essay on prehistoric art

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Introduction to prehistoric art, 20,000–8000 b.c..

Laura Anne Tedesco Independent Scholar

August 2007

To describe the global origins of humans’ artistic achievement, upon which the succeeding history of art may be laid, is an encyclopedic enterprise. The Metropolitan Museum’s Timeline of Art History , covering the period roughly from 20,000 to 8000 B.C., provides a series of introductory essays about particular archaeological sites and artworks that illustrate some of the earliest endeavors in human creativity. The account of the origins of art is a very long one marked less by change than consistency. The first human artistic representations, markings with ground red ocher, seem to have occurred about 100,000 B.C. in African rock art . This chronology may be more an artifact of the limitations of archaeological evidence than a true picture of when humans first created art. However, with new technologies, research methods, and archaeological discoveries, we are able to view the history of human artistic achievement in a greater focus than ever before.

Art, as the product of human creativity and imagination, includes poetry, music, dance, and the material arts such as painting, sculpture, drawing, pottery, and bodily adornment. The objects and archaeological sites presented in the Museum’s Timeline of Art History for the time period 20,000–8000 B.C. illustrate diverse examples of prehistoric art from across the globe. All were created in the period before the invention of formal writing, and when human populations were migrating and expanding across the world. By 20,000 B.C., humans had settled on every continent except Antarctica. The earliest human occupation occurs in Africa, and it is there that we assume art to have originated. African rock art from the  Apollo 11 and Wonderwerk Caves contain examples of geometric and animal representations engraved and painted on stone. In Europe, the record of Paleolithic art is beautifully illustrated with the magnificent painted caves of Lascaux and Chauvet , both in France. Scores of painted caves exist in western Europe, mostly in France and Spain, and hundreds of sculptures and engravings depicting humans, animals, and fantastic creatures have been found across Europe and Asia alike. Rock art in Australia represents the longest continuously practiced artistic tradition in the world. The site of Ubirr in northern Australia contains exceptional examples of Aboriginal rock art repainted for millennia beginning perhaps as early as 40,000 B.C. The earliest known rock art in Australia predates European painted caves by as much as 10,000 years.

In Egypt, millennia before the advent of powerful dynasties and wealth-laden tombs, early settlements are known from modest scatters of stone tools and animal bones at such sites as Wadi Kubbaniya . In western Asia after 8,000 B.C., the earliest known writing , monumental art, cities , and complex social systems emerged. Prior to these far-reaching developments of civilization, this area was inhabited by early hunters and farmers. Eynan/Ain Mallaha , a settlement in the Levant along the Mediterranean, was occupied around 10,000–8000 B.C. by a culture named Natufian. This group of settled hunters and gatherers created a rich artistic record of sculpture made from stone and bodily adornment made from shell and bone.

The earliest art of the continent of South Asia is less well documented than that of Europe and western Asia, and some of the extant examples come from painted and engraved cave sites such as Pachmari Hills in India. The caves depict the region’s fauna and hunting practices of the Mesolithic period. In Central and East Asia, a territory almost twice the size of North America, there are outstanding examples of early artistic achievements, such as the expertly and delicately carved female figurine sculpture from Mal’ta . The superbly preserved bone flutes from the site of Jiahu in China, while dated to slightly later than 8000 B.C., are still playable. The tradition of music making may be among the earliest forms of human artistic endeavor. Because many musical instruments were crafted from easily degradable materials like leather, wood, and sinew, they are often lost to archaeologists, but flutes made of bone dating to the Paleolithic period in Europe (ca. 35,000–10,000 B.C.) are richly documented.

North and South America are the most recent continents to be explored and occupied by humans, who likely arrived from Asia. Blackwater Draw in North America and Fell’s Cave in Patagonia, the southernmost area of South America, are two contemporaneous sites where elegant stone tools that helped sustain the hunters who occupied these regions have been found.

Whether the prehistoric artworks illustrated here constitute demonstrations of a unified artistic idiom shared by humankind or, alternatively, are unique to the environments, cultures, and individuals who created them is a question open for consideration. Nonetheless, each work or site superbly characterizes some of the earliest examples of humans’ creative and artistic capacity.

Tedesco, Laura Anne. “Introduction to Prehistoric Art, 20,000–8000 B.C.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/preh/hd_preh.htm (August 2007)

Further Reading

Price, T. Douglas. and Gary M. Feinman. Images of the Past . 5th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2006.

Scarre, Chris, ed. The Human Past: World Prehistory & the Development of Human Societies . London: Thames & Hudson, 2005.

Additional Essays by Laura Anne Tedesco

• Tedesco, Laura Anne. “ Blackwater Draw (ca. 9500–3000 B.C.) .” (originally published October 2000, last revised September 2007)
• Tedesco, Laura Anne. “ Wadi Kubbaniya (ca. 17,000–15,000 B.C.) .” (October 2000)
• Tedesco, Laura Anne. “ Fell’s Cave (9000–8000 B.C.) .” (originally published October 2000, last revised September 2007)
• Tedesco, Laura Anne. “ Jiahu (ca. 7000–5700 B.C.) .” (October 2000)
• Tedesco, Laura Anne. “ Lascaux (ca. 15,000 B.C.) .” (October 2000)
• Tedesco, Laura Anne. “ Mal’ta (ca. 20,000 B.C.) .” (October 2000)
• Tedesco, Laura Anne. “ Pachmari Hills (ca. 9000–3000 B.C.) .” (October 2000)
• Tedesco, Laura Anne. “ Hasanlu in the Iron Age .” (October 2004)
• Tedesco, Laura Anne. “ Eynan/Ain Mallaha (12,500–10,000 B.C.) .” (October 2000; updated February 2024)

Related Essays

• African Rock Art
• Chauvet Cave (ca. 30,000 B.C.)
• Lascaux (ca. 15,000 B.C.)
• Neolithic Period in China
• Prehistoric Stone Sculpture from New Guinea
• African Rock Art: Game Pass
• African Rock Art: Tassili-n-Ajjer (?8000 B.C.–?)
• African Rock Art: The Coldstream Stone
• Apollo 11 (ca. 25,500–23,500 B.C.) and Wonderwerk (ca. 8000 B.C.) Cave Stones
• Blackwater Draw (ca. 9500–3000 B.C.)
• Cerro Sechín
• Cerro Sechín: Stone Sculpture
• Eynan/Ain Mallaha (12,500–10,000 B.C.)
• Fell’s Cave (9000–8000 B.C.)
• Indian Knoll (3000–2000 B.C.)
• Jiahu (ca. 7000–5700 B.C.)
• Jōmon Culture (ca. 10,500–ca. 300 B.C.)
• Mal’ta (ca. 20,000 B.C.)
• Pachmari Hills (ca. 9000–3000 B.C.)
• Ubirr (ca. 40,000?–present)
• Valdivia Figurines
• Wadi Kubbaniya (ca. 17,000–15,000 B.C.)
• X-ray Style in Arnhem Land Rock Art
• 8th Millennium B.C.
• Agriculture
• Archaeology
• Central and North Asia
• Eastern Mediterranean
• Iberian Peninsula
• Literature / Poetry
• Musical Instrument
• Mythical Creature
• North Africa
• North America
• Painted Object
• Personal Ornament
• Prehistoric Art
• Relief Sculpture
• Sculpture in the Round
• South America
• Wall Painting
• Wind Instrument

Prehistoric Art – History of Humanity’s Earliest Artforms

There was a time that humans had not yet developed any kind of written language. During this period, various art forms served as a practical method for imparting information between themselves and other tribes. Prehistoric art refers to prehistoric artifacts and art created in the Stone Age, Paleolithic and Neolithic periods.

Table of Contents

• 1.1.1 Lower and Middle Paleolithic Era
• 1.1.2 Upper Paleolithic
• 2.1 Asian Prehistoric Art
• 2.2 The Near East Prehistoric Art
• 2.3 European Prehistoric Art
• 2.4 African Prehistoric Art
• 2.5 Prehistoric Art of the Americas
• 3.1 Blombos Cave
• 3.2 Venus of Willendorf
• 3.3 Lubang Jeriji Saléh
• 3.4 Lascaux Cave Paintings
• 3.5 The Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave
• 3.6 Göbekli Tepe
• 4.1 What Is Prehistoric Art?
• 4.2 What Techniques and Methods Were Used in Early Prehistory Art?

The Definition of Prehistoric Art

Prehistoric art could be defined as art that was created by people in an era where any form of written language had yet not been developed. The time in which various cultures throughout human history started developing their unique language systems varies greatly from region to region.

Before leaving historians a written record of daily events, prehistoric artists left a treasure trove of information behind through their prehistoric artifacts and prehistoric drawings.

Prehistoric artists recorded their daily experiences in mediums that have managed to make it through centuries of harsh exposure to changing environmental conditions, giving us detailed insights into what life was like in the earliest days of our species before the development of a written form of communication.

The Origins of Prehistoric Art

Around 500 000 years ago, one of our early ancestors took a shark’s tooth and engraved a zig-zag pattern on the surface of a seashell. Although the reason for its creation is unknown, it is considered to be the earliest existing example of art. As paleolithic art transitioned to neolithic art from the old stone age, we see the use of charcoal, a medium that has continued to artworks created by modern humans. Let’s look at the various periods during which art first began to emerge in prehistoric art history.

Lower and Middle Paleolithic Era

The engraved shell was said to come from the later years of the Lower Paleolithic, but most of the evidence points to the Middle Paleolithic as having the best examples of the use of art for expressive reasons instead of being purely practical in application, like elaborately carved stone tools.

Early hand axes like those found at a site by archeologists at Saint Acheul in France have been shown to contain a degree of symmetry and styling that could be evidence of creative expression.

Other potential candidates for the earliest examples can be found in the Blombos Cave in South Africa and the Venus of Tan-Tan in Morocco. The patterns found on the walls of the Blombos caves are dated to around 73, 000 years old and are thought to possibly be the earliest existing examples of art made by the human hand.

Upper Paleolithic

In a cave on the island of Borneo in 2018, scientists discovered what is thought to be the oldest known painting depicting the human form. It has been dated to somewhere between 40, 000 and 52, 000 years of age.

Some of the earliest uncontested examples of figurative prehistoric artifacts were found in Baden-Württemberg, Germany.

These also date to around 40, 000 years ago, the Venus of Hohle Fels being a well-known example of prehistoric art history from this period. Cave paintings from around 40, 000 to 10, 000 years ago are another source of Upper Paleolithic art depicting figurative forms and motifs, as well as the sculpture The Venus of Willendorf and several animal carvings, like the Wolverine pendant of Les Eyzies, which depicts a wolf engraved onto a bone.

Prehistoric Art Around the World

Various cultures around the world developed written languages at different times in human history, so each region has a unique story regarding its initial development of art. Let’s take a look at how prehistoric artworks first emerged in various regions across the globe, from Spain to Australia and everywhere in between. 

Asian Prehistoric Art

The prehistoric art history of Asia is specifically unique because the written language was adopted early on the continent, especially in China. Mesopotamian art is rarely defined as prehistoric, as written language took roots relatively early in the region, but the surrounding cultures such as the Persian, the Urartu, and Luristan cultures have all had impactful and highly detailed art traditions.

In Azerbaijan, dated to be around 12, 000 years old, there are approximately 6000 or more rock engravings that represent the figures of humans and animals engaged in various hunting scenarios, which are located at the National Park in Gobustan.

There are also objects that look similar in design to the Viking Longships. The earliest examples of paintings on the Indian sub-continent are petroglyphs such as those found at the Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka. Petroglyphs are images that are created when a surface such as a cave wall is scraped or picked at until an image is revealed.

In China’s Bronze Age, the Shang and Zhou Dynasties created many prehistoric artifacts such as bronze objects for ritualistic purposes.

Whereas in Japan, the first people to develop pottery were the ancient Jōmon people , dating to around the 11th millennium BC. The Jōmon used sticks or cords (sometimes braided) to create patterns on the wetted clay figures. In Korea, the first examples of art date from somewhere in 3000 BCE, consisting mostly of sculptures as well as petroglyphs according to more recent archeological discoveries.

The Near East Prehistoric Art

The world’s oldest megaliths can be found at the archeological site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey . On pillars made during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic phase, one can find reliefs portraying human and animal figures as well as abstract patterns. Around the same time in 9000 BCE in Israel, the first known artwork representing two human figures engaged in intercourse, the Ain Sakhri , was said to have been made in Bethlehem.

It is the rise of the Achaemenid Empire that is seen as being the end of the prehistoric era in the Near East in the 6th century, however, writing had already existed for two thousand years by then. Yet this entire period is considered prehistoric despite some of the works having text such as the name of rulers displayed on them.

European Prehistoric Art

During the Stone Age, it was common for humans to carve animal figures onto objects such as bone or antlers, as well as the walls of caves. This was also the period of the Venus figurines. In certain places, simplistic pottery objects also began being created around this time. This age is divided into the Mesolithic and the Neolithic Age. The Mesolithic Period came after the Upper Paleolithic and before the Neolithic Age. In comparison to the other periods, there is little art that has survived from this period.

The art of the Iberian Mediterranean Basin, for example, is far less known when compared to similar sites from the Upper Paleolithic Period.

At sites such as Roca dels Moros, the art is mostly found on cliff faces exposed to the open-air environment. Containing the image of 45 figures, the subject seems to be mainly focused on the human form rather than animal figures. Figures can also be seen to be wearing noticeable garments of clothing and depict daily scenes like food gathering, hunting, engaged in a battle against feuding tribes, and dancing.

The figures depicted in this era are more energetic in their poses and smaller than their Paleolithic counterparts. Small, simply engraved pendants have also been discovered from this period. In the Neolithic Period, many Central European cultures tended to produce mostly female statues and very few examples of male figurines, as well as animal figures and detailed pieces of pottery.

Many megalithic monuments were built in this era such as Stonehenge and the Temples of Malta, some of which have spirals and other patterns carved into the huge stone structures such as the tomb in Ireland which is said to have been dated from somewhere around 32000 BC.

The Bronze Age in Europe saw the rise of new techniques in tool development and this had a great impact on the quality and speed in which artisans could create works of art.

It is due to the rising productivity that society in general began to experience a surplus of luxury items such as weapons that had been artfully decorated.

During this period we see many fine examples of decorated weapons such as ornamental swords and ax handles, as well as ceremonial helmets made of bronze. During the following Iron Age, the focus would shift to anthropomorphic sculptures, which attributed human characteristics to various animals and objects.

African Prehistoric Art

The first known prehistoric drawing created by Homo Erectus was found by archeologists in Southern Africa in September 2018. The prehistoric drawing is estimated to be approximately 73, 000 years old, which is considerably older than what was previously discovered by about 43, 000 years. Some rock paintings made by the San people in the Drakensberg area are thought to be from the period 8000 BCE.

These paintings have remained remarkably clear and portray a multitude of human figures and animal motifs, most notably antelope. However, not all rock art in the area is thought to be ancient in origin, with a fairly unbroken tradition of painting that has continued until as recently as the 19th century, with horses displayed in some paintings, which there were none of in the local environment until introduced there by foreigners in the 1820s.

Rock art depicting pastoral scenery can be found at Laas Geel in northwestern Somalia. This formation of caves contains some of the earliest examples of cave paintings and prehistoric drawings in the region known as the Horn of Africa. They are estimated to have been made sometime between 9000 and 3000 BCE. In 2008, the earliest portrayal of a hunter riding a horse was discovered by archeologists.

It has been dated in the ballpark region of 1000 to 3000 BCE and was created in the typical Arabian/Ethiopian style.

Saharan Africa had its unique style and techniques, with depictions of fauna carved onto walls. Weirdly formed human figures were prominent throughout this period as well as a few animal depictions. As lifestyles changed for the people towards the end of this period, focus on the subject turned towards the depiction of domesticated animals, as well as decorative headdresses and ornate clothing.

During this time, figures became simplified in design and focussed on common domestic everyday scenes such as the herding of animals and dancing.

Prehistoric Art of the Americas

The Vero Beach Bome is the oldest known piece of art in the Americas and belongs to the Lithic Period. Dating back to approximately 11, 000 BCE, it is thought to be made of mammoth bone and has been etched with the image of a walking mammoth. In Mesoamerica, we find the Olmec Bird Vessel and Bowl, dated from around 1000 BC and both made from ceramic.

This is noteworthy for its time, as kilns had to reach temperatures above 900 degrees celsius for the ceramics to be produced, and outside of Egypt, they were the only known culture that was able to do so at this time.

Olmec art can easily be recognized by the use of reflective iconography within a religious context as well as being highly stylized. However, despite being stylized, there are also examples of more naturalistic Olmec art depicting the human form. Large monumental figurines are abundant in this era as well as small carved figures made of jade.

Peru in South America has a long recorded history of human culture dating as far back as 10, 000 BCE.  Rock paintings in the Toquepala Caves have been dated as far back as 9500 BCE.  Beads have been found at ceremonial burial sites that are dated to be from somewhere between 8600 and 7200 BCE.  Ceramics have been found that date from around 1850 BCE.

The Initial Period for cultures in the Central Andean region lasted approximately somewhere from 1800 BCE to 900 BCE. Textiles from this period display an incredible complexity and included images such as birds with two heads and crabs with snakes for claws. Depending on how it is viewed, various subjects can seem to dominate the work in some kind of optically created illusion. Artwork that was considered portable at the time included jewelry made of shells and bones, clay female figures, and mirrors that were highly decorated.

The early Intermediate period is epitomized by work that was extremely demanding of its artist in both time and level of detail required for each piece and used an abundance of visual elements in a vividly colorful manner.

Famous Examples of Prehistoric Art

It is hard enough to ask the question “what is prehistoric art” without even considering the question ”who created the art, what was the name of the prehistoric artist?” These pieces of prehistoric art history were created before written languages had been developed yet, so the chances of us discovering a signature or name seem rather slim to none.

Yet, we have managed to learn much about the people who created these artworks as well the techniques they used, and what daily life was like for people in the very distant past.

Blombos Cave

Blombos Cave is situated 300kms from Cape Town in the Blombos Private Nature Reserve and is considered an extremely important archeological site. It is here that archaeologists found what is now thought to be the oldest known drawing created by human hands, and is estimated to be about 73, 000 years old based on surrounding deposits.

Very little is known about humans from this period, so it comes as a surprise to researchers that humans from this time would display an ability to create works of art.

Researchers hope the find will assist them in gaining insight into our species’ first attempts at the use of symbols – a technique of communication and representation that would pave the way for mathematics and the formation of spoken and written languages.

One artifact from this location is a tiny piece of ochre stone, measuring a diameter comparable to the length of a couple of thumbnails. The flake of stone has six distinct lines drawn on it as well as three curved diagonal lines running across it. The lines end suddenly, hinting at the possibility that the pattern extended further beyond the edges of what remains of the flake, in a far more complex manner than initially available to see from the flake he found.

There has been much debate on his assertions that it was made by Homo Sapiens and intentionally created, and several attempts were made at replicating the potential techniques used by a group of French experts. They analyzed the chemical composition of the pigments, and after replicating various techniques, it was concluded that the most likely substance used to create the lines was ochre.

Venus of Willendorf

The Venus of Willendorf was discovered in 1908 at the site of Willendorf in Austria by digger Johann Veran during excavations. It has been carved out of oolitic limestone not found in its native region and slightly tinted in pigment made of red ochre. Based on it being made from non-native stone, this sculpture is thought to have been produced somewhere else and then transported to where it was later found.

Some believe it was created as some kind of goddess symbol of fertility, a charm that brings one good luck, or even possibly a talisman designed as an aphrodisiac.

The figure consists mostly of a female torso and breasts, with the arms present, but not anatomically represented, they seem understated and shrunk. There is a head visible, but one that does not show any features except a stylized pattern perhaps meant to represent braided hair or some kind of head cap.

The feet also seem to be missing or were perhaps not ever part of the initial design, to begin with. It is believed to be a fertility statue as the body parts associated with reproduction seem to be disproportionately exaggerated.

This is one of many sculptures from the Paleolithic Period that have been titled “Venus” sculptures even though they greatly outdated the culture and theology behind the Venus from mythology known by traditional scholars.

There has been some speculation that perhaps the carvings were created by women themselves as a means of self-representation. This was in a time when there were no reflective surfaces such as mirrors and the proportions of the figurines seem to match up with the associated angle a woman would see of her own body if looking down at it.

Lubang Jeriji Saléh

Borneo island is home to a limestone complex of caves known as the Lubang Jeriji Saléh. At around 40, 000 years old, it is thought to be one of the oldest figurative paintings known to the world. Located in the East Kalimantan mountains, this series of caves are covered in images of hands that have been made visible through applying flashes of bright orange ochre and iron oxide paint to the walls, spraying the colors over the hand, and leaving an outline of it amongst the burst of colors on cave walls.

These hand outlines have been dated to have been created around 52, 000 years ago. It is amongst these paintings that we also find the bull, thought to be the first figurative painting created by human hands approximately 40, 000 years ago. The illustrated bovine stretches over a rocky canvas measuring more than five feet in length and has been applied to the limestone walls using red ochre paint.

