish monument consists of a central circle of 13 stones from which

four alignments extend to form a general cross shape. The northern alignment is longer

than the rest and a double rows, forming an avenue.

*The Ambum Stone

Ambum Valley, Enga Provence

Papua New Guinea

c. 1500 B.C.E.

Greywacke

• Ancient stone mortars and pestles from Papua New Guinea are often fashioned into the forms of birds, humans and animals.

• The Ambum Stone may depict a juvenile spiny anteater.

• Shows a higher sculptural level than other prehistoric pestles with more figurative detail.

• The significance and function of the Ambum stone remains unknown. Today these objects possess powers and are considered sacred by present-day people in the region, and areused as spirit stones in sorcery and other rituals.

*Tlatilco female figurine

Central Mexico, Tlatilco site

1200-900 B.C.E

Ceramic

• These mall ceramic figures, often of women, are found in Central Mexico in lively poses and elaborate hairstyles.

• Tlatilco people existed 2,000-3,000 years before the Aztecs.

• There is an emphasis on wide hips, the spherical upper thighs, and the pinched waist in these figurines.

• The hair and its styling was important for the people of this region.

• The two connected heads are rare. The purpose for this is unknown, perhaps it expresses and idea of duality.

•Modern Mexico City sits on top

of the remains of the village,

making archaeological work

difficult.

•Village homes were a basic

shape made of mud and reed.

•The inhabitants made their

living by growing maize (corn)

and taking advantage of the rich

lake resources nearby.

•Common motifs found on

other Tlatilco ceramics are

ducks and fish, which villagers

would have seen from the

lakeside.

• Male figurines are rare, but are often wearing costumes and even masks.

• Masks were very rare on female figures; most female figures stress hairstyle and/or body paint.

• Archaeologists found many of these figurines in burial sites.

Video in notes

*Terra cotta fragment

Lapita

Solomon Islands, Reef Islands

1000 B.C.E.

Terra cotta

• Lapita refers to an ancient Pacific culture that archaeologists believe to be the common ancestor of the contemporary cultures of Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia.

• The culture takes its name from where the distinctive pottery was discovered.

• The Lapita were a seafaring people who settled primarily on the coast rather than inland.

• Lapita art is best known for its ceramics, which feature intricate repeating geometric patterns that occasionally include anthropomorphic faces and figures.

• The patterns were incised into the pots before firing.

• Lapita ceramics are large vessels thought to have been used for cooking, serving, or storing food.

• Designs found on Lapitapottery may be related to patterns seen in modern Polynesian tattoos and barkcloth.

Websites

• http://archeologie.culture.fr/chauvet/en/

• http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/ur-mothers-paleolithic-statuettes

• http://www.metmuseum.org/TOAH/hd/lasc/hd_lasc.htm

• http://www.lascaux.culture.fr/#/en/00.xml

• http://africanrockart.org/

• http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/research_projects/all_current_projects/african_rock_art_image_project.aspx