Notes for Prehistory Slides Part 2
1. Slide one title
2. Prehistory is the time before written history starting with the period when there was life on
earth.
 The history of cultures, not nations or individual
 What we know of prehistory comes from the study of material remains by archaeologists,
scientists, scientists, and “art” historians.
3. The cave art that we will see belongs to the very top layer- the “upper” layer that was closest to
the surface of the earth, and which represents a more “recent”, relatively speaking, time period.
 Humans first appear on earth c. 100,000 years ago.
 Earliest tools were made of stone (which is why we call it the “stone” age) and bone.
 About 40,000 years ago, humans began making detailed representations of forms found in
nature.
4. We’ve eliminated the skulls that represent Neanderthal (Homo sapiens)- the elongated
examples. The squatter, rounder skull belongs to homo sapiens sapiens (Cro-Magnon).
 Image making and symbolic language are associated with the new structure of the brain
found in homo sapiens sapiens (Cro-Magnon).
 “Art” emerges around the same time that fully modern humans moved out of Africa into
 Europe
 Asia
 Australia
 Each continent has examples of representational artwork or body decoration.
5. Map of the prehistoric cave sites that we’ll be looking at in Europe. Prehistoric painting first
came to light in 1878 with the discovery of the Altamira site.
1. Cave and rock- shelter paintings from the Upper Paleolithic period may provide the most
powerful connections with our early ancestors. Rock art survives in many places around the
world, but the oldest known examples come from Western Europe. People began to paint,
engrave, draw, and model images in caves as early as 35,000 years ago, producing many
cave paintings in southern France and northern Spain between about 30,000 and 10,000
BCE. The images represent animals— such as wild horses, bison, mammoths, aurochs (
ancestors of cattle)— and a few people; many handprints; and hundreds of geometric
markings, such as grids, circles, and dots.
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6. The images in the Chauvet cave represent 427 different animals and 17 species.
 Chauvet was discovered in 1994 by three speleologists (people who study caves) or
spelunkers (people who explore caves) and was named for one of them: Jean-Marie
Chauvet.
 Chauvet cave contains what so far are the oldest examples of cave painting.
7. Title: Wall Painting with Horses, Rhinoceroses, and Aurochs
 Medium: Paint on limestone
 Date: c. 30,000–28,000 BCE
 Source/Museum: Chauvet Cave, Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, Ardèche Gorge, France
 NOTE: This is a KEY IMAGE
 Black and red outline
 Some images are polychromatic
 Naturalistic style:
 Line
 Shading
 Modeling
 Overlapping
8. Horses Facing Each Other :
 Horse Panel detail of horse head shows use of shading
 Reindeer: double line on back gives perspective
 Rhinoceros: horn follows curve of the wall
 Dated 32,410 +/-720 before the present
 Originally, before scientific methods were used, paintings were “dated” by how
“naturalistic” they appeared.
 The images in Chauvet were, at first, thought to be much more recent because they
conformed to more “modern” tastes in naturalism.
 Ironically, Chauvet is probably the oldest example of known cave painting, so the presence
of “naturalism” cannot be used to determine chronology.
9. Chauvet Cave: an owl.
It is said that this is the only depiction of this animal in Paleolithic art.
10. Title slide Pech-Merl cave
11. KEY IMAGE!
 Spotted Horses and Human Hands
Pech-Merle Cave
 Dordogne, France.
 Horses: 25,000-24,000 BCE; Hands c. 15,000 BCE
 Paint of limestone; individual horses are over 5’ (1.5cm) in length (fig. 1-8).
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Smooth finely detailed heads. Heavy bodies.
Massive extended necks.
Leg tapering to the hooves.
Overlayed with dots.
Notice that the horses and the hands were painter c. 10,000 years apart. This demonstrates
that the caves were in use for a very long time and that humans returned to the same caves
to paint images on the walls.
Theories concerning shamanism— a belief in a parallel spirit world accessed through
alternative states of consciousness— build upon the earlier ethnographic interpretations,
arguing that an animal’s “ spirit” was evident where a bulge in the wall or ceiling suggested
its shape, as with the Spotted Horses at Pech- Merle in southwestern France.