In 2018, scientists were able to do a more in-depth analysis of samples taken from the site and concluded that the site was decorated in three stages over time. During the first stage, the hands and bull were added. In the second stage, complex motifs were added, using stencils and a mulberry-colored paint mix. During the third and final phase, water vessels, designs of geometric patterns, and human-like figures were added to the cave walls.

The team that led the research of the site in 2018 originally concluded that this was the first known example of a figurative painting by a prehistoric artist.

However, they have since made further discoveries of artworks in caves in Sulawesi that are even older at around 44, 000 years of age. This discovery still holds much significance for art historians, however, as it shows us that cave art gave rise at the same time in Asia as it did in Europe. Experts agree that the finding is very significant to archeological discovery, yet has little to offer in terms of data on the early origins of art geographically speaking.

Lascaux Cave Paintings

The Vézère Valley is home to many famously decorated caves that were first discovered in the early days of the 20th century. Amongst them, one of the most well-known would be the Lascaux cave paintings . Renowned for its Paleolithic era cave paintings, the caves are situated in Dordogne, a region of southwestern France. They are most highly revered for the complexity of design, outstanding quality of production, age, and sheer scale. The paintings are estimated to be in the region of 20, 000 years of age.

A cave complex consisting of several areas, Lascaux was discovered on 12 September 1940 and later that year was honored with historic monument protection status.

Lascaux caves are part of several cave complexes in the area that were added to the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites, yet they remain in constant danger of further deterioration and are the constant source of symposiums for archeologists and scientists to discuss how to handle these artworks to ensure a legacy that spans even further into the future.

Archeologists have identified several distinct sections of the cave complex, giving them such titles as The Great Hall of the Bulls , The Chamber of Felines , and The Shaft of the Dead Man . Abstract symbols, animal effigies, and human figures form the three groups that the more than 2000 figures on the cave walls can be divided into.

The majority of these images have been impressed on the wall with painted mineral pigments, although others have been chiseled into the stone’s facade.

The paintings in Lascaux caves mainly consist of 364 horse figures, as well as ninety stags and various other animals such as felines, rhinos, cows, a single bear, bison, and even a human. In the Hall of Bulls, we find the most well-known image of the cave, the four black bulls, one of which alone is 17 feet in diameter, which makes it the largest known painting of an animal in cave art.

The Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave

Archeologists have concluded that the figurative cave paintings in the Chauvet Cave are some of the most well-preserved examples of prehistory art around the globe. The cave is situated on a cliff made from limestone in Ardeche, Southeast France, and was first discovered on 18th December 1994.

It is considered by many art historians and archeologists to be an extremely important prehistoric site, with UNESCO granting the cave’s World Heritage status in 2014.

Various groups of researchers have gathered significant data and understanding of the culture that may have created it over the years. Not only were paintings discovered by archeologists, but also the fossil remnants and markings of animals, many of which no longer exist today.

Recent carbon dating studies have isolated two periods in which the caves were habituated by humans, a period from 37, 000 to 33, 500 years ago and another period following that from 31,000 to around 28,000 years ago.

All that remains from the latter period are the prints of a child’s foot, the sooty remnants of the community fireplace, and blackened stains on the cave walls from the use of torches.

The child’s footprints could be the oldest prints of the human foot that can accurately be dated, as, after the visitation of the child who made the prints, the cave remained untouched until its rediscovery in 1994 due to a landslide or something similar.

Göbekli Tepe

Göbekli Tepe is situated in Southeastern Anatolia in Turkey and is considered by historians to be a site of significance for human civilization and the development of culture and art. The Mesolithic age mound is a prime example of megalithic art. Göbekli Tepe was formed by one settlement built upon another settlement in the same place over time, the debris and remnants from the former settlements stacking up over the decades to create a mound that exceeds fifteen meters in height and around 300 meters in diameter.

The multi-layered complex has been carbon-dated to around 9559 BCE and it is said to contain the oldest stone structures bearing artwork engraved upon it.

The most common motifs were the depiction of various animals such as boars, bulls, foxes, and lions. Only a few examples of imagery depicting the human figure have been found at this particular site, a notable exception being the relief of a naked female crouching down on the ground. The true purpose of this site remains shrouded in mystery, but the archeologist Klaus Schmidt has suggested that the site was most likely used as a cult center or holy place during the Neolithic period. This is largely evident by the unusual number of megaliths that were used in the construction of the layout of the site.

In summary, we have learned that prehistoric art predates the use of written language by various cultures throughout human history. We have also seen how the period of transformation for each culture to one based on written text differs from region to region. There are examples of early cave art that appear simultaneously in both Asia and Europe.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is prehistoric art.

Prehistoric art refers to all art that was created before cultures had developed more complex forms of expression and communication such as a written language. Prehistoric art can not only be described as art found on cave walls, but also prehistoric sculpture such as the Venus figurines. Some of the earliest examples of prehistoric art in civilized communities are the huge monoliths found in ancient sites such as Gobekli Tepe and many others.

What Techniques and Methods Were Used in Early Prehistory Art?

As with any era, artists that created prehistory art were limited by the resources available to them at the time they lived. The very first art was made from tools and canvases readily accessible to them such as cave walls, bones, and pigments such as ochre and burnt wood. Not only did they use various pigments to paint on surfaces, but also carved images on bone, stone, and walls, as well as made various pieces of clay sculpture and pottery from available materials in the region.

Isabella studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature & Language and Psychology. Throughout her undergraduate years, she took Art History as an additional subject and absolutely loved it. Building on from her art history knowledge that began in high school, art has always been a particular area of fascination for her. From learning about artworks previously unknown to her, or sharpening her existing understanding of specific works, the ability to continue learning within this interesting sphere excites her greatly.

Her focal points of interest in art history encompass profiling specific artists and art movements, as it is these areas where she is able to really dig deep into the rich narrative of the art world. Additionally, she particularly enjoys exploring the different artistic styles of the 20 th century, as well as the important impact that female artists have had on the development of art history.

Learn more about Isabella Meyer and the Art in Context Team .

Cite this Article

Isabella, Meyer, “Prehistoric Art – History of Humanity’s Earliest Artforms.” Art in Context. November 19, 2021. URL: https://artincontext.org/prehistoric-art/

Meyer, I. (2021, 19 November). Prehistoric Art – History of Humanity’s Earliest Artforms. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/prehistoric-art/

Meyer, Isabella. “Prehistoric Art – History of Humanity’s Earliest Artforms.” Art in Context , November 19, 2021. https://artincontext.org/prehistoric-art/ .

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The Most Famous Artists and Artworks

Discover the most famous artists, paintings, sculptors…in all of history! 

MOST FAMOUS ARTISTS AND ARTWORKS

Discover the most famous artists, paintings, sculptors!

Summary of Cave Art

Cave Art (or Paleolithic Art) is a broad term for the earliest known art-making in human history. This movement is perhaps best-known today for the paintings found on the walls of many prehistoric caves, rich in depictions of animals, human figures, and forms that are a combination of man and beast. The tradition of cave art also includes relief carvings and portable sculptural objects. The art created by our earliest ancestors is at one level alien and deeply mysterious to us, and yet it serves as a reminder of the common humanity we share with its creators. It rarely fails to dazzle and astound with its meticulous detail, abstract gestures, and rich scope for imaginative speculation on its meaning and origin.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

• The art made during the Paleolithic era is the only document left to us by prehistoric people of their lives. For this reason, it is both vitally important and steeped in mystery, with no written records to accompany or explain it. Archaeologists, historians, and scholars have for centuries attempted to decode the motivations behind cave art, but all we can confidently assume is that these images and objects must have held great importance given the time dedicated to creating them, particularly given the nomadic lifestyles that held sway in this era.
• Paleolithic art is found throughout the world and on every continent except Antarctica. However, the most researched and well-known examples have come from Europe. According to archaeologist Bruno David, the cave art of France and Spain "has reached especially great fame over the past century, capturing the imagination of the general public as well as attracting the attention of archaeologists. "
• Paleolithic art was made with the limited materials that were available at the time. This includes natural pigments such as ochre and charcoal applied to cave walls by using plants or the artists' hands as brushes. Mixtures and powders would also have been blown onto walls through reed-like tubes or using the mouth, while portable objects were often carved out of animal tusks such as those of mammoths, using pieces of flint or rock.
• There are key differences between the cave art traditions of different regions, suggestions different functions or influences for cave art dependent on geography. European images, for instance, rarely ever feature a human and almost always depict animals. The majority of human representations that are found on other continents, most notably in Africa and Australia.

Overview of Cave Art

Paleolithic art is a broad term used to describe the earliest known art making period in the history of human development, including cave paintings, relief carvings and sculptural objects. The artwork of this period is steeped in mystery. Theories around its creation range from ceremonial and religious concepts to mapping or educational uses.

Artworks and Artists of Cave Art

Lion-man of the Hohlenstein-Stadel

This impressive 12-inch composite creature, carved from the ivory of a mammoth, fuses animal and human elements. Its beastly attributes include a lion's head and the elongated body and forelimbs of a big cat, while the legs, feet and bi-pedal stance are clearly modeled on the human form. An important prehistoric work, the sculpture was discovered in Germany in the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in 1939 and is the oldest example of an imaginary form in history. The fact the work is a composite creature emanating from the artist's mind disproves any notion that the earliest humans were unintelligent or unimaginative, while the time involved in its creation also suggests a capacity for sustained and concentrated thought. According to author Jill Cook, "an experiment by Wulf Hein using the same sort of stone tools available in the Ice Age indicate that the Lion Man took more than 400 hours to make... This was a lot of time for a small community living in difficult conditions to invest in a sculpture that was useless for their physical survival. " Whilst we may never know the reason this work was created, the time spent on it in an age of nomadic hunter-gatherer routines is proof of its importance to the individual or community concerned. According to Cook, "the Lion Man makes sense as part of a story that might now be called a myth. The wear on his body caused by handling suggests that he was passed around and rubbed as part of a narrative or ritual that would explain his appearance and meaning. It is impossible to know what that story was about or whether he was deity, an avatar to the spirit world, part of a creation story or a human whose experiences on a journey through the cosmos to communicate with spirits caused this transformation." "Perhaps this hybrid", she concludes, "helped people to come to terms with their place in nature on a deeper, religious level or in some way to transcend or reshape it. "

Ivory - Collection of Museum Ulm, Germany

Panel of Horses

Known as the Panel of Horses , this painting found in the Chauvet cave in fact features nineteen other types of animals, including deer and rhinoceroses, as well as its famous equine subjects in side profile. This beautiful and elaborate frieze is one of the most significant works in the Chauvet complex. As well as providing an important historical record of the animals that existed in prehistoric France, this painting gives a sense of the detail and realism with which early artists could capture the world around them. The sophistication of technique, including figurative detail and perspective, characterizing the pieces at Chauvet has been frequently discussed. According to writer James C. Harris, the Chauvet drawings "are highly realistic, and many show perspective and utilize the contours in the cave wall, sometimes to suggest movement." F ocusing on the Panel of Horses , he notes "the presence [of] rhinoceroses at the bottom of this panel", with "small arched ears, crossed horns, and leg positions suggesting movement. Meanwhile, "the heads of the four horses in this panel most powerfully engage the viewer...The one showing the greatest detail [with] its open mouth suggests the horse is whinnying. " The early artistic technique of stump drawing is evident in this painting. As archaeologist Jean Clottes explains, here, "the artist has crushed charcoal and mixed it with the soft whitish substance that covers the walls to obtain shades that range from black to dark blue, and he (or she) has skillfully spread the pigment inside the head and the body [of the horses] to create their contours, using the process currently known as 'stump drawing. '" Like many other works of ancient cave art, The Panel of Horses offers extraordinary insight into minds set far apart from ours in time yet sharing certain vital emotional, social, and creative instincts.

Pigment on rock - Chauvet cave, Ardèche Valley, France

Venus of Willendorf

Perhaps the most well-known work of three-dimensional art from the Paleolithic period, the Venus of Willendorf is a sculpture of a woman with exaggerated female features including breasts, hips, and pubic area. A small work, measuring little more than four inches high, the statue has no distinguishing features other than a head full of coiled rows of hair, suggesting an archetypal character, perhaps meant to sum up certain principles of femininity or fertility, rather than an individual human being. This work, discovered in Austria in 1908, is amongst several carved female figurines uncovered in caves across Europe. Their small size means the works were portable, contributing to debate over their intended purpose. As archaeologist Bruno David explains, these figures "have provoked many different interpretations ranging from children's dolls to 'mother goddesses'. They have been thought by some commentators to have acted as symbols of fertility in a harsh Ice Age environment where fecundity was highly valued, by others as images of women's bodies by and for men, and by others again as self-representations by women, or as obstetric devices to monitor the growth of the foetus and to aid with childbirth, or as a standardized way of stylized depiction to facilitate information exchange between communities. " The documentation of the "Venus" figures is also an interesting example of the potential pitfalls of titling works after the fact. David asserts that these figures "have become a useful way of exposing the sociology of our own Western biases. " We think of Venus as the Greek goddess of love, and so by giving these works such a title we imply, with no basis in fact, that there is a sexual element to the figures. According to author Joshua Learn, "some experts believe they represent everything from self-depictions of women to ancient pornography. But many of these interpretations have now been discredited for the inherent sexism they carry." These interpretations were probably given extra currency by the "Venus" tag.

Limestone with red ochre - Collection of Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

Venus of Laussel

The so-called Venus of Laussel is an 18-inch bas-relief carving featuring a woman with large breasts and hips. Her left hand rests on her stomach while in her right hand she holds a carved horn (most believe that of a bison) on which are carved thirteen lines. While her face contains no distinguishing features, she appears to be turning her head to the right as if to look at the horn. Arguably the most famous of the five carvings found amongst the cave painting treasures discovered in the Laussel Cave in the Dordogne Valley of France in 1911, this work has been the source of extensive debate over its meaning. As with the Venus of Willendorf , discussions around the provenance and significance of the object tell us as much about the eras in which different theories were advanced as the age in which the artwork was created. Many contemporary commentators have noted the sexism implicit in the assumption that works placed in the "Venus" category carry some sexual charge. Nonetheless, the most accepted interpretation of this work is that as one of several depictions of females with exaggerated breasts and pubic areas, this female form represents an archetype of feminine fertility. As author K. Kris Hirst explains, some scholars have gone so far as to argue that what she is holding "is not a horn core, but rather an image of the crescent moon, and the 13 stripes cut into the object are an explicit reference to the annual lunar cycle. This combined with the Venus resting her hand on a large belly, is read as a reference to fertility, some speculate that she is illustrated as pregnant. The tallies on the crescent are also sometimes interpreted as referring to the number of menstrual cycles in a year of an adult woman's life. "

Limestone with red ochre - Collection of Museum of Acquitaine, Bordeaux, France

Altamira Bison

This image of a bison is part of a large number of animals depicted in the Altamira cave. Painting the beast in side-profile, the artist has gone to great efforts to make the animal as detailed as possible, including distinguishing features such as horns, hooves, and tufts of hair. Pablo Picasso's bulls and other larger animals are often reminiscent of the bison of Altamira, and it is known that images like this had a profound effect on the painter's imagination. Painted on the ceiling, bison are the most frequently depicted animal in the Altamira complex, with this being one of the finest examples. A distinguishing feature of the art found in the Altamira cave is the striking use of color to represent fauna, the deep orange of the animal's side still vivid thousands of years later. This is a result of the vibrant red ochre pigment used to both outline the bison and to fill in its flank. Interestingly, the bison does not appear in relation to any landscape, rather seeming to float free amongst the other animals. This leads to questions regarding the purpose behind its placement. Whilst we will probably never know the answers to these questions, possible theories include that the animal was merely decorative, that it served as a teaching tool, and that it was used during religious ceremonies in the cave, during which people would gaze up in wonder at the illuminated ceiling.

Pigment on rock - Altamira cave, Cantabria, Spain

Hall of Bulls

The Hall of Bulls is a painting featuring a large number of prehistoric animals, including bulls, horses, aurochs, and deer. Placed on a large segment of rock in the interior of the Lascaux cave, the animals are presented in different degrees of detail and size, suggesting that the drawing was created by multiple people, potentially over an extended period of time. The Lascaux cave, one of the most impressive in the Paleolithic period, features many different paintings across several chambers. The area known as the Hall of Bulls is important because it supports the view that certain areas in ancient caves were used as gathering places for spiritual rituals or ceremonies. According to archaeologist Jean Clottes, the Hall of Bulls "would have been able to accommodate relatively large groups. The drawn or painted images are detailed, sometimes complex, and of considerable size. They are visible from a distance...This suggests participation in collective ceremonies, which might have been frequent or rare. These meticulously prepared and very visible images might have played a social role in the celebration of rites, in the perpetuation of beliefs and of perceptions of the world and in recruiting the aid of invisible powers. " A noteworthy feature of this painting is that all the animals appear to be moving, many of them even charging towards each other. This contributes to the mystery of the panel and raises questions as to whether it could represent a particular event, or used as a teaching tool to show all the animals in the area which would be available for hunting.

Pigment on rock - Lascaux cave, Montignac, France

Male figure with bird head and disemboweled bison

In this painting found on the walls of the Lascaux cave, a creature is depicted with a male body and the head of a bird. To the left of the figure is a stick, perhaps a spear, on which is perched a bird. To the right is a large bison whose intestines have been pulled from its body. Commonly referred to as the "bird man" panel, this painting is a rare example of a figure drawing from Paleolithic Europe, where non-human animals are much more frequently found. Debate surrounds the intended meaning of this painting, as archaeologist Bruno David articulates: "are these examples of rituals, religious performances that involved people wearing masks and, in the case of the 'bird-man' of Lascaux, associated with a kind of bird wand?" We know that the figure is a composite creature, which many scholars have associated with religious or mythical functions, making such an assumption possible. Other parts of the drawing are even more mysterious. The bird man's erect penis begs the question of whether there is a sexual meaning attached to the work, potentially connected to its religious role. Other explanations have also been forwarded, however. The fact that an injured bison appears next to the figure has led some to consider the drawing a symbol or talisman to ensure a productive hunt. There is also debate as to whether the birdman and bison are related at all. Were they simply placed next to each other at random; were they even drawn at the same time, or by the same person? Such discussion typifies the mystery that surrounds cave art, which does nothing to lessen its appeal to modern audiences.

Hand stencils

In the aptly named Cave of the Hands a collection of handprints is stenciled onto the cliff wall in red, black, and white pigments. As author Nick Dall explains, "of the 829 handprints most are male, one has six fingers and only 31 are of right hands. All of the prints are negatives or stencils; created by placing the hand against the rock face and blowing paint at it through a tube made of bone. " One of the most striking aspects of the artwork is the way that form and background colors switch, such that the color of a hand in one section reappears as the base color - behind the hand - in another. When we look at this ancient rock art, we are inevitably led to wonder what caused our ancestors to mark their presence in this way. Dall offers two possible explanations. "[O]ne of the more plausible theories is that the hands were painted by adolescent boys as part of an initiation ceremony or rite of passage. This is backed up by the fact that many of the handprints are not large enough to have been made by fully-grown adults. Another popular theory is that the paintings were made as part of a religious ceremony that preceded a hunt. " Whatever the explanation for their presence, these handprints are amongst the most extraordinary of all ancient artworks. Whereas other Paleolithic symbols and figures depict a life of hunting and nomadic wandering that feels distant to us, we share the basic features of our bodies - the shapes of our hands, for example - in common with our earliest ancestors. Indeed, there is no aspect of this image that could not have been created in the recent past, particularly given our modern preoccupation with abstract forms and gestures. Thousands of years of history seem to dissolve as we gaze at the walls of Cueva de las Manos.

Pigment on rock - Cueva de las Manos, Perito Moreno, Argentina

Gwion rock paintings

These Gwion rock paintings depict figures with elongated bodies. Elaborately dressed, many wear what appear to be feathers, tassels, and headdresses. A majority of the figures carry objects including spears and boomerangs. These are amongst a large number of images dotted across 100,000 sites veering 50,000 square kilometers of north-west Australia's Kimberley region. First discovered in 1891 by agriculturalist Joseph Bradshaw, the Gwion paintings constitute a whole tradition or school within Australia's rich history of ancient rock painting. According to author Candida Baker, the Gwion paintings are among the most mysterious of Australian rock drawings due to the unusual appearance of the figures, with their many ornaments and appendages. Baker notes that these paintings are "quite different to any other known Australian rock art". She also comments on the unusual sophistication of the images, which seems to appear fully-formed in the earliest pieces created in this tradition, whereas normally we would expect such intricacy of effect to evolve over time. Baker cites Maria Myers, Chair of the Kimberley Foundation Australia (KFA), who notes that, in the case of Gwion paintings, "the first iteration of the art is the most sophisticated and beautifully painted, which suggests that whoever did the art was portraying a developed culture. " Discoveries such as the Gwion rock paintings go a long way to disprove assumptions that prehistoric peoples were unsophisticated and underdeveloped. They suggest that the societies that produced rock art were capable of elaborate systems of social coding and stratification through dress, ornament, and figurative art.

Pigment on rock - Kimberley, Australia

Beginnings and Development

Earliest humans to make art.

It is impossible to state exactly when Homo sapiens (modern humans) began to create works of art, but famous examples date back to at least 40,000 BCE. However, the oldest known cave art was actually created by Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis), a species closely related to us, in around 63,000 BCE. Other excavated objects date from still earlier, but are the subject of debate as to whether they simply resemble crafted objects by chance.

A good example of the latter dilemma is the discovery of fossil sponges dating back to approximately 62,000 years ago, during the era of two early human species, Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis (the latter sometimes recorded as a subspecies of the former). Many of these sponges were discovered with holes running all the way through. Some archaeologists believe these holes were made intentionally and that the sponges were strung together, while others believe they are naturally occurring, or that the holes simply developed over time as a result of age and deterioration. If these holes were intentionally made and the sponges then strung together and presumably worn, than this would be the earliest examples of beads and an attempt by an early species at ornamentation and decoration of their bodies.

Two other early objects subject to a similar debate are the Tan-Tan figurine found in Morocco, dating to 50,000-30,000 years ago, and the 20,000-year-old Berekhat Ram figurine excavated in Israel. Both objects can be traced back to the Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis groups and suggest the appearance of a simplified human figure, but may have naturally assumed that shape. If they were created, then it supports an argument that species of human older than Homo sapiens had advanced minds and aesthetic inclinations.

Dating Paleolithic Art

Authenticating the year that Paleolithic art was made created immediate challenges for archeologists, and even today it can prove difficult to secure consensus amongst scholars. The greatest aid to the process has been through the use of carbon dating from the 1990s onwards. According to archaeologist Bruno David, "carbon dating is [today] the most commonly used method of absolute dating in cave art research, because some artworks contain organic carbon in such materials as charcoal or beeswax that can be reliably dated. "

However, even carbon dating is not always reliable in this context. As David continues, "caution is needed, as black charcoal drawings [found in a cave], for example, could have been done with old pieces of charcoal that had lain on the ground surface for long periods of time." In the theoretical example given, the age of the charcoal would be greater than that of the painting, making verified dating difficult.

Concepts and Styles

Cave paintings.

The most widely known form of Paleolithic art is probably the creation of paintings on prehistoric cave walls and ceilings. In many cases, even the discovery of these drawings is steeped in intrigue and excitement. For example, the famous depictions of bison and other animals in the Cave of Altamira in Spain were discovered in 1878 by Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola and his young daughter Maria while they were walking the grounds of their vast property. At the time of discovery, French experts questioned the authenticity and date of the paintings, perhaps in part out of jealousy that the cave was not in their own country. It was not until two decades later that the paintings were officially recognized by the archaeological community.

The discovery of the Lascaux cave was also the result of a fortuitous accident. In 1940, when France was under German occupation during World War Two, seven young boys were out walking their dogs when they discovered the opening to the cave on the property of the Count of La Rochefoucauld (they were trespassing at the time). Burrowing their way through a partially revealed opening, they entered the cave and, after exploring its depths, found themselves in the beautifully painted cavern today known as the Hall of Bulls . The boys had unwittingly stumbled on one of the most important prehistoric sites in the world.

Once similar ancient caves began to be discovered all over the globe, archaeologists and explorers unearthed a full range of often beautifully rendered animals and figures. Using charcoal and other natural pigments such as ochre, the early artists of the Paleolithic period transferred the drawings onto the cave walls by hand, often with the aid of simple brushes made of leaves or by blowing pigment through tubes of reeds.

Great debate and mystery surrounds the creation of these cave paintings. Prehistoric humans were nomadic, traveling from place to place, and so the fact that they based themselves in single locations long enough to create these extraordinary likenesses imbues them with undeniable importance even if we will never know the artists' intentions. At the very least, the figures provide a good record of the types of animals that existed in certain locations during the Paleolithic age, some of which are extinct today. The representation of wild beasts has also led many to believe that the paintings served as records of the fauna available for hunting in the nearby area. The appearance of dots alongside some of the animals, meanwhile, may imply some sort of tally or count, implying that the works could have been used to record the success of previous hunting trips.

The frequent placement of these drawings high up on cave walls or even on ceilings, generally in remote areas towards the rears of caves, has led to other theories as to why some of these paintings were made. Effort would have been required to reach many artwork sites, and as they often appear above or alongside wide-open spaces, some believe the drawings were placed where groups could have gathered for secret or guarded ceremonies, perhaps in an attempt to will a good hunt. In the Niaux cave in France, for example, according to archaeologist Jean Clottes, "the comparatively vast chambers would have been able to accommodate relatively large groups." This supports the theory of the drawings having a ritual function.

There are also important distinctions to be made between the cave paintings found in different parts of the world. Very few images of the human forms other than the occasional composite creature (half human, half animal) are found in the caves of Europe. As author Justin E. H. Smith notes of European cave art, "Paleolithic artists were singularly interested in the nonhuman mammals with which they shared an environment...Unlike Australian and southern African art from the same broad period, cave art in Europe offers no depiction of landscape, no horizon, no vegetation, almost no depiction of human-animal interaction, almost no hunting scenes."

By contrast, figures appear regularly in the cave art of Australia and Africa. There is no known reason for this. However, many people tend to attach a clearer religious function to non-European cave art, even suggesting that images could be documents of shamanic or religious ceremonies.

Paleolithic Sculptures and Portable Art

In addition to cave paintings, the Paleolithic period boasts a rich variety of sculptures and portable art (small objects that could be carried from place to place). Works from this period includes representations of the human form, most notably a number of "Venus" statues featuring women with enlarged breasts, hips, and pubic areas; animals such as a lion carved from mammoth ivory found in the Vogelherd Cave in Germany (40,000 years old); and composite creatures such as the "lion-man" of the Hohlenstein-Stadel (40,000 years old).

As the earliest humans did not live in settled communities, their three-dimensional artworks had to be small enough to carry with the pack as it traveled from place to place. Early humans also had access to only the crudest and simplest tools, such as pieces of flint, which they used to work on relatively tough materials such as ivory. The painstaking care taken to create these pieces supports the belief that they must have been of great significance to prehistoric people.

Many different theories exist as to why portable artworks were made during the Paleolithic era. According to K. Kris Hirst, "during the mid-twentieth century, archaeologists and art historians explicitly connected portable art to shamanism. Scholars compared the use of portable art by modern and historical groups and recognized that portable art, specifically figural sculpture, was often related to folklore and religious practices." Hirst goes on to speculate on other theories, noting that, while "a spiritual element may well have been involved with portable art objects...wider possibilities have since been put forward by archaeologists and art historians." These include the idea of "portable art as personal ornamentation, toys for children, teaching tools, or objects expressing personal, ethnic, social, and cultural identity. "

Composite Creatures and Religious Expression

One of the most fascinating aspects of Paleolithic art is the creation of painted and sculpted composite creatures. Sometimes referred to as therianthropes, these forms combine certain human features with other, animal characteristics. While not a common occurrence in cave art or ancient sculpture, enough of these animal-human hybrids have been discovered to support the idea of their importance to people of this era.

Notable examples of composite creatures in Paleolithic art include the "lion-man" of the Hohlenstein-Stadel (40,000 years old), the "bird man" panel in the Lascaux cave (16,000-14,000 BCE), and the figures found in San (Bushman) rock art in South Africa, including a male figure with the head and hooves of an antelope, holding on to the tail of a large beast. The depiction of imaginary creatures suggests a highly developed frame of mind and creative faculties amongst many early humans. These artists were not only interested in capturing what they saw in the world around them, but also in forging new worlds and sharing them with their communities, an urge that connects artists of all eras.

The biggest mystery surrounding these composite creatures is around their community function. Many believe that they had some kind of religious significance, and may have been depicted during ceremonies or rituals. According the Bradshaw Foundation website, "some archaeologists believe that therianthropes represent humans wearing costumes such as masks, antlers and animal skins. This may be true literally, but the fact that the practice appears to be so universal [with composite creatures found in caves all over the world and not limited to one geographic location] suggests that it is also true figuratively; it is a metaphor that represents the ancient belief involving the permeability of boundaries between the human and animal worlds. This belief allowed people to pass from one domain to another. Humans could be endowed with the qualities and characteristics of a particular animal species."

Further Developments

As our world continues to be explored, there is still the possibility of more Paleolithic art discoveries being made. A cave unearthed on the remote Indonesian Island of Sulawesi in late 2019 suggests the range of finds. As Katherine J. Wu explains, within the cave was discovered "a red-tinted painting depicting what appears to be a vivid hunt or ritual. In the scene, two wild pigs and four anoas, or dwarf buffaloes, scurry about as their apparent pursuers-mythical, humanoid figures sporting animal features like snouts, beaks and tails-give chase, armed with rope- and spear-like weapons. " With some historians ready to date the artwork as 44,000 years old, it could be one of the oldest cave paintings ever discovered, although there is already debate over the age of the piece amongst scholars.

With the excavation of ancient artistic sites occurring over centuries, theories as to their provenance and role have changed along with social mores. Justin E. H. Smith notes, for example, that "the first French scholars of cave art were mostly abbots and priests, and they saw their work as contributing to the vast project of Catholic apologetics...Their explicit concern was to find, in the symbolic world of early inhabitants of the continent that would much later become Europe, evidence for an awareness of the existence of a higher realm beyond the senses, and thus of a mental and spiritual capacity that could eventually accommodate the truth of Christianity. Over the twentieth century the discipline would develop into a proper science." Today, there is a wide range of theories as to the function of Paleolithic art, ranging from teaching and storytelling to the ideas of religious significance, mapping and even hunting tallies already noted.

Cave art has, in any case, played an important role in the advancement of theories around mental evolution during early human history. Bruno David notes that "cave art, both as buried portable objects such as personal adornments and as designs on rock walls, plays a key role in scientific debates concerning the degree to which cognitive modernism evolved with, or independently of, biological modernism. One reason for this is that artistic expressions are 'proxies' for aesthetically loaded forms of representational behaviour, for the ability to simulate and think in abstract ways that also tap into senses of appeal. "

The documentation of Paleolithic art has also allowed for increasingly sophisticated technologies to be tested and utilized. Initially, sketches and tracings had to be made on site, but scientific developments soon allowed more accurate reproduction. According to David, "one of the most complex but rewarding ways of documenting a site and its art is by making a high-precision three-dimensional digital model. At the Chauvet Cave, the French government not only commissioned such a three-dimensional recording, but then used it to physically build a life-sized model of much of the cave so that the public can see what the underground space looks like without detrimental effects to the original cave itself. "

With the development of Modernism during the early-twentieth century, many artists became interested in ideas of untutored creative purity, leading to a new wave of fascination with cave art. Pablo Picasso reportedly visited the famous Altamira cave before fleeing Spain in 1934, and emerged saying: "Beyond Altamira, all is decadence. " Since then, artists including Picasso's fellow Cubist Amédée Ozenfant and the French Tachiste painter Pierre Soulages have spoken of their fascination with ancient painting and sculpture, and its influence on their practice. The British figurative painter Jenny Saville , meanwhile, has spoken of the influence of the Venus of Willendorf on her visceral depictions of female flesh.

Formal and thematic traits reminiscent of cave art can be found across a number of modern and contemporary art movements, from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism , and Art Brut . Picasso's depiction of bulls and other animals is frequently reminiscent of the elementary line and shape of Altamira's beasts, while Jackson Pollock explicitly honored ancient cave artists by leaving handprints along the top edge of at least two of his paintings. Jean Dubuffet sought to emulate the most instinctive and unschooled creative gestures through his work in ways that often brought to mind the art of the earliest human societies.

Land artists such as Giuseppe Penone, meanwhile, have brought a scale and primitivism of gesture reminiscent of cave art to much of their work. Penone's Sculptures of Lymph (2007), for example, involved covering walls with tanned leather molded to the shape of tree bark, suggesting the texture and atmospherics of the painted cave wall. The argument can even be made that Graffiti art has its roots in the early cave paintings and the leaving of one's mark on a wall traces back to the hand stencils made by the earliest humans.

Useful Resources on Cave Art

• Cave Art Our Pick By Bruno David
• Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave (The Oldest Known Paintings in the World), By Jean-Marie Chauvet and Eliette Brunel Deschamps
• The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World's First Artists By Gregory Curtis
• What is Paleolithic Art? Cave Paintings and the Dawn of Human Creativity Our Pick By Jean Clottes
• Bradshaw Foundation
• All you need to know about Argentina's Cueva de las Manos SA Expeditions / December 19, 2016
• Art in the Paleolithic Age ThoughtCo. / June 30, 2019
• Chauvet Cave: The Panel of Horses Our Pick JAMA Network / September 2011
• 'Humans were not centre stage': how ancient cave art puts us in our place Our Pick The Guardian / December 12, 2019
• Newly Discovered Indonesian Cave Art May Represent World's Oldest Known Hunting Scene Smithsonian Magazine / December 12, 2019
• Portable Art from Upper Paleolithic Period ThoughtCo. / May 30, 2019
• The Lion Man: an Ice Age masterpiece The British Museum Blog / October 10, 2017
• Venus of Laussel: 20,000 Year Old Goddess ThoughtCo. / July 3, 2019
• What Cave Art Means Our Pick Art in America / September 1, 2018
• What Did the Venus of Willendorf Originally Represent? Our Pick Discover / March 5, 2021
• Why scientists are intrigued by the Gwion Gwion rock art of the Kimberley Our Pick The Sydney Morning Herald / October 20, 2016
• Cave of Altamira and Paleolithic Cave Art of Northern Spain Our Pick This video provides a detailed look at the Museum of Altamira which is located next to the prehistoric Altamira Cave in Spain.
• Chauvet cave: Preserving prehistoric art Our Pick This BBC news clip provides a rare look inside the Chauvet cave as well as a discussion of how the life-size replica of the cave was made. Created by the French government, it provides visitors an experience similar to that of being in the actual cave.
• Did Neanderthals create art? This BBC video examines an ancient engraving found in a Neanderthal cave to consider whether it was in fact created art.
• Earliest hunting scene in prehistoric art Our Pick This video provides a look at the recently discovered cave art painting of a hunting scene discovered in a cave in Indonesia. It is believed to date back at least 44,000 years.
• Kimberley Rock Art: A World Treasure. 2020 Our Pick This video provides an in depth look at the prehistoric rock art found in the Kimberley region of Australia as well as efforts being made to discover, date, and preserve this art.
• Lascaux Virtual Tour This brief video provides a virtual tour of the Lascaux Cave which is currently closed to the public.

Related Artists

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Content compiled and written by Jessica DiPalma

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Greg Thomas

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AP®︎/College Art History

Course: ap®︎/college art history   >   unit 3.

• Key points for studying global prehistory
• Our earliest technology?

Paleolithic art, an introduction

• Origins of rock art in Africa
• Apollo 11 Stones
• Camelid sacrum in the shape of a canine
• Rock art in North Africa
• Running horned woman, Tassili n’Ajjer
• The Neolithic Revolution
• Bushel with ibex motifs
• Anthropomorphic stele
• Working jade
• Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites (UNESCO/NHK)
• Ambum Stone
• Tlatilco figurines
• Tlatilco Figurines
• Terracotta fragments, Lapita people

The oldest art: ornamentation

The oldest representational art, chauvet-pont-d'arc, a word of caution, want to join the conversation.

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Chapter 1: Prehistoric Art

Introduction to prehistoric art.

The term  Prehistory refers to all of human history that precedes the invention of writing systems (c. 3100 B.C.E.) and the keeping of written records, and it is an immensely long period of time, some ten million years according to current theories. For the purposes of an art history survey, we split our study of Prehistory into two broad periods: Paleolithic  and  Neolithic  (from the Greek “ palaios ” (old) / “ neos ” (new) and “ lithos ” (stone), as these peoples worked with stone tools).

The timeline covered in this area of the survey is vast —c. 32,000 B.C.E. (Chauvet Caves) to 2,000 B.C.E. (Neolithic settlements)—but the question that unites this vast chronology is simple and compelling: what can we find out about objects and the people who made them and how do they connect to our contemporary experiences today?  Geography also is vast – these periods existed on all inhabitable continents, although the chronology is not the same.  Early humans arrived in the Americas much later.

Common questions about dates

B.C. or B.C.E.?

Many people use the abbreviations B.C. and A.D. with a year (for example, A.D. 2012). B.C. refers to “Before Christ,” and the initials, A.D., stand for  Anno Domini , which is Latin for “In the year of our Lord.” This system was devised by a monk in the year 525.

A more recent system uses B.C.E. which stands for “Before the Common Era” and C.E. for “Common Era.” This newer system is now widely used as a way of expressing the same periods as B.C. and A.D., but without the Christian reference. According to these systems, we count time backwards Before the Common Era (B.C.E.) and forwards in the Common Era (C.E.).

Often dates will be preceded with a “c.” or a “ca.” These are abbreviations of the Latin word “circa” which means around, or approximately. We use this before a date to indicate that we do not know exactly when so mething happened, so c. 400 B.C.E. means approximately 400 years Before the Common Era.

Terms to know

The Paleolithic Age 

The  Paleolithic Art, or Old Stone Age, spanned from around 30,000 BCE until 10,000 BCE and produced the first accomplishments in human creativity. Due to a lack of written records from this time period, nearly all of our knowledge of Paleolithic human culture and way of life comes from archaeologic and ethnographic comparisons to modern hunter-gatherer cultures. The Paleolithic lasted until the retreat of the ice, when farming and the use of metals were adopted.

A typical Paleolithic society followed a hunter-gatherer economy. Humans hunted wild animals for meat and gathered food, firewood, and materials for their tools, clothes, or shelters. The adoption of both technologies—clothing and shelter—can not be dated exactly, but they were key to humanity’s progress. As the Paleolithic era progressed, dwellings became more sophisticated, more elaborate, and more house-like. At the end of the Paleolithic era, humans began to produce works of art such as cave paintings, rock art, and jewelry, and began to engage in religious behavior such as burial and rituals.

Dwellings and Shelters

The oldest examples of Paleolithic dwellings are shelters in caves, followed by houses of wood, straw, and rock. Early humans chose locations that could be defended against predators and rivals and that were shielded from inclement weather. Many such locations could be found near rivers, lakes, and streams, perhaps with low hilltops nearby that could serve as refuges. Since water can erode and change landscapes quite drastically, many of these campsites have been destroyed. Our understanding of Paleolithic dwellings is therefore limited.

As early as 380,000 BCE, humans were constructing temporary wood huts. Other types of houses existed; these were more frequently campsites in caves or in the open air with little in the way of formal structure. The oldest examples are shelters within caves, followed by houses of wood, straw, and rock. A few examples exist of houses built out of bones.

Caves are the most famous example of Paleolithic shelters, though the number of caves used by Paleolithic people is drastically small relative to the number of hominids thought to have lived on Earth at the time. Most hominids probably never entered a cave, much less lived in one. Nonetheless, the remains of hominid settlements show interesting patterns. In one cave, a tribe of Neanderthals kept a hearth fire burning for a thousand years, leaving behind an accumulation of coals and ash. In another cave, post holes in the dirt floor reveal that the residents built some sort of shelter or enclosure with a roof to protect themselves from water dripping on them from the cave ceiling. They often used the rear portions of the cave as middens, depositing their garbage there. In the Upper Paleolithic (the latest part of the Paleolithic), caves ceased to act as houses. Instead, they likely became places for early people to gather for ritual and religious purposes.

Tents and Huts

Modern archaeologists know of few types of shelter used by ancient peoples other than caves. Some examples do exist, but they are quite rare. In Siberia, a group of Russian scientists uncovered a house or tent with a frame constructed of mammoth bones. The great tusks supported the roof, while the skulls and thighbones formed the walls of the tent. Several families could live inside, where three small hearths, little more than rings of stones, kept people warm during the winter. Around 50,000 years ago, a group of Paleolithic humans camped on a lakeshore in southern France. At Terra Amata, these hunter-gatherers built a long and narrow house. The foundation was a ring of stones, with a flat threshold stone for a door at either end. Vertical posts down the middle of the house supported roofs and walls of sticks and twigs, probably covered over with a layer of straw. A hearth outside served as the kitchen, while a smaller hearth inside kept people warm. Their residents could easily abandon both dwellings. This is why they are not considered true houses, which were a development of the  Neolithic  period rather than the Paleolithic period.

Paleolithic Artifacts

The Paleolithic is separated into three periods: the Lower Paleolithic (the earliest subdivision), Middle Paleolithic, and Upper Paleolithic. The Paleolithic era is characterized by the use of stone tools, although at the time humans also used wood and bone tools. Other organic commodities were adapted for use as tools, including leather and vegetable fibres; however, due to their nature, these have not been preserved to any great degree. The Paleolithic era has a number of artifacts that range from stone, bone, and wood tools to stone sculptures.

The earliest undisputed art originated in the Upper Paleolithic. However, there is some evidence that a preference for aesthetics emerged in the Middle Paleolithic due to the symmetry inherent in discovered artifacts and evidence of attention to detail in such things as tool shape, which has led some archaeologists to interpret these artifacts as early examples of artistic expression. There has been much dispute among scholars over the terming of early prehistoric artifacts as “art.” Generally speaking, artifacts dating from the Lower and Middle Paleolithic remain disputed as objects of artistic expression, while the Upper Paleolithic provides the first conclusive examples of art-making.