The artist’s or shaman’s power brought that spirit to the surface.
Some scholars have cast the paintings in a central role in early religion, as images for
worship.
12. Hands c. 15,000 BCE
 Human hands occasionally feature on the cave walls, stamped in paint or, more usually, in
negative silhouette.
 “Aerosol” technique- mixing pigment and saliva and spitting the paint like a spray can. This is
one theory advanced to explain the negative images (paint applied around the shape of the
hand)of the hands.
13. Title slide Lascaux
14. Lascaux: Visit in 1940, Lit by acetylene lamps:
 Count Begouen and Abbe Henri Breuil in center. Get a sense of the size of the passageways.
15. KEY IMAGE Title: Hall of Bulls
 Medium: Paint on limestone
 Size: length of the largest auroch (bull) 18' (5.50 m)
 Date: c. 15,000 BCE
 Source/Museum: Lascaux Cave, Dordogne, France
 The best- known cave paintings today are those at Lascaux, in southern France, where
paintings of cows, bulls, horses, and deer date from about 15,000 BCE. The animals appear
singly, in rows, face- to- face, tail- to- tail, and even painted on top of one another. Perhaps
to ensure a complete image, the horns, eyes, and hooves are shown as seen from the front,
while heads and bodies are rendered in profile. The use of twisted perspective is evident in
some of these drawings.
 In twisted perspective, the most characteristic feature of the subject is emphasized.
 Lascaux was discovered in 1940, but closed to the public in 1963 after visitors’ breath was
found to be affecting the paintings. A mock-up, Lascaux II, attracts 250,000 people a year.
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16. Title: Lascaux: Hall of Bulls (right wall)
 Date: c. 15,000-13,000 BCE
 Material: paint on limestone
 Measurements: length of largest bull 18’ (5.50 m).
 Location: Lascaux Cave (France)
 Description: Dordogne, France
17. Title: Bird-Headed Man with Bison
 Medium: Paint on limestone
 Size: length approx. 9' (2.75 m)
 Date: c. 15,000 BCE
 Source/Museum: Shaft scene in Lascaux Cave
 One scene at Lascaux is unusual not only because it includes a human figure but also
because it is a rare example of a painting that seems to tell a story.
 But what is this scene telling us? Why did the artist portray the man as only a stick- like
figure with a bird’s head when the bison was rendered with such accurate detail?
 It may be that the painting illustrates a myth regarding the death of a hero. Perhaps it
illustrates an actual event.
 A compelling theory is that it depicts the vision of a shaman. As we know shamanism from
practitioners today, shamans were thought to have special powers, an ability to foretell
events and assist their people through contact with spirits in the form of animals or birds.
Shamans typically make use of trance states, in which they believe they fly and receive
communications from their spirit guides. The images they use to record their visions tend to
be highly imaginative incorporating geometric figures and combinations of human and
animal forms.
18. Note that the human stick figure, which has the head of a bird) and the spear-throwing
implement- the stick with the head of a bird (it’s called an atlatl) both evoke bird imagery.
19. The cave paintings at Altamira, in northern Spain , were the first to be discovered, but scholars
are still uncovering new information about them. As recently as 2008, specialists used an
innovative scientific technique called uranium series dating to discover that prehistoric artists
worked here over a very broad time span. The earliest paintings are now placed between 35,000
and 25,000 BCE, and the most recent date from 11,000 BCE. To produce the herd of bison on the
ceiling of the main cavern, they used rich red and brown ochers to paint the large areas of the
animals’ shoulders, backs, and flanks, then sharp-ened the contours and added the details of the
legs, tails, heads, and horns in black and brown, mixing yellow and brown from ochers with iron
to make the red tones and deriving black from manganese or charcoal.
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20. Title: Bison
 Medium: Paint on limestone
 Size: length approx. 8'3" (2.5 m)
 Date: c. 12,500 BCE
 Source/Museum: Ceiling of a cave at Altamira, Spain
 In this cave artists capitalized on natural sculptural effects by painting the bodies of their
animals over and around geological protuberances in the cave’s walls and ceilings.