Our earliest technology?

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

Made nearly two million years ago, stone tools such as this are the first known technological invention.

This chopping tool and others like it are the oldest objects in the British Museum. It comes from an early human campsite in the bottom layer of deposits in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. Potassium-argon dating indicates that this bed is between 1.6 and 2.2 million years old from top to bottom. This and other tools are dated to about 1.8 million years.

Using another hard stone as a hammer, the maker has knocked flakes off both sides of a basalt (volcanic lava) pebble so that they intersect to form a sharp edge. This could be used to chop branches from trees, cut meat from large animals or smash bones for marrow fat—an essential part of the early human diet. The flakes could also have been used as small knives for light duty tasks.

Deliberate shaping

To some people this artifact might appear crude; how can we even be certain that it is humanly made and not just bashed in rock falls or by trampling animals? A close look reveals that the edge is formed by a deliberate sequence of skillfully placed blows of more or less uniform force. Many objects of the same type, made in the same way, occur in groups called assemblages which are occasionally associated with early human remains. By contrast, natural forces strike randomly and with variable force; no pattern, purpose or uniformity can be seen in the modifications they cause.

Chopping tools and flakes from the earliest African sites were referred to as Oldowan  by the archaeologist Louis Leakey. He found this example on his first expedition to Olduvai in 1931, when he was sponsored by the British Museum.

Handaxes were still in use there some 500,000 years ago by which time their manufacture and use had spread throughout Africa, south Asia, the Middle East and Europe where they were still being made 40,000 years ago. They have even been found as far east as Korea in recent excavations. No other cultural artifact is known to have been made for such a long time across such a huge geographical range.

Handaxes are always made from stone and were held in the hand during use. Many have this characteristic teardrop or pear shape which might have been inspired by the outline of the human hand.

The beginnings of an artistic sense?

Although handaxes were used for a variety of everyday tasks including all aspects of skinning and butchering an animal or working other materials such as wood, this example is much bigger than the usual useful size of such hand held tools. Despite its symmetry and regular edges it appears difficult to use easily. As language began to develop along with tool making, was this handaxe made to suggest ideas? Does the care and craftsmanship with which it was made indicate the beginnings of the artistic sense unique to humans?

Rock art and the origins of art in Africa

Genetic and fossil evidence tells us that Homo sapiens (anatomically modern humans who evolved from an earlier species of hominids) developed on the continent of Africa more than 100,000 years ago and spread throughout the world. But what we do not know—what we have only been able to assume—is that art too began in Africa. Is Africa, where humanity originated, home to the world’s oldest art? If so, can we say that art began in Africa? 

The first examples of what we might term “art” in Africa, dating from between 100,000–60,000 years ago, emerge in two very distinct forms: personal adornment in the form of perforated seashells suspended on twine, and incised and engraved stone, ochre and ostrich eggshell.  Despite some sites being 8,000 km and 40,000 years apart, an intriguing feature of the earliest art is that these first forays appear remarkably similar. It is worth noting here that the term “art” in this context is highly problematic, in that we cannot assume that humans living 100,000 years ago, or even 10,000 years ago, had a concept of art in the same way that we do, particularly in the modern Western sense. However, it remains a useful umbrella term for our purposes here.

Pattern and design

The practice of engraving or incising, which emerges around 12,000 years ago in Saharan rock art, has its antecedents much earlier, up to 100,000 years ago. Incised and engraved stone, bone, ochre and ostrich eggshell have been found at sites in southern Africa. These marked objects share features in the expression of design, exhibiting patterns that have been classified as cross-hatching.

One of the most iconic and well-publicized sites that have yielded cross-hatch incised patterning on ochre is Blombos Cave, on the southern Cape shore of South Africa. Of the more than 8,500 fragments of ochre deriving from the MSA (Middle Stone Age) levels, 15 fragments show evidence of engraving. Two of these, dated to 77,000 years ago, have received the most attention for the design of cross-hatch pattern.

Incised ochre from Blombos Cave, South Africa. Photo by Chris. S. Henshilwood © Chris. S. Henshilwood

For many archaeologists, the incised pieces of ochre at Blombos are the most complex and best-formed evidence for early abstract representations, and are unequivocal evidence for symbolic thought and language. The debate about when we became a symbolic species and acquired fully syntactical language—what archaeologists term ‘modern human behaviour’—is both complex and contested. It has been proposed that these cross-hatch patterns are clear evidence of thinking symbolically, because the motifs are not representational and as such are culturally constructed and arbitrary. Moreover, in order for the meaning of this motif to be conveyed to others, language is a prerequisite.

The Blombos engravings are not isolated occurrences, since the presence of such designs occur at more than half a dozen other sites in South Africa, suggesting that this pattern is indeed important in some way, and not the result of idiosyncratic behavior. It is worth noting, however, that for some scholars, the premise that the pattern is symbolic is not so certain. The patterns may indeed have a meaning, but it is how that meaning is associated, either by resemblance (iconic) or correlation (indexical), that is important for our understanding of human cognition.

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

Personal ornamentation and engraved designs are the earliest evidence of art in Africa, and are inextricably tied up with the development of human cognition. For tens of thousands of years, there has been not only a capacity for, but a motivation to adorn and to inscribe, to make visual that which is important. The interesting and pertinent issue in the context of this project is that the rock art we are cataloguing, describing and researching comes from a tradition that goes far back into African prehistory. The techniques and subject matter resonate over the millennia.

Blombos Cave

Discoveries of engraved stones and beads in the Blombos Cave of South Africa has led some archaeologists to believe that early  Homo sapiens  were capable of abstraction and the production of symbolic art. Made from  ochre , the stones are engraved with abstract patterns, while the beads are made from Nassarius shells. While they are simpler than prehistoric cave paintings found in Europe, some scholars believe these engraved stones represent the earliest known artworks, dating from 75,000 years ago.

Apollo 11 Cave Stones, Namibia

Approximately 25,000 years ago, in a rock shelter in the Huns Mountains of Namibia on the southwest coast of Africa (today part of the Ai-Ais Richtersveld Transfrontier Park), an animal was drawn in charcoal on a hand-sized slab of stone. The stone was left behind, over time becoming buried on the floor of the cave by layers of sediment and debris until 1969 when a team led by German archaeologist W. E. Wendt excavated the rock shelter and found the first fragment. Wendt named the cave “Apollo 11” upon hearing on his shortwave radio of NASA’s successful space mission to the moon. It was more than three years later however, after a subsequent excavation, when Wendt discovered the matching fragment, that archaeologists and art historians began to understand the significance of the find.

The Apollo 11 rock shelter overlooks a dry gorge, sitting twenty meters above what was once a river that ran along the valley floor. The cave entrance is wide, about twenty-eight meters across, and the cave itself is deep: eleven meters from front to back. While today a person can stand upright only in the front section of the cave, during the Middle Stone Age, as well as in the periods before and after, the rock shelter was an active site of ongoing human settlement.

Seven painted stone slabs of brown-grey quartzite, depicting a variety of animals painted in charcoal, ochre and white, were located in a Middle Stone Age deposit (100,000–60,000 years ago). These images are not easily identifiable to species level, but have been interpreted variously as felines and/or bovids; one in particular has been observed to be either a zebra, giraffe or ostrich, demonstrating the ambiguous nature of the depictions.

Apollo 11 Cave Stones, Namibia, quartzite, c. 25,500–25,300 B.C.E. Image courtesy of State Museum of Namibia.

View across Fish River Canyon toward the Huns Mountains, /Ai-/Ais – Richtersveld Transfrontier Park, southern Namibia (photo:  Thomas Schoch , CC-BY-SA-3.00

Excavation site of the Apollo 11 stones (photo: Jutta Vogel Stiftung)

Inside the cave, above and below the layer where the Apollo 11 cave stones were found, archaeologists unearthed a sequence of cultural layers representing over 100,000 years of human occupation. In these layers stone artifacts, typical of the Middle Stone Age period—such as blades, pointed flakes, and scraper—were found in raw materials not native to the region, signaling stone tool technology transported over long distances. Among the remnants of hearths, ostrich eggshell fragments bearing traces of red color were also found—either remnants of ornamental painting or evidence that the eggshells were used as containers for pigment.

Recently discovered examples of patterned stone, ochre and ostrich eggshell, as well as evidence of personal ornamentation emerging from Middle Stone Age Africa, have demonstrated that “art” is not only a much older phenomenon than previously thought, but that it has its roots in the African continent. Africa is where we share a common humanity.

The cave stones are what archaeologists term art mobilier —small-scale prehistoric art that is moveable. But mobile art, and rock art generally, is not unique to Africa. Rock art is a global phenomenon that can be found across the World—in Europe, Asia, Australia, and North and South America. While we cannot know for certain what these early humans intended by the things that they made, by focusing on art as the product of humanity’s creativity and imagination we can begin to explore where, and hypothesize why, art began.

Paleolithic art, an introduction

                              Replica of the painting from the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in southern France (Anthropos museum, Brno)

The oldest art: ornamentation

Humans ( Homo sapiens ) make art. We do this for many reasons and with whatever technologies are available to us. Recent research suggests that Neanderthals also made art.

Extremely old, non-representational ornamentation has been found across Africa. The oldest firmly-dated example is a collection of 82,000 year old Nassarius snail shells found in Morocco that are pierced and covered with red ochre. Wear patterns suggest that they may have been strung beads. Nassarius shell beads found in Israel may be more than 100,000 years old and in the  Blombos cave in South Africa, pierced shells and small pieces of ochre (red Hematite) etched with simple geometric patterns have been found in a 75,000-year-old layer of sediment.

The oldest representational art

Some of the oldest known representational imagery comes from the Aurignacian culture of the Upper Paleolithic period (Paleolithic means old stone age). Archaeological discoveries across a broad swath of Europe (especially Southern France, Northern Spain, and Swabia, in Germany) include over two hundred caves with spectacular Aurignacian paintings, drawings, and sculpture that are among the earliest undisputed examples of representational image-making. Among the oldest of these is a 2.4-inch tall female figure carved out of mammoth ivory that was found in six fragments in the Hohle Fels cave near Schelklingen in southern Germany. It dates to 35,000 B.C.E.

Female Figure of Hohlefels, c. 35,000 B.C.E., ivory, found in cave near Schelklinge, southern Germany (photo: Ramessos, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Warty pig (Sus celebensis), c. 43,900 B.C.E., painted with ocher (clay pigment), Maros-Pangkep caves, Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4, South Sulawesi, Indonesia

The caves at Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc,  Lascaux , Pech Merle, and  Altamira  contain the best known examples of pre-historic painting and drawing. Here are remarkably evocative renderings of animals and some humans that employ a complex mix of naturalism and abstraction. Archaeologists that study Paleolithic era humans, believe that 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. The 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. The world’s oldest known cave painting was found in Sulawesi,  Indonesia  in 2017 and was made at least 45,500 years ago.

What can we really know about the creators of these paintings and what the images originally meant? These are questions that are difficult enough when we study art made only 500 years ago. It is much more perilous to assert meaning for the art of people who shared our anatomy but had not yet developed the cultures or linguistic structures that shaped who we have become. Do the tools of art history even apply? Here is evidence of a visual language that collapses the more than 1,000 generations that separate us, but we must be cautious. This is especially so if we want to understand the people that made this art as a way to understand ourselves. The desire to speculate based on what we see and the physical evidence of the caves is wildly seductive.

Replica of the painting from the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in southern France

Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc

The cave at Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc is over 1,000 feet in length with two large chambers. Carbon samples date the charcoal used to depict the two head-to-head Rhinoceroses (see the image above, bottom right) to between 30,340 and 32,410 years before 1995 when the samples were taken. The cave’s 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). Photographs show that the drawing at the top of this essay is very carefully rendered but may be misleading. We see a group of horses, rhinos, and bison and we see them as a group, overlapping and skewed in scale. But the photograph distorts the way these animal figures would have been originally seen. The bright electric lights used by the photographer create a broad flat scope of vision; how different to see each animal emerge from the dark under the flickering light cast by a flame.

A word of caution

In a 2009 presentation at University of California San Diego, Dr. Randell White, Professor of Anthropology at New York University, suggested that the overlapping horses pictured above might represent the same horse over time, running, eating, sleeping, etc. Perhaps these are far more sophisticated representations than we have imagined.  In addition to the drawings, the cave is littered with the skulls and bones of cave bear and the track of a wolf. There is also a footprint thought to have been made by an eight-year-old boy.

Two main types of Upper Paleolithic  art have survived. The first we can classify as permanently located works found on the walls within caves. Mostly unknown prior to the final decades of the nineteenth century, many such sites have now been discovered throughout much of southern Europe and have provided historians and archaeologists new insights into humankind millennia prior to the creation of writing. The subjects of these works vary: we may observe a variety of geometric motifs, many types of flora and fauna, and the occasional human figure. They also fluctuate in size; ranging from several inches to large-scale compositions that span many feet in length.

The second category of Paleolithic art may be called portable since these works are generally of a small-scale—a logical size given the nomadic nature of Paleolithic peoples. Despite their often diminutive size, the creation of these portable objects signifies a remarkable allocation of time and effort.

Paleolithic Sculpture

Sculptural work from the Paleolithic consists mainly of figurines, beads, and some decorative utilitarian objects constructed with stone, bone, ivory, clay, and wood. During prehistoric times, rock shelters were  places of dwelling and communal gathering as well as possible spaces for rituals  Unsurprisingly, caves were the locations of many archeological discoveries owing to their secluded locations and protection from the elements.  Paintings were also found in caves – those that have survived were ritual spaces, there is no evidence that the deep and remote caves were inhabited.   All of the surviving sculptures are small and portable – they would easily fit in your pocket.  Surviving sculpture are mostly carved from stone or animal ivory and bones. A few ceramic works have been found (the clay figures were air-dried – firing technology is not known to have existed in the Paleolithic).   The most common subject is the female form, often with exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics and the facial features are minimal.  The best known of these figures is the Woman of Willendorf.

 Woman of Willendorf

The name of this prehistoric sculpture refers to a Roman goddess—but what did she originally represent?

Can a 25,000-year-old object be a work of art?

The artifact known as the  Venus of Willendorf  dates to between 24,000–22,000 B.C.E., making it one of the oldest and most famous surviving works of art. But what does it mean to be a work of art?

The Oxford English Dictionary, perhaps the authority on the English language, defines the word “art” as

the application of skill to the arts of imitation and design, painting, engraving, sculpture, architecture; the cultivation of these in its principles, practice, and results; the skillful production of the beautiful in visible forms.

Some of the words and phrases that stand out within this definition include “application of skill,” “imitation,” and “beautiful.” By this definition, the concept of “art” involves the use of skill to create an object that contains some appreciation of aesthetics. The object is not only made, it is made with an attempt of creating something that contains elements of beauty.

anything made by human art and workmanship; an artificial product. In Archaeol[ogy] applied to the rude products of aboriginal workmanship as distinguished from natural remains.

Again, some keywords and phrases are important: “anything made by human art,” and “rude products.” Clearly, an artifact is any object created by humankind regardless of the “skill” of its creator or the absence of “beauty.”

Click here to go to Sketchfab by the Natural History Museum, Vienna

Artifact, then, is anything created by humankind, and art is a particular kind of artifact, a group of objects under the broad umbrella of artifact, in which beauty has been achieved through the application of skills. Think of the average plastic spoon: a uniform white color, mass produced, and unremarkable in just about every way. While it serves a function—say, for example, to stir your hot chocolate—the person who designed it likely did so without any real dedication or commitment to making this utilitarian object beautiful. You have likely never lovingly gazed at a plastic spoon and remarked, “Wow! Now that’s a beautiful spoon!” This is in contrast to a silver spoon you might purchase at Tiffany & Co. While their spoon could just as well stir cream into your morning coffee, it was skillfully designed by a person who attempted to make it aesthetically pleasing; note the elegant bend of the handle, the gentle luster of the metal, the graceful slope of the bowl.

These terms are important to bear in mind when analyzing prehistoric art. While it is unlikely people from the  Upper Paleolithic   period cared to conceptualize what it meant to make art or to be an artist, it cannot be denied that the objects they created were made with skill, were often made as a way of imitating the world around them, and were made with a particular care to create something beautiful.  They likely represent, for the Paleolithic peoples who created them, objects made with great competence and with a particular interest in aesthetics.

Caves and pockets – permanent and portable

Two main types of Upper  Paleolithic art  have survived. The first we can classify as permanently located works found on the walls within caves. Mostly unknown prior to the final decades of the nineteenth century, many such sites have now been discovered throughout much of southern Europe and have provided historians and archaeologists new insights into humankind millennia prior to the creation of writing. The subjects of these works vary: we may observe a variety of geometric motifs, many types of flora and fauna, and the occasional human figure. They also fluctuate in size; ranging from several inches to large-scale compositions that span many feet in length.

The second category of Paleolithic art may be called portable since these works are generally of a small-scale—a logical size given the nomadic nature of Paleolithic peoples. Despite their often diminutive size, the creation of these portable objects signifies a remarkable allocation of time and effort. As such, these figurines were significant enough to take along during the nomadic wanderings of their Paleolithic creators.

The  Venus of Willendorf  is a perfect example of this. Josef Szombathy, an Austro-Hungarian archaeologist, discovered this work in 1908 outside the small Austrian village of Willendorf. Although generally projected in art history classrooms to be several feet tall, this limestone figurine is petite in size. She measures just under 11.1 cm high, and could fit comfortably in the palm of your hand. This small scale allowed whoever carved (or, perhaps owned) this figurine to carry it during their nearly daily nomadic travels in search of food. 

Naming and dating

Clearly, the Paleolithic sculptor who made this small figurine would never have named it the  Venus of Willendorf . Venus was the name of the Roman goddess of love and ideal beauty. When discovered outside the Austrian village of Willendorf, scholars mistakenly assumed that this figure was likewise a goddess of love and beauty. There is absolutely no evidence though that the  Venus of Willendorf  shared a function similar to its classically inspired namesake. However incorrect the name may be, it has endured and tells us more about those who found her than those who made her.

Dating too can be a problem, especially since Prehistoric art, by definition, has no written record. In fact, the definition of the word prehistoric is that written language did not yet exist, so the creator of the  Venus of Willendorf  could not have incised “Bob made this in the year 24,000 B.C.E.” on the back. In addition, stone artifacts present a special problem since we are interested in the date that the stone was carved, not the date of the material itself. Despite these hurdles, art historians and archaeologists attempt to establish dates for prehistoric finds through two processes. The first is called relative dating and the second involves an examination of the stratification of an object’s discovery.

Relative dating is an easily understood process that involves stylistically comparing an object whose date is uncertain to other objects whose dates have been firmly established. By correctly fitting the unknown object into this stylistic chronology, scholars can find a very general chronological date for an object. A simple example can illustrate this method. The first Chevrolet Corvette was sold during the 1953 model year, and this particular car has gone through numerous iterations up to its most recent version. If presented with pictures of the Corvette’s development from every five years to establish the stylistic development from its earliest model to the most recent (for example, images from the 1953, 1958, 1963, and all the way to the current model), you would have a general idea of the changes the car underwent over time. If then given a picture of a Corvette from an unknown year, you could, on the basis of stylistic analysis, generally place it within the visual chronology of this car with some accuracy. The Corvette is a convenient example, but the same exercise could be applied to iPods, Coca-Cola bottles, suits, or any other object that changes over time.

The second way scholars date the  Venus of Willendorf  is through an analysis of where it was found. Generally, the deeper an object is recovered from the earth, the longer that object has been buried. Imagine a penny jar that has had coins added to it for hundreds of years. It is a good bet that the coins at the bottom of that jar are the oldest whereas those at the top are the newest. The same applies to Paleolithic objects. Because of the depth at which these objects are found, we can infer that they are very old indeed.

What did it mean?

In the absence of writing, art historians rely on the objects themselves to learn about ancient peoples. The form of the  Venus of Willendorf —that is, what it looks like—may very well inform what it originally meant. The most conspicuous elements of her anatomy are those that deal with the process of reproduction and child rearing. The artist took particular care to emphasize her breasts, which some scholars suggest indicates that she is able to nurse a child. The artist also brought deliberate attention to her pubic region. Traces of a  pigment —red ochre—can still be seen on parts of the figurine.

In contrast, the sculptor placed scant attention on the non-reproductive parts of her body. This is particularly noticeable in the figure’s limbs, where there is little emphasis placed on musculature or anatomical accuracy. We may infer from the small size of her feet that she was not meant to be free standing, and was either meant to be carried or placed lying down. The artist carved the figure’s upper arms along her upper torso, and her lower arms are only barely visible resting upon the top of her breasts. As enigmatic as the lack of attention to her limbs is, the absence of attention to the face is even more striking. No eyes, nose, ears, or mouth remain visible. Instead, our attention is drawn to seven horizontal bands that wrap in concentric circles from the crown of her head. Some scholars have suggested her head is obscured by a knit cap pulled downward, others suggest that these forms may represent braided or beaded hair and that her face, perhaps once painted, is angled downward.

If the face was purposefully obscured, the Paleolithic sculptor may have created, not a portrait of a particular person, but rather a representation of the reproductive and child rearing aspects of a woman. In combination with the emphasis on the breasts and pubic area, it seems likely that the Venus of Willendorf had a function that related to fertility.

Without doubt, we can learn much more from the Venus of Willendorf than its diminutive size might at first suggest. We learn about relative dating and stratification. We learn that these nomadic people living almost 25,000 years ago cared about making objects beautiful. And we can learn that these Paleolithic people had an awareness of the importance of the women.

The Venus of Willendorf is only one example dozens of paleolithic figures we believe may have been associated with fertility. Nevertheless, it retains a place of prominence within the history of human art

The Lion Man

The cave lion was the fiercest animal of the ice age, and this mammoth ivory carving combines human with lion.

URL:  https://youtu.be/mJWUPBQpX1c

Cite this page as: The British Museum, “ Lion Man ,” in  Smarthistory , March 30, 2018, accessed December 27, 2023,  https://smarthistory.org/lion-man-2/ .

Paleolithic Cave Painting

We are as likely to communicate using easily interpretable pictures as we are text. Portable handheld devices enable us to tell others via social media what we are doing and thinking. Approximately 15,000 years ago, we also communicated in pictures—but with no written language.

Lascaux II (replica of the original cave, which is closed to the public), original cave: c. 16,000–14,000 B.C.E., 11 feet 6 inches long (photo:  Francesco Bandarin , CC BY-SA 3.0)

The cave of Lascaux, France is one of almost 350 similar sites that are known to exist—most are isolated to a region of southern France and  northern Spain . Both Neanderthals (named after the site in which their bones were first discovered—the Neander Valley in Germany) and Modern Humans (early Homo Sapiens Sapiens) coexisted in this region 30,000 years ago. Life was short and very difficult; resources were scarce and the climate was very cold.

Map showing the location of three well-known prehistoric cave painting sites in France and Spain © Google

Location, location, location!

Detail of Hall of Bulls, Lascaux II (replica of the original cave, which is closed to the public), original cave: c. 16,000–14,000 B.C.E.

How did they do it?

The 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. The images are sometimes entirely linear—line drawn to define the animal’s contour. In many other cases, the animals are described in solid and blended colors blown by mouth onto the wall. In other portions of the Lascaux cave, artists carved lines into the soft calcite surface. Some of these are infilled with color—others are not.

The cave spaces range widely in size and ease of access. The famous Hall of Bulls is large enough to hold some fifty people. Other “rooms” and “halls” are extraordinarily narrow and tall.

Archaeologists have found hundreds of stone tools. They have also identified holes in some walls that may have supported tree-limb scaffolding that would have elevated an artist high enough to reach the upper surfaces. Fossilized pollen has been found; these grains were inadvertently brought into the cave by early visitors and are helping scientists understand the world outside.

Left wall of the Hall of Bulls, Lascaux II (replica of the original cave, which is closed to the public), original cave: c. 16,000–14,000 B.C.E., 11 feet 6 inches long

Hall of Bulls

Why did they do it.

Many scholars have speculated about why prehistoric people painted and engraved the walls at Lascaux and other caves like it. Perhaps the most famous theory was put forth by a priest named Henri Breuil. Breuil spent considerable time in many of the caves, meticulously recording the images in drawings when the paintings were too challenging to photograph. Relying primarily on a field of study known as  ethnography , Breuil believed that the images played a role in “hunting magic.” The theory suggests that the prehistoric people who used the cave may have believed that a way to overpower their prey involved creating images of it during rituals designed to ensure a successful hunt. This seems plausible when we remember that survival was entirely dependent on successful foraging and hunting, though it is also important to remember how little we actually know about these people.

Disemboweled bison and bird-headed human figure? Cave at Lascaux, c. 16,000–14,000 B.C.E.

Drawn in strong, black lines, bristles with energy, as the fur on the back of its neck stands up and the head is radically turned to face us. A form drawn under the bison’s abdomen is interpreted as internal organs, spilling out from a wound. A more crudely drawn form positioned below and to the left of the bison may represent a humanoid figure with the head of a bird. Nearby, a thin line is topped with another bird and there is also an arrow with barbs. Further below and to the far left the partial outline of a rhinoceros can be identified.

Interpreters of this image tend to agree that some sort of interaction has taken place among these animals and the bird-headed human figure—in which the bison has sustained injury either from a weapon or from the horn of the rhinoceros. Why the person in the image has the rudimentary head of a bird, and why a bird form sits atop a stick very close to him is a mystery. Some suggest that the person is a shaman —a kind of priest or healer with powers involving the ability to communicate with spirits of other worlds. Regardless, this riveting image appears to depict action and reaction, although many aspects of it are difficult to piece together.

Preservation for future study

The Caves of Lascaux are the most famous of all of the known caves in the region. In fact, their popularity has permanently endangered them. From 1940 to 1963, the numbers of visitors and their impact on the delicately balanced environment of the cave—which supported the preservation of the cave images for so long—necessitated the cave’s closure to the public. A replica called Lascaux II was created about 200 yards away from the site. The original Lascaux cave is now a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site. Lascaux will require constant vigilance and upkeep to preserve it for future generations.  Many mysteries continue to surround Lascaux, but there is one certainty. The very human need to communicate in the form of pictures—for whatever purpose—has persisted since our earliest beginnings.

Cave of Altamira and Paleolithic Cave Art of Northern Spain (UNESCO/NHK)

URL: https://youtu.be/qyIfPbn0RDs

The Neolithic revolution

Neolithic art and architecture.

by DR. SENTA GERMAN

A settled life

When people think of the Neolithic era, they often think of Stonehenge, the iconic image of this early time. Dating to approximately 3000 B.C.E. and set on Salisbury Plain in England, it is a structure larger and more complex than anything built before it in Europe.  Stonehenge is an example of the cultural advances brought about by the Neolithic revolution—the most important development in human history. 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 revolution which led to our way of life was the development of the technology needed to plant and harvest crops and to domesticate animals.

Before the Neolithic revolution, it’s likely you would have lived with your extended family as a nomad, never staying anywhere for more than a few months, always living in temporary shelters, always searching for food and never owning anything you couldn’t easily pack in a pocket or a sack. The change to the Neolithic way of life was huge and led to many of the pleasures (lots of food, friends and a comfortable home) that we still enjoy today.

Stonehenge, c. 3,000 B.C.E., Salisbury Plain, England

Neolithic art

The massive changes in the way people lived also changed the types of art they made. Neolithic sculpture became bigger, in part, because people didn’t have to carry it around anymore; pottery became more widespread and was used to store food harvested from farms. Alcohol was first produced during this period and architecture, as well as its interior and exterior decoration, first appears. In short, people settled down and began to live in one place, year after year.

It seems very unlikely that Stonehenge could have been made by earlier, Paleolithic, nomads. It would have been a waste to invest so much time and energy building a monument in a place to which they might never return or might only return infrequently. After all, the effort to build it was extraordinary. Stonehenge is approximately 320 feet in circumference and the stones which compose the outer ring weigh as much as 50 tons; the small stones, weighing as much as 6 tons, were quarried from as far away as 450 miles. The use or meaning of Stonehenge is not clear, but the design, planning and execution could have only been carried out by a culture in which authority was unquestioned. Here is a culture that was able to rally hundreds of people to perform very hard work for extended periods of time. This is another characteristic of the Neolithic era.

Skulls with plaster and shell from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, 6,000-7,000 B.C.E., found at the Yiftah’el archaeological site in the Lower Galilee, Israel

Plastered skulls

The Neolithic period is also important because it is when we first find good evidence for religious practice, a perpetual inspiration for the fine arts. Perhaps most fascinating are the plaster skulls found around the area of the Levant, at six sites, including Jericho. At this time in the Neolithic, c. 7000-6,000 B.C.E., 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 mustaches.

The traditional interpretation of these the skulls has been that they offered a means of preserving and worshiping male ancestors. However, recent research has shown that among the sixty-one plastered skulls that have been found, there is a generous number that come from the bodies of women and children. Perhaps the skulls are not so much religious objects but rather powerful images made to aid in mourning lost loved ones.

Neolithic peoples didn’t have written language, so we may never know what their creators intended.  (The earliest example of writing develops in Sumer in Mesopotamia in the late 4th millennium B.C.E. However, there are scholars that believe that earlier proto-writing developed during the Neolithic period).

Neolithic Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East

Neolithic sites can be found in Jericho, Catalhuyuk, and Ain Ghazal

Tell es-sultan, Jerico archaeological site from the air (photo:  Fullo88 , public domain)

Biblical reference

The site of Jericho is best known for its identity in the Bible and this has drawn pilgrims and explorers to it as early as the 4th century C.E.; serious archaeological exploration didn’t begin until the latter half of the 19th century. What continues to draw archaeologists to Jericho today is the hope of finding some evidence of the warrior Joshua, who led the Israelites to an unlikely victory against the Canaanites (“the walls of the city fell when Joshua and his men marched around them blowing horns” Joshua 6:1-27). Although unequivocal evidence of Joshua himself has yet to be found, what has been uncovered are some 12,000 years of human activity.

The most spectacular finds at Jericho, however, do not date to the time of Joshua, roughly the Bronze Age (3300-1200 B.C.E.), but rather to the earliest part of the Neolithic era, before even the technology to make pottery had been discovered.

Looking down at the tower at Jericho (photo:  Reinhard Dietrich , public domain)

The site of Jericho rises above the wide plain of the Jordan Valley, its height the result of layer upon layer of human habitation, a formation called a Tell. The earliest visitors to the site who left remains (stone tools) came in the Mesolithic period (around 9000 B.C.E.) but the first settlement at the site, around the Ein as-Sultan spring, dates to the early Neolithic era, and these people, who built homes, grew plants, and kept animals, were among the earliest to do such anywhere in the world. Specifically, in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A levels at Jericho (8500-7000 B.C.E.) archaeologists found remains of a very large settlement of circular homes made with mud brick and topped with domed roofs.

As the name of this era implies, these early people at Jericho had not yet figured out how to make pottery, but they made vessels out of stone, wove cloth and for tools were trading for a particularly useful kind of stone, obsidian, from as far away as Çiftlik, in eastern Turkey. The settlement grew quickly and, for reasons unknown, the inhabitants soon constructed a substantial stone wall and exterior ditch around their town, complete with a stone tower almost eight meters high, set against the inner side of the wall. Theories as to the function of this wall range from military defense to keeping out animal predators to even combating the natural rising of the level of the ground surrounding the settlement. However, regardless of its original use, here we have the first version of the walls Joshua so ably conquered some six thousand years later.

Plastered human skulls

The Pre-Pottery Neolithic A period is followed by the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (7000-5200 BCE), which was different from its predecessor in important ways. Houses in this era were uniformly rectangular and constructed with a new kind of rectangular mud bricks which were decorated with herringbone thumb impressions, and always laid lengthwise in thick mud mortar. This mortar, like a plaster, was also used to create a smooth surface on the interior walls, extending down across the floors as well. In this period there is some strong evidence for cult or religious belief at Jericho. Archaeologists discovered one uniquely large building dating to the period with unique series of plastered interior pits and basins as well as domed adjoining structures and it is thought this was for ceremonial use.

Plastered human skull with shell eyes from Jericho, Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, c. 7200 B.C.E. (The British Museum)

Other possible evidence of cult practice was discovered in several homes of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic town, in the form of plastered human skulls which were molded over to resemble living heads. Shells were used for eyes and traces of paint revealed that skin and hair were also included in the representations. The largest group found together were nine examples, buried in the fill below the plastered floor of one house.

Jericho isn’t the only site at which plastered skulls have been found in Pre-Pottery Neolithic B levels; they have also been found at Tell Ramad, Beisamoun, Kfar Hahoresh, ‘Ain Ghazal and Nahal Hemar. Among the some sixty-two skulls discovered among these sites, we know that older and younger men as well as women and children are represented, which poses interesting questions as to their meaning. Were they focal points in ancestor worship, as was originally thought, or did they function as images by which deceased family members could be remembered? As we are without any written record of the belief system practiced in the Neolithic period in the area, we will never know.

The Jericho Skull

Video from the British Museum  URL: https://youtu.be/bMZWsM687MY

The Jericho Skull   by  The British Museum  on  Sketchfab

Cite this page as: The British Museum, “The Jericho Skull,” in  Smarthistory , March 30, 2018, accessed December 27, 2023,  https://smarthistory.org/jericho-skull/ .

Çatalhöyük after the first excavations by James Mellaart and his team (photo:  Omar hoftun , CC BY-SA 3.0)

Çatalhöyük or Çatal Höyük (pronounced “cha-tal hay OOK”) is not the oldest site of the  Neolithic era  or the largest, but it is extremely important to the beginning of art. Located near the modern city of Konya in south central Turkey, it was inhabited 9000 years ago by up to 8000 people who lived together in a large town. Çatalhöyük, across its history, witnesses the transition from exclusively hunting and gathering subsistence to increasing skill in plant and animal domestication. We might see Çatalhöyük as a site whose history is about one of man’s most important transformations: from nomad to settler. It is also a site at which we see art, both painting and sculpture, appear to play a newly important role in the lives of settled people.

Map of Turkey noting the location of Çatalhöyük (underlying map © Google)

South Excavation Area, Çatalhöyük (photo:  Çatalhöyük , CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Çatalhöyük had no streets or foot paths; the houses were built right up against each other and the people who lived in them traveled over the town’s rooftops and entered their homes through holes in the roofs, climbing down a ladder. Communal ovens were built above the homes of Çatalhöyük and we can assume group activities were performed in this elevated space as well.

From left: A hearth, oven, and ladder cut in Building 56, South Area, Çatalhöyük (photo:  Çatalhöyük , CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Like at  Jericho , the deceased were placed under the floors or platforms in houses and sometimes the skulls were removed and plastered to resemble live faces. The burials at Çatalhöyük show no significant variations, either based on wealth or gender; the only bodies which were treated differently, decorated with beads and covered with ochre, were those of children. The excavator of Çatalhöyük believes that this special concern for youths at the site may be a reflection of the society becoming more sedentary and required larger numbers of children because of increased labor, exchange, and inheritance needs.

Neolithic Wall Painting in Building 80, Çatalhöyük (photo:  Çatalhöyük , CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Art is everywhere among the remains of Çatalhöyük—geometric designs as well as representations of animals and people. Repeated lozenges and zigzags dance across smooth plaster walls, people are sculpted in clay, pairs of leopards are formed in relief facing one another at the sides of rooms, hunting parties are painted baiting a wild bull. The volume and variety of art at Çatalhöyük is immense and must be understood as a vital, functional part of the everyday lives of its ancient inhabitants.

Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük (head is a restoration) (The Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara, Turkey; photo:  Nevit Dilmen , CC BY-SA 3.0)

Many figurines have been found at the site, the most famous of which illustrates a large woman seated on or between two large felines. The figurines, which illustrate both humans and animals, are made from a variety of materials but the largest proportion are quite small and made of barely fired clay. These casual figurines are found most frequently in garbage pits, but also in oven walls, house walls, floors and left in abandoned structures. The figurines often show evidence of having been poked, scratched or broken, and it is generally believed that they functioned as wish tokens or to ward off bad spirits.

Nearly every house excavated at Çatalhöyük was found to contain decorations on its walls and platforms, most often in the main room of the house. Moreover, this work was constantly being renewed; the plaster of the main room of a house seems to have been redone as frequently as every month or season. Both geometric and figural images were popular in two-dimensional wall painting and the excavator of the site believes that geometric wall painting was particularly associated with adjacent buried youths.

Hunters attack an aurochs, Çatalhöyük (photo:  Çatalhöyük , CC BY-SA 3.0)

Figural paintings show the animal world alone, such as, for instance, two cranes facing each other standing behind a fox, or in interaction with people, such as a vulture pecking at a human corpse or hunting scenes. Wall reliefs are found at Çatalhöyük with some frequency, most often representing animals, such as pairs of animals facing each other and human-like creatures. These latter reliefs, alternatively thought to be bears, goddesses or regular humans, are always represented splayed, with their heads, hands and feet removed, presumably at the time the house was abandoned.

Bull bucrania, corner installation in Building 77, Çatalhöyük (photo:  Çatalhöyük , CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The most remarkable art found at Çatalhöyük, however, are the installations of animal remains and among these the most striking are the bull bucrania. In many houses the main room was decorated with several plastered skulls of bulls set into the walls (most common on East or West walls) or platforms, the pointed horns thrust out into the communal space. Often the bucrania would be painted ochre red. In addition to these, the remains of other animals’ skulls, teeth, beaks, tusks, or horns were set into the walls and platforms, plastered and painted. It would appear that the ancient residents of Çatalhöyük were only interested in taking the pointy parts of the animals back to their homes!

How can we possibly understand this practice of interior decoration with the remains of animals? A clue might be in the types of creatures found and represented. Most of the animals represented in the art of Çatalhöyük were not domesticated; wild animals dominate the art at the site. Interestingly, examination of bone refuse shows that the majority of the meat which was consumed was of wild animals, especially bulls. The excavator believes this selection in art and cuisine had to do with the contemporary era of increased domestication of animals and what is being celebrated are the animals which are part of the memory of the recent cultural past, when hunting was much more important for survival.

Neolithic Western Europe

Brú na bóinne, ireland, by  unesco, brú na bóinne – archaeological ensemble of the bend of the boyne.

The three main prehistoric sites of the Brú na Bóinne Complex, Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth, are situated on the north bank of the River Boyne 50 km north of Dublin. This is Europe’s largest and most important concentration of prehistoric megalithic art. The monuments there had social, economic, religious and funerary functions.

Newgrange, a prehistoric tomb in Ireland

Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites

In the south of england, circles of huge stones rose from the plains..

Stonehenge and Avebury, in Wiltshire, are among the most famous groups of megaliths in the world. The two sanctuaries consist of circles of menhirs arranged in a pattern whose astronomical significance is still being explored. These holy places and the nearby Neolithic sites are an incomparable testimony to prehistoric times. Learn more on the  UNESCO World Heritage List  website.

Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, England, c. 2550–1600 B.C.E., circle 97 feet in diameter, trilithons: 24 feet high (photo:  Maedin Tureaud , CC BY-SA 3.0)

Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain in England, is one of the most recognizable monuments of the Neolithic world and one of the most popular, with over one million visitors a year. People come to see Stonehenge because it is so impossibly big and so impossibly old; some are searching for a connection with a prehistoric past; some come to witness the workings of a massive astrological observatory. The people living in the fourth millennium B.C.E. who began work on Stonehenge were contemporary with the first dynasties of  Ancient Egypt,  and their efforts predate the building of the Pyramids. What they created has endured millennia and still intrigues us today.

Aerial view, 2014, Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, England, c. 2550–1600 B.C.E., circle 97 feet in diameter, trilithons: 24 feet high (photo:  timeyres , CC BY-SA 2.0)

In fact, what we see today is the result of at least three phases of construction, although there is still a lot of controversy among archaeologists about exactly how and when these phases occurred. It is generally agreed that the first phase of construction at Stonehenge occurred around 3100 B.C.E., 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, it is thought, were either originally filled with upright bluestones or upright wooden beams. If it was bluestones which filled the Aubrey holes, it involved quite a bit 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. Surprisingly, it is also during this second phase at Stonehenge that it 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.

Phase three

The third phase of construction at Stonehenge happened approximately 400–500 years later and likely lasted a long time. In this phase 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 (the horizontal stones).

Interior of the sarsen circle and bluestones in the foreground, Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, England, c. 2550–1600 B.C.E., circle 97 feet in diameter, trilithons 24 feet high

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 (a trilithon is a pair of upright stones with a lintel stone spanning their tops) set up in a horseshoe shape 45 feet across. These huge stones, ten uprights and five lintels, weigh up to 50 tons each. Bluestones, either reinstalled or freshly quarried, 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, consisting of parallel banks with exterior ditches approximately 34 meters across, leading from the northeast entrance to Stonehenge, dipping to the south and eventually to the banks of the Avon river.

Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, England, c. 2550–1600 B.C.E., circle 97 feet in diameter, trilithons: 24 feet high (photo:  Stonehenge Stone Circle , CC BY 2.0)

All three phases of the construction of Stonehenge pose fascinating questions. The first phase of work required precise planning and a massive amount of labor. Who planned the henge and who organized whom to work together in its construction?  Unfortunately, remains of  Neolithic  villages, which would provide information about who built Stonehenge, are few, possibly because so many lie underneath later Bronze Age, Roman, medieval, and modern cities. The few villages that have been explored show simple farming hamlets with very little evidence of widely differing social status. If there were leaders or a social class who convinced or forced people to work together to build the first phase of Stonehenge, we haven’t found them. It also probably 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? Recent analysis of these bones has revealed that nearly all the burials were of adult males, aged 25–40 years, in good health and with little sign of hard labor or disease. No doubt, to be interred at Stonehenge was a mark of elite status and these remains may well be those of some of the first political leaders of Great Britain, an island with a ruling tradition extending all the way to the House of Windsor. They also show us that in this era, some means of social distinction must have been desirable.