 To produce the herd of bison on the ceiling of the main cavern, they used rich red and
brown ochers to paint the large areas of the animals’ shoulders, backs, and flanks, then
sharp-ened the contours and added the details of the legs, tails, heads, and horns in
black and brown, mixing yellow and brown from ochers with iron to make the red tones
and deriving black from manganese or charcoal.
21. Altamira Cave, Northern Spain, Bison priscus or steppe bison (a large-horned species) painted
in red and black. C.12,500-12,000 BCE
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Title Altamira: mask drawn on a rock face in a deep gallery
Date ca. 15,000-10,000 B.C
Location Spain
Measurements: 39.37 in
22. Title: Bison
 Medium: Unbaked clay
 Size: length 25" ( 63.5 cm) and 24" (60.9 cm)
 Date: c. 13,000 BCE
 Source/Museum: Le Tuc d’Audoubert, France
 modeling
 In addition to paintings, caves sometimes had relief sculpture created by modeling, or
shaping, the damp clay of the cave’s floor. An excellent example from about 13,000 BCE is
preserved at Le Tuc d’Audoubert, south of the Dordogne region of France. Here the sculptor
created two bison leaning against a ridge of rock. Although these beasts are modeled in very
high relief ( they extend well forward from the background), they display the same
conventions employed in paintings, with emphasis on the broad masses of the meatbearing flanks and shoulders.
23. To make the animals even more lifelike, their creator engraved short parallel lines below their
necks to represent their shaggy coats. Numerous small footprints found in the clay floor of this
cave suggest that important group rites took place here.
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24. Title: Lamp with ibex design
 Medium: Engraved stone
 Size: n/a
 Date: c. 15,000–13,000 BCE
 Source/Museum: La Mouthe Cave, Dordogne, France
 Stone Age peoples appear to have discovered that a wick soaked in and fed by fat or oil
would provide a lasting light and, using a hollowed-out stone to hold the light source,
created the first lamp. Light came from burning animal fats, since any wood would be damp
and incombustible, and would therefore burn too smoky for use in a tent. Lamp technology
made it possible to paint deep inside the caves.
25. Map of Neolithic cave shelter sites
26. Neolithic Rock Shelter Art: We’ll look at a few examples from Cogul and El Civil, both on the
levantine (east) coast of Spain, one from Algeria in the maghreb (western) region of N. Africa.
27. Title: People and Animals
 Date: c. 4000–2000 BCE
 Source/Museum: Detail of rock-shelter painting, Cogul, Lérida, Spain Catalonia
 Much of what we know of Neolithic daily life comes from material remains of art and
architecture.
 At Cogul, in the province of Lleida in Catalunya, the broad surfaces of a rock shelter
were decorated between 4000 and 2000 BCE with elaborate narrative scenes involving
dozens of small figures— men, women, children, animals, even insects— seemingly
going about daily activities .
 In the detail shown here, a number of women gracefully stroll or stand about; some in
pairs hold hands. The women’s small waists are emphasized by skirts with scalloped
hemlines revealing large calves and sturdy ankles, and all the women appear to have
shoulder-length hair. The women stand near several large animals, some of which are
shown leaping forward with legs fully extended
 In the flying gallop pose used to portray an animal in motion.
 What looks different from the paleolithic images that we just saw? These figures are
extremely reductive- almost stick figures, although there are details that allow us to
make you female and child forms. Line is much more important than modeling- it seems
more important to record the event than to spend time on the process of recording the
image.
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28. El Civil site.
 Levantine Spain- Eastern Mediterranean coast
 Another example of the simplified “geometric” human form that appears in rock shelter
art during this period.
29. Map. Algeria
30. Another example of Neolithic rock shelter found in Algeria
 One of the most famous North African sites of rock painting. Similar interest in representing
human interactions- with other humans (women and children). More schematic than
naturalistic.
31. Title slide.
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