Conclusions

The work achieved in the long third phase of Stonehenge’s construction, however, is the one which is most remarkable and enduring. Like the first phase of Stonehenge, except on a much larger scale, 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.

Each of the upright sarsens were dressed differently on each side, with the inward facing side more smoothly finished than the outer. Moreover, the stones of the outer ring of sarsens were subtly modified to accommodate the way the human eye observes the massive stones against the bright shades of the Salisbury plain: 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 stones in the horseshoe of trilithons are arranged by size; the smallest pair of trilithons are around 20 feet tall, the next pair a little higher and the largest, single trilithon in the south west corner would have been 24 feet tall. This effect creates a kind of pull inward to the monument, and dramatizes the outward Northeast facing of the horseshoe. Although there are many theories, it is still not known how or why these subtle refinements were made to Stonehenge, but their existence is sure proof of a sophisticated society with organized leadership and a lot of free time.

A solar and lunar calendar?

Of course the most famous aspect of Stonehenge is its relationship with the solar and lunar calendar. This idea was first proposed by scholars in the 18th century, who noted that the sunrise of the midsummer 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 midwinter sunset, the sun is also aligned. These dates, the longest and shortest days of the year, are the turning point of the two great seasonal episodes of the annual calendar. Since this discovery, several other theories about astrological observation have been offered but few stand up to scrutiny together with the physical details of the monument.

Orkney Islands

URL:  https://youtu.be/XxxSYc0KHMg

North Africa

Rock Art in the Green Sahara (Neolithic)

Video from The British Museum URL: https://youtu.be/HD_Ot2GaCXo

The Sahara is the world’s largest hot desert, spanning the entire northern part of Africa. Yet it hasn’t always been dry — archaeological and geological research shows that it has undergone major climatic changes over thousands of years. Rock art often depicts extraordinary images of life, landscape and animals that show a time when the Sahara was much greener and wetter than it is now.

This film is in collaborative partnership with the Leverhulme Trust-funded project: “Peopling the Green Sahara. A multi-proxy approach to reconstructing the ecological and demographic history of the Saharan Holocene”, Paul Breeze, Nick Drake and Katie Manning, Department of Geography, King’s College London Modelling and mapping of the Green Sahara ©Kings College London Images ©Trust for African Rock Art (TARA)/David Coulson & ©Kings College London  Cite this page as: The British Museum, “Rock Art in the Green Sahara (Neolithic),” in  Smarthistory , May 14, 2019, accessed December 27, 2023,  https://smarthistory.org/rock-art-in-the-green-sahara/ .

Running Horned Woman, Tassili n’Ajjer, Algeria

Running Horned Woman , 6,000–4,000 B.C.E., pigment on rock, Tassili n’Ajjer, Algeria

“Discovery”

Between 1933 and 1940, camel ­corps officer Lieutenant Brenans of the French Foreign Legion completed a series of small sketches and hand­ written notes detailing his discovery of dozens of  rock art  sites deep within the canyons of the Tassili n’Ajjer. Tassili n’Ajjer is a difficult to access plateau in the Algerian section of the Sahara Desert near the borders of Libya and Niger in northern Africa.

Tassili n’Ajjer is a Tamahaq name meaning “plateau” of the Ajjer people (the Kel Ajjer is group of tribes whose traditional territory was here). Much of the 1,500–2,100 meter ­high plateau is protected by an 80,000 square kilometer National Park. Underlying map © Google.

Brenans donated hundreds of his sketches to the Bardo Museum in Algiers, alerting the scientific community to one of the richest rock art concentrations on Earth and prompting site visits that included fellow Frenchman and archaeologist Henri Lhote. Lhote recognized the importance of the region and returned again and again, most notably in 1956 with a team of copyists for a 16­-month expedition to map and study the rock art of the Tassili. Two years later Lhote published  A la découverte des fresques du Tassili . [1] The book became an instant best­seller, and today is one of the most popular texts on archaeological discovery.

Tassili N’Ajjer National Park (photo:  hanming_huang , CC BY-SA 2.0)

Lhote made African rock art famous by bringing some of the estimated 15,000 human figure and animal paintings and engravings found on the rock walls of the Tassili’s many gorges and shelters it to the wider public. Yet contrary to the impression left by the title of his book, neither Lhote nor his team could lay claim to having discovered Central Saharan rock art: long before Lhote, and even before Brenans, in the late 19th century a number of travelers from Germany, Switzerland, and France had noted the existence of “strange” and “important” rock sculptures in Ghat, Tadrart Acacus, and Upper Tassili. But it was the Tuareg—the Indigenous peoples of the region, many of whom served as guides to these early European explorers—who long knew of the paintings and engravings covering the rock faces of the Tassili.

Running Horned Woman  (detail), 6,000–4,000 B.C.E., pigment on rock, Tassili n’Ajjer, Algeria (photo:  András Zboray,   FJ Expeditions )

The “Horned Goddess”

Lhote published not only reproductions of the paintings and engravings he found on the rock walls of the Tassili, but also his observations. In one excerpt he reported that with a can of water and a sponge in hand he set out to investigate a “curious figure” spotted by a member of his team in an isolated rock shelter located within a compact group of mountains known as the Aouanrhet massif, the highest of all the “rock cities” on the Tassili. Lhote swabbed the wall with water to reveal a figure he called the “Horned Goddess”:

On the damp rock ­surface stood out the gracious silhouette of a woman running. One of her legs, slightly flexed, just touched the ground, while the other was raised in the air as high as it would normally go. From the knees, the belt and the widely outstretched arms fell fine fringes. From either side of the head and above two horns that spread out horizontally was an extensive dotted area resembling a cloud of grain falling from a wheat field. Although the whole assemblage was skillfully and carefully composed there was something free and easy about it . . .

The  Running Horned Woman , the title by which the painting is commonly known today, was found in a massif so secluded and so difficult to access that Lhote’s team concluded that the collection of shelters was likely a sanctuary and the female figure—“the most beautiful, the most finished and the most original”—a goddess:

Perhaps we have here the figure of a priestess of some agricultural religion or the picture of a goddess of such a cult who foreshadow—or is derived from—the goddess Isis, to whom, in Egypt, was attributed the discovery of agriculture.

Lhote’s suggestion that the painting’s source was Egyptian was influenced by a recently published hypothesis by his mentor, the French anthropologist Henri Breuil, the then undisputed authority on prehistoric rock art who was renowned for his work on  Paleolithic cave art  in Europe. In an essay titled, “The White Lady of Brandberg, South-West Africa, Her Companions and Her Guards,” Breuil famously claimed that a painting discovered in a small rock shelter in Namibia showed influences of classical antiquity and was not African in origin, but possibly the work of Phoenician travelers from the Mediterranean. Lhote, equally convinced of outside influence, linked the Tassili painting’s provenance with Breuil’s ideas and revised the title to the “White Lady” of Aouanrhet:

In other paintings found a few days later in the same massif we were able to discern, from some characteristic features, an indication of Egyptian influence. Some features are, no doubt, not very marked in our ‘White Lady’; still, all the same, some details as the curve of the breasts, led us to think that the picture may have been executed at a time when Egyptian traditions were beginning to be felt in the Tassili.

Foreign influence?

Time and scholarship would reveal that the assignment of Egyptian influence on the  Running Horned Woman  was erroneous, and Lhote the victim of a hoax: French members of his team made “copies” of Egyptionized figures, passing them off as faithful reproductions of authentic Tassili rock wall paintings. These fakes were accepted by Lhote (if indeed he knew nothing of the forgeries), and falsely sustained his belief in the possibility of foreign influence on Central Saharan rock art. Breuil’s theories were likewise discredited: the myth of the “White Lady” was rejected by every archaeologist of repute, and his promotion of foreign influence viewed as racist.

The Tassili plateau, hailed as “the greatest center of prehistoric art in the world:” undercuts at cliff bases have created rock shelters with smooth walls ideal for painting and engraving. The Tassili’s unique geological formations of eroded sandstone rock pillars and arches—“forests of stone”—resemble a lunar landscape. (photo:  magharebia , CC BY 2.0)

Yet Breuil and Lhote were not alone in finding it hard to believe that ancient Africans discovered how to make art on their own, or to have developed artistic sensibilities. Until quite recently many Europeans maintained that art “spread” or was “taken” into Africa, and, aiming to prove this thesis, anointed many works with classical­ sounding names and sought out similarities with early rock art in Europe. Although such vestiges of colonial thinking are today facing a reckoning, cases such as the “White Lady” (both of Namibia and of Tassili) remind us of the perils of imposing cultural values from the outside.

Crouching giraffe giving birth, Oued In Djerane, Tassili n’Ajjer National Park, Nigeria (photo:  András Zboray, FJ Expeditions )

While we have yet to learn how, and in what places, the practice of rock art began, no firm evidence has been found to show that  African rock art —some ten million images across the continent—was anything other than a spontaneous initiative by early Africans. Scholars have estimated the earliest art to date to 12,000 or more years ago, yet despite the use of both direct and indirect dating techniques very few firm dates exist (“direct dating” uses measurable physical and chemical analysis, such as radiocarbon dating, while “indirect dating” primarily uses associations from the archaeological context). In the north, where rock art tends to be quite diverse, research has focused on providing detailed descriptions of the art and placing works in chronological sequence based on style and content. This ordering approach results in useful classification and dating systems, dividing the Tassili paintings and engravings into periods of concurrent and overlapping traditions (the  Running Horned Woman  is estimated to date to approximately 6,000 to 4,000 B.C.E.—placing it within the “ Round Head Period “), but offers little in the way of interpretation of the painting itself.

Advancing an interpretation of the  Running Horned Woman

Visible in this reproduction of the original rock painting are two groupings in red ochre of small human figures superimposed onto the horned goddess. Based on  Running Horned Woman , 6,000–4,000 B.C.E., pigment on rock, Tassili n’Ajjer, Algeria

Who was the  Running Horned Woman ? Was she indeed a goddess, and her rock shelter some sort of sanctuary? What does the image mean? And why did the artist make it? For so long the search for meaning in rock art was considered inappropriate and unachievable—only recently have scholars endeavored to move beyond the mere description of images and styles, and, using a variety of interdisciplinary methods, make serious attempts to interpret the rock art of the Central Sahara.

Lhote recounted that the  Running Horned Woman  was found on an isolated rock whose base was hollowed out into a number of small shelters that could not have been used as dwellings. This remote location, coupled with an image of marked pictorial quality—depicting a female with two horns on her head, dots on her body probably representing  scarification , and wearing such attributes of the dance as armlets and garters—suggested to him that the site, and the subject of the painting, fell outside of the everyday. More recent scholarship has supported Lhote’s belief in the painting’s symbolic, rather than literal, representation. As Jitka Soukopova has noted, “Hunter-gatherers were unlikely to wear horns (or other accessories on the head) and to make paintings on their whole bodies in their ordinary life.” [2] Rather, this female horned figure, her body adorned and decorated, found in one of the highest massifs in the Tassili—a region is believed to hold special status due to its elevation and unique topology—suggests ritual, rite, or ceremony.

Archers, Tassili n’Ajjer (photo:  Patrick Gruban , CC BY-SA 2.0)

But there is further work to be done to advance an interpretation of the  Running Horned Woman . Increasingly scholars have studied rock shelter sites as a whole, rather than isolating individual depictions, and the shelter’s location relative to the overall landscape and nearby water courses, in order to learn the significance of various “rock cities” in both image-­making and image ­viewing.

Archaeological data from decorated pottery, which is a dated artistic tradition, is key in suggesting that the concept of art was firmly established in the Central Sahara at the time of Tassili rock art production. Comparative studies with other rock art complexes, specifically the search for similarities in fundamental concepts in African religious beliefs, might yield the most fruitful approaches to interpretation. In other words, just as southern African rock studies have benefitted from tracing the beliefs and practices of the San people, so too may a study of Tuareg ethnography shed light on the ancient rock art sites of the Tassili. [3]

Paintings at Akaham Ouan Elbered, Tassili n’Ajjer National Park, Algeria (photo:  András Zboray, FJ Expeditions )

Afterword: the threatened rock art of the Central Sahara

Tassili’s rock walls were commonly sponged with water in order to enhance the reproduction of its images, either in trace, sketch, or photograph. This washing of the rock face has had a devastating effect on the art, upsetting the physical, chemical, and biological balance of the images and their rock supports. Many of the region’s subsequent visitors—tourists, collectors, photographers, and the next generation of researchers—all captivated by Lhote’s “discovery”—have continued the practice of moistening the paintings in order to reveal them. Today scholars report paintings that are severely faded while some have simply disappeared. In addition, others have suffered from irreversible damage caused by outright vandalism: art looted or stolen as souvenirs. In order to protect this valuable center of African rock art heritage, Tassili N’Ajjer was declared a National Park in 1972. It was classified as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1982 and a Biosphere Reserve in 1986.

[1] Henri Lhote,  A la découverte des fresques du Tassili [The Search for the Tassili Frescos]  (Arhaud, 1958).

[2] Jitka Soukopova, “The Earliest Rock Paintings of the Central Sahara: Approaching Interpretation,”  Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture  4, no. 2 (2011), p. 199.

[3] Read more about how southern African rock studies have benefitted from tracing the beliefs and practices of the San people in Jamie Hampson, “ Discovering Southern African Rock Art .”

Rock-Art Sites of Tadrart Acacus (Libya)

On the borders of Tassili N’Ajjer in Algeria, also a World Heritage site, this rocky massif has thousands of cave paintings in very different styles, dating from 12,000 B.C. to A.D. 100. They reflect marked changes in the fauna and flora, and also the different ways of life of the populations that succeeded one another in this region of the Sahara. Video from UNESCO  URL: https://youtu.be/C_OxZpaOShg

The rock art sites of Tadrart Acacus have survived for 14,000 years in the desert of southern Libya, but they are now under serious threat.  Since 2009 , vandalism has been a continuous problem: graffiti has been spray-painted across the surface of many of the paintings, and people have carved their initials into the rocks. But despite  UNESCO’s  and other organizations’ calls for the government to intervene with restoration and security measures, efforts to protect this precious ancient site have been gravely hampered by armed conflict and political chaos.

Libya experienced a political revolution in 2011 with the ousting of Muammar Gaddafi, and since then the country has been in a state of civil war.  Savino di Lernia , an archaeologist at Sapienza University of Rome who has worked extensively in the Tadrart Acacus mountains, explains how dangerous the area—formerly a tourist destination—has become:

Today, the site is inaccessible: no commercial flight connects Tripoli and Ghat, a nearby town (a weekly military aircraft brings food, essential goods and first-aid equipment). The tarred road between Ghat and Ubari is broken up, and clashes between the Tebu and Tuareg tribes increasingly affect the area….Being a Saharan archaeologist today is a difficult job. Researchers fear being kidnapped or even killed.

Yahya Saleh, a local tour guide , mourns the fact that local hunters now regularly scrawl their names across the art: “People do not know the value of this. There are supposed to be people to protect these areas…because if this issue persists, then they will be gone within two years.”

The ongoing vandalism of the Tadrart Acacus sites is only one of the many overwhelming difficulties Libya faces with regard to cultural heritage protection. As  di Lernia notes ,

Perhaps the greatest threat to Libya’s diverse heritage is the trafficking of archaeological materials, for profit or to fund radical groups….No one has been able to fully assess the situation in Libya. Going to work among the black smoke of grenades, the men and women of the Libyan Department of Antiquities are doing their best. But museums are closed and the little activity left in the field is limited to the north.

Until the fighting in Libya stops and archaeologists can again effectively cooperate with the government and international organizations to restore and protect sites like the rock art at Tadrart Acacus, Libya’s rich trove of monuments and artifacts will continue to be endangered.

Backstory by Dr. Naraelle Hohensee

FURTHER RESOURCES

Paleolithic art.

In our time: cave art

U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art

Neanderthal artists made oldest-known cave paintings

World’s oldest known cave painting found in Indonesia

Pig Painting May Be World’s Oldest Cave Art Yet, Archaeologists Say

The cave of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc

A carved female figurine dating to at least 35,000 years ago recovered from caves in the Hohle Fels region of Germany (video)

Lascaux: a visit to the cave

Lascaux on The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

Neolithic Art

Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East

Çatalhöyük Research Project.

Çatalhöyük UNESCO World Heritage site.

Cultural heritage at risk: Turkey.

Bushel with ibex motifs at the Louvre

Royal City of Susa: Ancient Near Eastern Treasures in the Louvre (Met publication online)

Susa from UNESCO

Ancient Near East: cradle of civilization

David Stronach, “ EXCAVATIONS i. In Persia ,”  Encyclopaedia Iranica , volume IX, number 1 (originally published December 15, 1998), pp. 88–94.

Robert H. Dyson, Jr., “ Early Works on the Acropolis at Susa ,”  Expedition Magazine  , volume10, number 4 (1968).

Creating an Ancestor: The Jericho Skull at the British Museum

Discover Stonehenge from English Heritage

Virtual tour of Stonehenge , Google Cultural Institute

Who built Stonehenge (video from English Heritage)

Stone working (video from English Heritage)

Stonehenge: bluestones (video from English Heritage)

Stonehenge Clues to the Past (video from English Heritage)

Stonehenge (video from UNESCO)

Stonehenge (description from UNESCO)

Stonehenge (English Heritage site)

Who built Stonehenge? (English Heritage video)

Stonehenge: Clues to the past (English Heritage video)

Who were the people of Stonehenge?  Curators’ Tour (British Museum video)’

History of Stonehenge (BBC)

African Rock Art: Tassili­-n-­Ajjer—Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.

Tassili n’Ajjer—African World Heritage Sites.

Tassili n’Ajjer, UNESCO.

TARA—Trust for African Rock Art: Algeria gallery.

Jitka Soukopova, “The Earliest Rock Paintings of the Central Sahara: Approaching Interpretation,”  Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture  4, no. 2 (2011), pp. 193­–216.

Another UNESCO video, on  rock art in Tassili n’Ajjer

UNESCO webpage for Tadrart Acacus

UNESCO report on the state of conservation at Tadrart Acacus

Ulf Leassig, “Vandals destroy prehistoric rock art in Libya’s lawless Sahara,”  Reuters , June 3, 2014

Savino di Lernia, “Cultural heritage: Save Libyan archaeology,”  Nature,  January 28, 2015

Report on Tadrart Acacus rock art from the AP Archive, January, 2018

ARTS 101: Art and Architecture from the Prehistoric World through the Medieval World Copyright © 2024 by Karen Brown. All Rights Reserved.

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Paleolithic art, an introduction

Replica of the painting from the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in southern France (Anthropos museum, Brno)

The oldest art: ornamentation

Humans ( Homo sapiens ) make art. We do this for many reasons and with whatever technologies are available to us. Recent research suggests that Neanderthals also made art.

Extremely old, non-representational ornamentation has been found across Africa. The oldest firmly-dated example is a collection of 82,000 year old Nassarius snail shells found in Morocco that are pierced and covered with red ochre. Wear patterns suggest that they may have been strung beads. Nassarius shell beads found in Israel may be more than 100,000 years old and in the Blombos cave in South Africa, pierced shells and small pieces of ochre (red Hematite) etched with simple geometric patterns have been found in a 75,000-year-old layer of sediment.

Female Figure of Hohlefels, c. 35,000 B.C.E., ivory, found in cave near Schelklinge, southern Germany (photo: Ramessos, CC BY-SA 3.0)

The oldest representational art

Some of the oldest known representational imagery comes from the Aurignacian culture of the Upper Paleolithic period (Paleolithic means old stone age). Archaeological discoveries across a broad swath of Europe (especially Southern France, Northern Spain, and Swabia, in Germany) include over two hundred caves with spectacular Aurignacian paintings, drawings, and sculpture that are among the earliest undisputed examples of representational image-making. Among the oldest of these is a 2.4-inch tall female figure carved out of mammoth ivory that was found in six fragments in the Hohle Fels cave near Schelklingen in southern Germany. It dates to 35,000 B.C.E.

Left wall of the Hall of Bulls, Lascaux II (replica of the original cave, which is closed to the public), original cave: c. 16,000–14,000 B.C.E., 11 feet 6 inches long

Warty pig (Sus celebensis), c. 43,900 B.C.E., painted with ocher (clay pigment), Maros-Pangkep caves, Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4, South Sulawesi, Indonesia

The caves at Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc, Lascaux , Pech Merle, and Altamira contain the best known examples of pre-historic painting and drawing. Here are remarkably evocative renderings of animals and some humans that employ a complex mix of naturalism and abstraction. Archaeologists that study Paleolithic era humans, believe that 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. The 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. The world’s oldest known cave painting was found in Sulawesi, Indonesia in 2017 and was made at least 45,500 years ago.

What can we really know about the creators of these paintings and what the images originally meant? These are questions that are difficult enough when we study art made only 500 years ago. It is much more perilous to assert meaning for the art of people who shared our anatomy but had not yet developed the cultures or linguistic structures that shaped who we have become. Do the tools of art history even apply? Here is evidence of a visual language that collapses the more than 1,000 generations that separate us, but we must be cautious. This is especially so if we want to understand the people that made this art as a way to understand ourselves. The desire to speculate based on what we see and the physical evidence of the caves is wildly seductive.

Replica of the painting from the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in southern France

Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc

The cave at Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc is over 1,000 feet in length with two large chambers. Carbon samples date the charcoal used to depict the two head-to-head Rhinoceroses (see the image above, bottom right) to between 30,340 and 32,410 years before 1995 when the samples were taken. The cave’s 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). Photographs show that the drawing at the top of this essay is very carefully rendered but may be misleading. We see a group of horses, rhinos, and bison and we see them as a group, overlapping and skewed in scale. But the photograph distorts the way these animal figures would have been originally seen. The bright electric lights used by the photographer create a broad flat scope of vision; how different to see each animal emerge from the dark under the flickering light cast by a flame.

In a 2009 presentation at University of California San Diego, Dr. Randell White, Professor of Anthropology at New York University, suggested that the overlapping horses pictured above might represent the same horse over time, running, eating, sleeping, etc. Perhaps these are far more sophisticated representations than we have imagined. There is another drawing at Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc that cautions us against ready assumptions. It has been interpreted as depicting the thighs and genitals of a woman but there is also a drawing of a bison and a lion, and the images are nearly intertwined. In addition to the drawings, the cave is littered with the skulls and bones of cave bear and the track of a wolf. There is also a footprint thought to have been made by an eight-year-old boy.

Clovis culture

Although the Paleo-Indians who migrated to America from Asia (across the Bering Strait — a land bridge that once joined present-day Alaska and eastern Siberia) during the Pleistocene Epoch (Ice Age) did not leave behind a written (or even a large material) record, they can be identified by specific toolkits. Clovis points , for example, reveal technologies of hunting and processing meat, as well as crafting a sharp point from available resources. Workers used a hard rock to chip flakes from a softer one, shaping it into a sturdy point that could be used by hand or fastened to a wooden spear.

Clovis points from the Rummells-Maske site, Cedar County, Iowa (photo: Billwhittaker , CC BY-SA 3.0)

These tools reveal that Clovis people were hunter-gatherers, relying upon big game. As ice thawed, toolkits diversified. Later Archaic people left behind wooden fishing spears reflecting an expansion of hunting and diet, possible boat technology, and a variety of specialized stone tools. But the most significant development in the Americas was the start of agriculture which fundamentally altered lifestyles of people throughout the hemisphere.

Additional resources

Is this cave painting humanity’s oldest story?

In our time: cave art

U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art

Neanderthal artists made oldest-known cave paintings

World’s oldest known cave painting found in Indonesia

Pig Painting May Be World’s Oldest Cave Art Yet, Archaeologists Say

The cave of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc

A carved female figurine dating to at least 35,000 years ago recovered from caves in the Hohle Fels region of Germany (video)

Lascaux: a visit to the cave

Lascaux on The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

For instructors: related lesson plan on Art History Teaching Resources

Smarthistory images for teaching and learning:

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More Smarthistory images…

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Prehistoric Art in Modern and Contemporary Creations

Talk about an everlasting influence.

By Google Arts & Culture

Abbé Breuil in front of Lascaux's entrance Grotte Chauvet - UNESCO World Heritage Site

When a number of authentic cave paintings and engravings were discovered in Spain and France at the turn of the 20th century, it became common knowledge that our distant ancestors had an incredible artistic drive.

Feline Fresco (Chauvet Cave, Ardèche) (2008/2008) by L. Guichard/Perazio/smergc Grotte Chauvet - UNESCO World Heritage Site

The 1994 discovery of the Chauvet Cave completely shattered society’s ideas on the chronology of prehistoric art: 36,000 years ago, artists demonstrated a level of creativity and genius that once seemed impossible.

Inside the Bauge Chamber of the Replica (2014-09-04/2014-09-04) by S. Compoint/Resolute Grotte Chauvet - UNESCO World Heritage Site

Today, visitors flock to see the caves that are still open to the public and the incredible replicas of those not yet accessible. They discover a world of beauty and mystery that both fascinates and challenges them.

Horses panel (Chauvet cave) (2006/2006) by L. Guichard Grotte Chauvet - UNESCO World Heritage Site

The creations by prehistoric artists portray subjects and issues that speak across the millennia to other fellow artists. How has prehistoric society communicated their universal messages through the images and sculptures they have left us? 

Man-Lion (Hohlenstein-Stadel, Germany) by Université d'Ulm/smergc Grotte Chauvet - UNESCO World Heritage Site

How did they create such powerful works with limited tools at their disposal? How can you not be humbled by these masterpieces from another age? With five modern and contemporary examples, let’s take a look at how prehistoric art continues to influence modern artistic creation.

In the Chauvet cave, facing the panel of Horses (France) (2015/2015) by J.Pachoud Grotte Chauvet - UNESCO World Heritage Site

Space and time

Caves are both a hostile and protective environment. In the darkness and complexity of caves, all senses are on alert for ground-level hazards and the potential lurking danger of animals or other humans. However, a cave’s enveloping nature also offers security—once the cave and its layout is understood.

Sculture di linfa (2007) by Giuseppe Penone MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts

The work by Giuseppe Penone, created for the 2007 Venice Biennale, uses manipulated natural materials: damp leather hung on bark on the walls, carved marble veins on the ground, and a carved tree trunk filled with resin. 

Upon entering the art space, the visitor has a sensory experience which reflexively changes their view (the discovery of an unexpected closed space), their sense of smell (the smell of leather and resin), their hearing (sounds muffled by the leather and bark), and their sense of touch (the uneven cracked ground).

Primal feelings take us back to our animalistic nature and respond to those we experience upon entering caves frequented by prehistoric man.

Big Bisons (Chauvet Cave, Ardèche) (2008/2008) by L. Guichard/Perazio/smergc Grotte Chauvet - UNESCO World Heritage Site

Energy and the animal

The most impressive symbols in prehistoric art are the depictions of animals that can be found almost everywhere that prehistoric man left their mark.

A piece from the panel of the so-called "Chinese horses" (Lascaux) (1990/1990) by Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication Grotte Chauvet - UNESCO World Heritage Site

The painted, engraved, or sculpted beasts which decorate caves and prehistoric shelters remain the most fascinating aspect for the public that discovers them.

Vogelherd Horse (Germany) (2015-04-25/2015-04-25) by Université de Tübingen/smergc Grotte Chauvet - UNESCO World Heritage Site

Behind the realistic or abstract depictions of mammoths, aurochs, lions, horses, and any other creatures adorning the walls, visitors feel instinctively that they are confronted with images that seem to express beliefs from the depths of humanity.

Toro (1954) by Pablo Picasso & Egidio Costantini Hakone Venetian Glass Museum

Throughout his career, Pablo Picasso was fascinated by the theme of bulls. For him, as for many of his distant predecessors, bulls evoked the energy and brute strength of life force. This was a topic which brought him, and many others, back to the very first works of art.

It is said that Picasso, on the topic of prehistoric art, once said the appreciative and disillusioned words: “We have invented nothing!”

Wooly Rhinoceros (Chauvet Cave) (2008/2008) by L. Guichard/Perazio/smergc Grotte Chauvet - UNESCO World Heritage Site

Movement and remains

Remains and imprints left by prehistoric artists might speak more to modern and contemporary artists than to anybody else, besides archeologists.

"Positive-hand" technique (2006/2006) by SMERGC / Perazio / Guichard Grotte Chauvet - UNESCO World Heritage Site

Altering a medium such as a cave wall by painting or blowing color onto it to create an abstract or realistic symbol that can provoke a thought or an emotion is the basic action of any visual artist: nothing has changed in 36 thousand years.

3 Decembre 1966 (1966/1966) by Pierre Soulages Chrysler Museum of Art

Pierre Soulages often said that prehistoric art had been a revelation to him when he discovered it during his adolescence. The fact that humans ventured into the uncertain darkness underground to paint black or ochre symbols and figures proves their need to express something or to leave evidence.

Soulages’ paintings are also markings left in grooves on the surface of the canvas, normally black, and onto which the light works the materials by providing depth, reflections and different nuances, depending on the angle. This is reminiscent of how prehistoric paintings were illuminated by torches.

Chandelier with Hands (2006) by Thomas Hirschhorn The Baltimore Museum of Art

Physical and spiritual

With shapes reminiscent of meat cuts, and hands outstretched to the sky, this work by Thomas Hirschhorn challenges interpretation and evokes the two elements of humanity: the physical and the spiritual.

The physical is the large shapes attached to the wooden structure. They represent food—a quest that was undoubtedly prehistoric man's main activity. Here, they are suspended above the ground, as they would have been in shelters or huts to keep the meat from spoiling or from being scavenged.

The spiritual is represented by the chandelier of hands. They are reminiscent of those who, throughout the millennia, have left their fingerprints on the cave walls, which move us profoundly when we see them. 

They are the direct remains of these distant humans who seem to have left us signs of their presence through time, whilst wanting to feel, through touch, the spirit world which they may have believed to be behind the stone.

Abbot Breuil in the cave of Lascaux faces the panel of the Unicorn. (1940/1940) Grotte Chauvet - UNESCO World Heritage Site

Time and memory

The prehistoric works of art that have endured managed to do so thanks to exceptional circumstances allowing preservation. For all the intact paintings and complete sculptures, how many have disappeared, swallowed into the darkness of time? 

Engraved Horse by L. Guichard/Perazio/smergc Grotte Chauvet - UNESCO World Heritage Site

And how many of those which have survived have been modified, reworked, covered?

Mural by Banksy by Banksy Global Street Art Foundation

Street art is usually created on walls in public areas, conveys ideas through images and symbols, and is sometimes covered or damaged which adds to its character.

It poses the question of the perception of street art by authorities which consider it to be vandalism. Would they do the same to the cave art in Chauvet or Lascaux?

Felines (Chauvet Cave, Ardèche) (2008/2008) by L. Guichard/Perazio/smergc Grotte Chauvet - UNESCO World Heritage Site

The discovery of prehistoric art in 1881 opened the door for 20th- and 21st-century artists to experience a world of creation that had been completely forgotten for thousands of years. Whether our distant ancestors' works are discovered through books or seeing them in the caves themselves, their impact is impressive.

Punctuated Animal - Brunel Room (Chauvet Cave) (2008/2008) by L. Guichard/Perazio/smergc Grotte Chauvet - UNESCO World Heritage Site

Without leaving a single written or spoken word, instead painting and engraving the walls of their cave retreats, prehistoric artists showed the possibility of artistic expression as a timeless and universal language. From Picasso to Banksy, there are not many artists today who have not bowed to the legacy of their distant and anonymous masters.

The world is your augmented canvas

Global street art foundation, the culture: hip hop and contemporary art in the 21st century, the baltimore museum of art, the bear hollow chamber, grotte chauvet - unesco world heritage site, venetian master of modern sculpture livio seguso, hakone venetian glass museum, bellissima: italy and high fashion 1945 - 1968, maxxi national museum of xxi century arts, london street art 5, kimono & obi: romantic echoes from japan's golden age, the skull chamber and the lattices gallery, glass swaying in the wind, london street art 1, questioning the canon, the end chamber, venetian glass in paintings.

Prehistoric Art | Discovery, Characteristics, Purpose & More

Prehistoric art is a term used to refer to art made in the distant past, roughly corresponding with the stone age which lasted from 3.3 million years ago to around 2,000 BCE . It is divided into two main categories: rock art , or the art created on rock surface; and portable art , which includes sculptures, beads, pendants, manuports etc. Manuport is an unmodified object transported from its original environment and relocated, due to its aesthetic character. They are considered the earliest examples of art. Here is an overview of prehistoric art including its discovery, characteristics, purpose and more.

Table Of Contents

S1 – prehistoric era, s2 – prehistoric art definition, s3 – prehistoric art types, paleolithic cave art, paleolithic sculpture, mesolithic art, neolithic art, petroglyphs, art for art’s sake, hunting-fertility magic theory, shamanistic interpretation, dialogue between the artist and the cave, a combination of various theories.

Prehistory is the period of human history before the invention writing and keeping of written records. This is a very long period, ten million years according to current theories. The first known use of stone tools by hominins (modern humans, extinct human species and all our immediate ancestors) is dated to around 3.3 million years ago . The first full writing systems appeared in several regions independently. The first among them was in Mesopotamia around 3,400 BCE .

Prehistorians have used the activity of tool-making as the defining feature for measuring time. The Stone Age , which lasted from around 3.3 million years ago to around 2,000 BCE , is generally taken as the time period for Prehistoric art. It is divided into three eras: the Paleolithic , the Mesolithic and the Neolithic ; in other words the Old Stone Age, the Middle Stone Age and the New Stone Age. These periods are marked by change in technology of making stone tools.

Technically, prehistoric art is art made by people in those societies where a writing system has not been developed . There have been societies in recent times which have had no writing system. However, we don’t call their art prehistoric as it is recent. We generally use the term ‘ethnographic arts’ for arts developed by such societies. Moreover, the implication that societies with oral traditions are less cultured than those with writing is not true.

‘Archaeological art’ , or art of past cultures which we study using archaeological methods , may be a more appropriate term. Nonetheless, we will use the term ‘prehistoric art’ as it is widespread and most people relate to it. Moreover, we will limit the term to art made in the stone age as this is in keeping with the classification of prehistoric art in many texts.

Prehistoric art encompasses all art-like manifestations of the distant past. It is divided into two main categories:-

• Rock Art , which consists of markings on rock surfaces the were intentionally produced by members of the genus Homo (human beings or species closely related to humans like Neanderthals).
• Portable Art , which is made up of a diversity of materials, whose key determining feature is that they are small enough to be carried easily by humans, and which in many cases can be worn on the human body.

Rock art can be divided into two principal classes on the basis of the method used to manufacture it: petroglyphs , which are produced by a reductive process ; and pictograms , which are produced by an additive process . Petroglyphs are found in two forms: sgraffiti , defined by color contrast; and relief petroglyphs , defined by relief depth. Both of these types may be made by percussion or abrasion . Pictograms include stencils, paintings, drawings, beeswax figures etc. It is important to note that some rock art has been created using both reductive and additive processes.

Portable prehistoric art includes decorative items like beads and pendants; devices used for retention and retrieval of information, like message sticks; portable engravings and figurines; plaques; objects bearing series of notches and lines; ceremonial objects; and manuports.

S4 – Prehistoric Art Discovery

Apart naturally preserved sites, Prehistoric Rock Art was always known to the locals though they didn’t know its age. The first known mention of rock art in a written text is by Chinese philosopher Han Fei in his book Han Fei Zi . It was written in 3rd century BCE about 2,300 years ago. Numerous other references to rock art may be found in literature from around the world. By mid-19th century CE, as archaeology became established , the great antiquity of humankind and prehistory became accepted. Consequently, the study of prehistoric art became widespread, systematic and better documented.

In the 1860s, Archibald Carlyle , an English archaeologist active in India, discovered rock paintings in shelters at Morhana Pahar , near the village of Hanmana in Bhainsaur, Uttar Pradesh . While numerous other discoveries of prehistoric sites had been made before this, Carlyle was remarkable because he was the first to recognize that some of the paintings discovered must be prehistoric.

Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola was a Spanish jurist and amateur archaeologist. In 1878 , he discovered Paleolithic paintings on a cave on his property, known as the Altamira cave . Due to the sophistication of the art found, experts considered Sautuola’s discovery a hoax . He died in 1888, still not credited for his monumental find.

At the end of the 19th century, there were a number of discoveries of painted/engraved caves in France. These include La Mouthe (1895), Pair-non-Pair (1896), Les Combarelles (1901) and Font-de-Gaume (1901) . As images of long extinct animals were discovered from these sites, doubts over their authenticity as prehistoric art began to mitigate. In 1902, prehistorians of the time declared Altamira to be authentic .

The first Paleolithic female sculpture was discovered at Laugerie-Basse, located in Dordogne, France . It was found in 1864 by Paul Hurault, 8th Marquis de Vibraye, an amateur archaeologist from France. He named it Venus Impudique (“Immodest Venus”) because, unlike in classical depictions of Venus, the depicted female made no attempts to hide her sexuality.

The term “Venus” was then used 30 years later by French archaeologist Édouard Piette in a satirical manner, just like it was used for Venus of Hottentot . Piette used it to describe only what he considered grotesquely obese figures. Since then the term “Venus” was applied to each new find of a Paleolithic female sculpture . Thus the term is not related to fertility or to comparability with classical art. It is a misnomer which reflects European racist attitude at the time.

S5 – Prehistoric Art Characteristics

Geometric arrangements of lines, notches and dots are frequently found in Prehistoric art. Historically these signs were given literal interpretation like spears, traps, nets etc. However, now many of these signs are viewed as symbolic complements to the animal/human imagery. In some cases geometric signs might be pictorial representations of objects. Like the zig-zag shapes at Fornols probably represent lightening, which is frequent in the area. However, in most cases such correspondence is not evident.

• Animals dominate Paleolithic cave paintings.
• Usually, individual images have their distinct space and don’t overlap.
• Natural forms of the caves are exploited to give volume to depicted animals.
• Acoustic qualities of the caves may have played a part in choosing the location for cave art.
• Human representations are few in comparison to animals.
• Pregnant females dominate human depiction with males being a rarity.
• In some cases, the reliefs provide views of characteristic animal behaviors like mating.
• Like the Paleolithic era, rock paintings dominate the surviving examples of Mesolithic art.
• Due to warmer climates, art moved from caves to vertical cliffs or walls of natural rock.
• Humans, not animals, dominate Mesolithic rock art.
• The depicted humans may be seen hunting, dancing, running, playing games, etc.
• Sculpture made a comeback in Neolithic era after being nearly absent in the Mesolithic.
• It was no longer restricted to carving and was now also fashioned out of clay and baked.
• Like the Mesolithic, Neolithic painting depicts more humans than animals.
• These humans became more identifiable unlike their Mesolithic predecessors.

S6 – Prehistoric Art Techniques

Petroglyphs, as mentioned earlier, are rock artworks which are produced by a reductive process. Direct percussion or pounding accounts for most, if not all, percussion petroglyphs. The other type of petroglyphs are made by abrasion. Mur-e is an aboriginal word from the Brooandik language for a tool used for making a petroglyph. Several striking characteristics of mur-e are as follows:-

• They are usually under 150gm and rarely over 250gm. This corresponds to a maximum dimension of 6 to 8cm.
• There is a preference for pieces with a thick end to be held in hand and a pointed end to strike the rock surface. Flat and elongated shapes are also seen. Round pebbles are also used for patina (outer surface of rocks) bruising.
• There is a preference for dense quartzites and crystalline quartz of various types as the material, when available.
• Several types of other materials have been used to produce petroglyphs especially where the rock surface is soft.
• The softest rock used is carbonate speleothem, or moonmilk. It can be marked by the slightest finger touch.

There is a lot of ethnographic information available about the technology of pictograms, mostly from Australia. The various colors are obtained as follows:-

• Red ochre was a widely traded commodity. Substitutes were also used, including yellow or brown limonite, that were roasted to obtain a red color.
• White was frequently obtained from kaolin, huntite, enstatite, carbonate, gypsum or selenite; even from finely grounded minerals like quartz, microline, muscovite and jarosite.
• Black pigments are mostly of charcoal or manganese oxide.
• Yellow and various hues of brown were obtained from iron minerals, clay, from the dust inside termite nests, siderite, and locally from a fungus.
• Glouconite provided the rare bluish colors.

Hard pigments were pounded, ground or eroded into a powder . Ground patches of rock have been found at thousands of rock art sites. Various liquids provided the solvent, suspender or binder required in paint production. These include water, urine, blood, semen, honey, egg-white or fat of various animals. Plants were used to extract numerous other binders.

There is a lot of literature on the Australian use of paintbrushes and the application of paint on rock surfaces. In Arnhem Land, brushes were recently made from tree barks, pandanus leaves, kapok bush, palm leaf fibers or twigs whose ends were chewed. Paints were frequently applied with fingers or whole hands in Australia and elsewhere. Prepared paint was contained in the mouth of the artist or a suitable container , like a seashell or a piece of bark.

Apart from stencils, linear pictograph motifs were also produced by spraying paint directly from the mouth into a narrow gap made by the hand . This is a more effective form of paint application than brushes. This is because sprayed paint tends to have better penetration and adherence, especially on rough and porous surfaces.

Rock drawings were made with hand held pieces of pigment applied dry to the rock surface, like a crayon . This was a widespread technique but its results were less permanent. Drawings can often be distinguished from paintings, especially microscopically. The crayons used for drawings are sometimes found on sites, even in sediment layers.

Sculpting and finishing of prehistoric miniature sculptures would have been a difficult task considering the technology available. Splitting and wedging was followed by scraping, gouging, incising, grinding and polishing. Powered hematite was used as the abrasive for polishing. Among the best known Paleolithic sculptures is Venus of Brassempouy. It is one of the earliest detailed representations of a human face. The well preserved surface of the statue shows remarkably clear traces of several different techniques: cutting, incising, grinding, polishing, scraping, gouging and chiseling. Many of these techniques have been produced by the same tool, a stone burin.

S7 – Prehistoric Art Purpose

With some rare exceptions, there is nothing to tell us reliably what a rock art motif depicts or means. Most rock art interpretations are based on the perception of observers. There is no rational explanation for the traditional assumption that ‘researchers’ have some additional insight into the meaning of rock art acquired by many years of ‘observing’ such art traditions. Thus most theories about the meaning of prehistoric art has no value in scientific study of the subject. Nonetheless, we will cover the most prominent theories about the purpose of prehistoric art.

The simplest view among scholars about the purpose of prehistoric art was that it was merely decorative, i.e. it was “art for art’s sake” . This view persisted at least into the 1920s. While most of the cave paintings and engravings are readily accessible, there are some which have been created in places that are difficult to access . The “art for art s sake” explanation is highly unlikely for these sort of works. Moreover, as ethnographic research provided information about the active hunter-gatherer societies around the world, it became clear that art was anything but for its own sake in these societies .

In the 20th century, it was proposed that prehistoric artworks were magical acts to ensure the success of a hunt or to increase reproduction and fertility . The hunting-fertility magic theory believes that prehistoric humans perceived an image as equal to the animal it depicted. By possessing the image, they thought that they had some control over the animal thus increasing the chance of a successful hunt. This was corroborated by the fact that some animals were depicted with spears cast on them. The reason behind sculptures and paintings of pregnant women and animals was explained as a magical act to control reproduction and fertility.

The hunting-fertility magic theory dominated the scene until 1950s. However, as more prehistoric art was discovered, a flaw in this theory became apparent. The study of food deposits at some sites clearly implied that the artists were not portraying the animals they ate. For example, at Lascaux, 90% of the food remains were that of reindeer but the animal was represented only once. Similarly, at Grotte Chauvet, 72% of the animals depicted were not hunted.

In 19th and 20th century, anthropologists studied the rock art of Southern Africa and found it to be related to shamanistic practices of local bushmen . Scholars drew parallels between this and prehistoric cave art to link shamanism with it. The theory proposed was that cave art was a pursuit to contact a parallel spiritual universe .

In the shamanistic interpretation, geometric signs are seen as representation of hallucinations in a trance state. Moreover, where natural contours are exploited to create an artwork, the shaman is using his power to bring the spirit of the animal to the surface . The spotted horses at Pech-Merle , where the right side of the rock is shaped like a horse’s head, is one example of this. Paintings made in remote areas are seen as exploration of deep underground for spiritual visions.

Some scholars believe that the paintings played a role in early religion as images of worship. Recent researchers have also focused on th e individuality of each cave describing the process of creating art in them as dialogue between the artist and the cave . They study the choice of subject, color and technique in respect to surface, texture, light conditions, preexisting forms and even acoustic qualities of the cave.

There is a tendency of scholars to apply a one-for-all interpretation for Prehistoric art, whether it is “art for art s sake”, “hunting-fertility magic” or “shamanism”. The proponents of these theories present selected images to justify their interpretation , leaving the other majority unexplained . What emerges today is a picture of enormous complexity. Recent scholars thus believe that one explanation is not sufficient for all prehistoric artworks.

S1:- Buis, Alena. “Art and Visual Culture: Prehistory to Renaissance”. “Prehistoric Art” . Clayton, Ewan. “Where did writing begin?” . British Library Board. Janson, H. W., Davies, Penelope J. E. “Janson’s History of Art: The Western Tradition”. p. 9.

S2:- Conkey, M.W. (2001). “Prehistoric Art”. “International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences”.

S3:- Bednarik, Robert G. “Rock Art Science – The Scientific Study of Paleoart”. pp. 1, 5, 177.

S4:- Bahn, Paul G. (1997). “The Cambridge Illustrated History of Prehistoric Art”. pp. 1, 49, 67. White, Randall. (2003). “Prehistoric art: the symbolic journey of humankind.” pp. 45, 54, 55.

S5:- White, Randall. (2003). “Prehistoric art: the symbolic journey of humankind.” pp. 71-120. Esaak, Shelley. (Sep 01, 2018). “Art of the Mesolithic Age” . ThoughtCo. Dotdash Meredith. Unit 3 “Mesolithic Art” . eGyanKosh. Esaak, Shelley. (Aug 26, 2018). “Neolithic Art” . ThoughtCo. Dotdash Meredith.

S6:- Bednarik, Robert G. “Rock Art Science – The Scientific Study of Paleoart”. pp. 37-48. White, Randall. (2003). “Prehistoric art: the symbolic journey of humankind.” pp. 71, 87.

S7:- Bednarik, Robert G. “Rock Art Science – The Scientific Study of Paleoart”. p. 153. Janson, H. W., Davies, Penelope J. E. “Janson’s History of Art: The Western Tradition”. pp. 5, 6. White, Randall. (2003). “Prehistoric art: the symbolic journey of humankind.” pp. 50-58. “Art That Changed the World”. DK. Penguin Random House. p. 13.

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Art (Pre)History: Ritual, Narrative and Visual Culture in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe

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• Published: 20 July 2020
• Volume 27 , pages 454–480, ( 2020 )

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• John Robb   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7987-4549 1  

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Can we reconstruct how prehistoric people perceived things (their “ways of seeing” or visual culture)? This challenge is made more difficult by the traditional disciplinary assumptions built into prehistoric art studies, for instance focusing narrowly upon a single body of art in isolation. This paper proposes an alternative approach, using comparative study to reveal broad regional changes in visual culture. Although prehistoric art specialists rarely work comparatively, art historians are familiar with describing continent-wide general developments in visual culture and placing them in social context (for instance, the traditional broad-brush history from Classical to medieval to Renaissance systems of representation). This paper does the same for Neolithic (6000–2500 BC) vs. Bronze Age (2500–800 BC) and Iron Age (800 BC–Classical) rock and cave art from sites across Europe, uncovering broad patterns of change. The principal pattern is a shift from a Neolithic iconic art which uses heavily encoded imagery, often schematic geometric motifs, to a Bronze/Iron Age narrative art, which increasingly involves imagery of identifiable people, animals and objects. Moreover, there is also an increasing tendency for motifs to be associated in scenes rather than purely accumulative, and with contextual changes in how art is used—a movement from hidden places to more open or accessible places. Underlying all these changes is a shift in how rock and cave art was used, from citations reproducing ritual knowledge to composed arrays telling narratives of personhood.

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Big Histories of Art, Historic and Prehistoric

This paper attempts to look at prehistoric art in a way which is both new and old—entirely new for prehistoric art studies, but deeply familiar for visual culture in general. Imagine a range of the images commonly encompassed by the term “Western Art”. Without even thinking about it, you will almost certainly recognise what “period” they belong to. Their formal features—what subjects they depict, how “naturalistic” they are, how they use space and perspective and so on—place them stylistically within the canonical history of Western art: Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, neo-Classical, Impressionist, Modernist and so on. Moreover, these features, and others such as the place these images were originally designed to be seen in and the kinds of viewers they anticipate, helped form “ways of seeing” which were deeply intertwined with the pictures’ social context and historical moment. Visual culture changes historically as society changes; we can therefore write a big history of art. Indeed, though most art historians write specialist studies of particular artists and their oeuvres, all such studies assume and build upon a canonical big history of art; it would be impossible to understand Monet without understanding Impressionism or Michelangelo without Renaissance art.

Yet, a broad-brush, large-scale social history of prehistoric visual culture has never been attempted, or even contemplated. This is not for lack of material to study; Europe has 40,000 years of prehistoric imagery, in contrast with a mere 2800 years of historic art. It is not for lack of change to study; Spanish or French art made 30 or 40 millennia ago differs in every possible sense from late Iron Age art made 2000 years ago. It is not from lack of social change to contextualise such a history; the worlds of Palaeolithic foragers, Neolithic villagers and Bronze and Iron Age people differed from each other far more than the urban, stratified art worlds of medieval and modern people do. Instead, the reasons this project has never been attempted are disciplinary. One issue concerns the goal of interpretation; traditionally, archaeologists have focused overwhelmingly on what prehistoric art “meant” rather than on how it worked as visual or material culture. But above all, there is a relentless tradition of studying prehistoric art as single bodies of art rather than comparatively or analytically. The modal study of European prehistoric art is an authoritative descriptive analysis of a single corpus of material. Only rarely do analysts cross the boundaries between closely related corpora to talk about specific periods or areas. Even so, they rarely venture beyond synthesising homogeneous bodies such as “Ice Age Art” or “Celtic Art”. Larger scale efforts restrict themselves entirely to descriptive overviews (Sandars 1985 ). And, it must be said that prehistoric art specialists are often territorial about “their” bodies of art and defend them jealously against interlopers.

Thus, a big history of prehistoric European art has never been attempted, not because it is inherently impossible, or because it would not be worth doing, but simply because we have never imagined it as a possible goal. I argue that not only can we create such a history, we must do so. Looking at prehistoric art comparatively as visual culture can reveal things we would never understand from studies of individual corpora or periods, particularly about broad social change. Such a synthesis in no way threatens or supplants studies of individual bodies of art, any more than formulating the general ways in which Renaissance art differed from medieval art obviates a specialist study of Michelangelo or Leonardo. Instead, it provides an essential context for them.

Prehistoric Art in Europe: Background and Materials

The “greatest hits” of European prehistoric art are familiar. The most famous images bracket prehistory. At the beginning, we have Ice Age caves such as Lascaux, Altamira and Chauvet, painted with vivid deer, bison, wild horses and lions; at the end, on the threshold of the Classical world, we have the beautiful swirling patterns of circles and spirals on “Celtic” metalwork. But such well-known images are only a tiny proportion of what is out there. If we define “prehistoric art” in the conventional archaeological sense of representative and decorative imagery, including cave art, rock art, tomb and megalithic art, statuary, stelae, figurines, figured objects of metal, clay and bone, and many other less common genres, there are hundreds of bodies of “art” known (Robb 2015 ). Much of it is deeply unimpressive, and the famous images are often famous simply because they look the most like modern “art” to us; for every Palaeolithic bison or fancy “Celtic” mirror, there are thousands of sketchily engraved bone fragments, lumpy, broken figurines or enigmatic circular rock carvings.

This analysis discusses a significant subset of prehistoric European art, Holocene pictures. Building upon the first statistical overview of prehistoric art in Europe (Robb 2015 ), it includes bodies of art from Russia to the Atlantic and from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean. Chronologically, it expressly does not discuss imagery made by Palaeolithic or Mesolithic foragers; this is a large body of art which works in different ways than later art, and including it would go well beyond what can be covered in a single article. The periods covered here include the Neolithic, Copper, Bronze and Iron Ages. The Neolithic begins with the transition to settled agricultural life; this happened between 6500 and 3900 BC in different areas of Europe. The later fourth and third millennia BC, known confusingly in different areas as the Middle Neolithic, the Late Neolithic, the Copper Age and the Early Bronze Age, are marked by dramatic social changes (see below). The Bronze Age per se begins around 2400 BC in most of Europe and develops continuously into the Iron Age between about 1000 and 800 BC. In many areas, the Iron Age ends with incorporation into historical Greek or Roman worlds, but in Northern Europe, Eastern Europe and Ireland, it continues organically into the early medieval period. In this article, I broadly contrast Neolithic art with Copper, Bronze and Iron Age art. This bears two caveats. First, while bringing together materials from across Europe allows us to identify a broad transition between the two periods, this provides a general heuristic rather than a mechanism driving changes in rigid lockstep. Nobody doubts that a general transition occurred from medieval to Renaissance art, but that does not mean this change occurred instantly at 1450 AD and synchronously everywhere in Europe; the same holds true for prehistoric art histories. Secondly, in keeping with related changes in prehistoric society, the transition in art varies regionally, occurring earlier south of the Alps and east, and later in Atlantic areas. Thus, for instance, Central Alpine rock art dating to the mid-3rd millennium BC embodies new themes and styles which continue on into the Bronze Age; at the same moment, in Atlantic France and Britain, rock art and megalithic art continued to work in long-standing Neolithic traditions which would not end there for several centuries more.

In this analysis, I discuss two-dimensional visual imagery, mostly from rock art, cave art and architectural art (designs on menhirs, megaliths, tombs and buildings). I exclude three-dimensional imagery such as statuary and figurines, as these are likely to involve different systems of visual representation. I also exclude small decorative motifs on pottery, bone and metalwork. These are ubiquitous in almost all prehistoric and historic material culture, and thus form a massive, unbounded dataset, and they give little purchase for a history of change; every period has bone objects decorated with small circles and pots decorated with geometric motifs. Moreover, prehistoric art occurs in “macro-traditions”, broad groupings of multiple, distinct but generically related bodies of material which share materials and conventions (Robb 2015 : Table 3). This article reconstructs a sequence spanning the major macro-traditions of two-dimensional imagery in most of Holocene Europe. However, it intentionally excludes three well-known macro-traditions which follow different visual conventions. Interestingly, all are located at the margins of Europe. In northernmost Europe, from Alta in Norway to the White River in Russia, several bodies of rock art belong to a circum-Arctic forager tradition which has different themes and conventions from the mostly agricultural worlds of southern Scandinavian art. In Eastern Spain, Levantine cave art has an exceptionally varied and vivid mode of representation which has little in common with anything in Europe. Instead, it strongly resembles North African rock art traditions, and it is best regarded as a Saharan-derived tradition which somehow found its way north of Gibraltar. Finally, the elaborate frescoes in Mycenaean palaces, Minoan palaces and the Bronze Age houses of Akrotiri (Thera) portray unique themes in unique ways, possibly influenced by Near Eastern or Egyptian models. Footnote 1 All three traditions are based upon iconographic repertories and depictive styles strikingly different from those found in the rest of contemporary Europe, much as Inuit art differs from contemporary Native American art in adjacent regions or ancient Egyptian paintings differ from Classical paintings, suggesting that they derive from different art historical trajectories.

Within these limits, this review attempts to be comprehensive, including about 20 major traditions of rock, cave and architectural art (Table 1 , Figs.  1 and 2 ). I exclude some poorly dated sites such as Magura Cave (Bulgaria), but include some reasonably dated one-offs such as the Stonehenge rock carvings, Kivik (Sweden), German megalithic art and Levanzo Cave (Italy). I also make some reference to small, two-dimensional inset scenes on statue-stelae, metalwork and pottery, as these provide settings in which similar visual conventions come into play.

Some typical Neolithic panels. a Italian Neolithic cave art: Grotta Pazienza, Italy (redrawn after Gravina and Mattioli 2010 : Fig. 7). b Italian Neolithic cave art: Porto Badisco, Italy (redrawn after Graziosi 1980 : Plate 61). c Iberian schematic art: Peña Escrita, Fuencaliente, Spain (redrawn after Carmen Escobar Carrio, Wikimedia Commons). d Iberian schematic art: El Plato (redrawn after Sanchidrián 2005 : Fig. 193). e Iberian megalithic art: Granja de Toninuela, Badajoz (redrawn after Shee Twohig 1981 : Fig. 57). f Galician Atlantic Rock Art: Chan da Lagoa, Pontevedra, Spain (redrawn after Seoane Veiga 2007 : Fig. 4 ). g Breton megalithic art: Le Lizou, Carnac (redrawn after Shee Twohig 1981 : Fig. 137). h Irish megalithic art: Tara, Co. Meath (redrawn after Shee Twohig 1981 : Fig. 245). i British megalithic art from a “domestic” context: Skara Brae, Orkney (redrawn after Shee Twohig 1981 : Fig. 289). j British Neolithic rock art: Old Bewick, Northumberland (image: redrawn after Beckinsale archive plan/English Rock Art online). k Neolithic rock art, Scotland: Kirkdale House 4 (redrawn after 3d model by Scotland’s Rock Art, https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/kirkdale-house-4-456d69b988f449f8a5100bda1d9fcdfb )

Some typical panels from 3rd millennium through 1st millennium BC (Copper Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age). a Mount Bego, France: daggers, halberds, oxen, ploughs and schematic motifs (Copper Age, 3rd millennium BC) (redrawn after de Lumley 1996 : Fig. 271). b Alpine Copper Age art: arrays of deer, domesticated animals and weapons, Cemmo, Valcamonica, Italy, mid-third millennium BC (redrawn after Parco Archeologico dei Massi di Cemmo ). c Central Alpine Iron Age art: Seradina, Valcamonica (redrawn after Marretta 2018 : detail from site map). d Central Alpine Iron Age art: house and warriors, Seradina, Valcamonica, Italy (image: author). e Scandinavian Bronze Age art: boats, warriors and other anthropomorphs, animals, wheels. Tanum, Sweden (redrawn after Coles 2005 : Fig. 162). f Scandinavian Bronze Age art: boats, carts and people (Askum, Sweden) (redrawn after Coles 2005 : Fig. 200). g Iron Age rock art, Scandinavia: mounted warriors at Tanum, Sweden (drawing: Vicki Herring). h Megalithic art, Bronze Age: Kivik, Sweden (redrawn after Goldhahn 2009 : Fig. 3 ). i Early Bronze Age rock carving of boat, animal and anthropomorph, Naxos, Greece (redrawn after Broodbank 2000 : Fig. 23). j Thracian rock art (redrawn after Pivalaki 2016 : Fig. 14.3)

Concepts and Methods

The term “art” is used in this article in the conventional archaeological sense of “representational and decorated objects” such as figurines, sculptures, paintings and so on; I explicitly disavow any notion that these objects must have been meant principally for aesthetic enjoyment or to express discursive meanings and creative mastery of the people who made them. Indeed, in Gell’s ( 1998 ) sense of art as a social technology, they accomplished many tasks, from presencing spiritual beings to asserting social power; if a comparison with modern things is warranted, many of them would be better understood not as “art” but as interior decoration, narration devices, outlets for spiritual power or even medical technologies. Nevertheless, just as visual culture encompasses not only fine art but also advertising posters, wallpaper and family photographs, they embody the visual conventions and meanings of their times. There are several strands of visual culture research from which we can draw inspiration. In art history, Gombrich ( 1962 ) pioneered exploring styles such as naturalism and visual systems such as perspective. Half a century on, as Mitchell’s provocative question “What do pictures want?” highlights how the interaction between people and images is complex and reciprocal (Mitchell 2006 ; Belting 2011 ; Moxey 2008 ; Mitchell 1998 ). “Ways of seeing” (Berger 1972 ) are grounded in how viewers interact with images, often unconsciously; they include not only conventional systems such as perspective, but also habitual themes, scenes and internalised reactions about the act of viewing these. These also reflect conceptions of the shape of space (Summers 2003 ). Forms of vision are historically specific and are both attuned to and constructed by art (as in the concept of the “period eye” (Baxandall 1972 ; Alpers 1984 )). History may be a succession of forms of visuality (Davis 2011 ). Converging with this, anthropologists have argued that aesthetic senses are culturally specific (Coote and Shelton 1992 ; Heyd 2012 ) and may be enmeshed with social reflexes (Gell 1998 ). Moreover, many examples show how aesthetic reflexes relate to ontological and cosmological presuppositions. For instance, pattern in Aboriginal art embodies concepts of ancestral spiritual power (Morphy 1992 ), while indigenous Andean metalwork techniques were inseparable from concepts of material and purity (Lechtman 1984 ). Similarly, in animistic traditions, an object can be both a crafted object and a spirit (Bray 2009 ); in our own tradition, a theological divide between matter and spirit underlies an understanding of “images” as representations of reality rather than reality itself.

Critically, modes of vision are enmeshed with identities and power relations. One example is the gendered male gaze, at the heart of much Western art since Classical times (Koloski-Ostrow and Lyons 1997 ; Berger 1972 ). Another is colonial mode of vision, embedded in practices of surveillance, mapping, photography and the racialised gaze of “natives” (Smith 1998 ). For this research, the key point is that modes of vision are historically specific and fundamentally embedded in systems of orientation, cultural values and sociopolitical relations. Moreover, they are signalled or triggered through material codes such as choice of medium, framing, composition and style of execution.

This is heterogeneous ground to summarise briefly, but all of these establish useful foundational principles:

The act of seeing is not a neutral or universal act, but is constructed within a given social and historical context;

There is a fundamental link between social contexts, especially relations of power, and the habituated reflexes of the viewer;

There is a fundamental link between the habituated reflexes of the viewer and the material, thematic and stylistic characteristics of visual culture (using visual style in the sense of a way of doing things, akin to aesthetic style or technological style, and potentially reproduced through formal characteristics). Visual culture works with and reproduces these reflexes, and indeed in some cases provides explicit clues to how it should be interpreted.

In prehistory, power took radically different forms than it did in the urban, class-stratified societies visual culture studies typically deal with, but this general line of inquiry—examining art to see what it tells us about the act of seeing—is worth extending to prehistoric worlds. Archaeologists have rarely adopted a visual culture approach to prehistoric art, but some pioneering efforts have yielded important insights (Bradley 2009 ; Jones et al. 2011 ; Skeates 2005 ; Robin 2009 ; García Sanjuán et al. 2006 ; Wells 2012 ; Garrow and Gosden 2012 ; Helskog and Olsen 1995 ; Fredell et al. 2010 ; Fahlander 2012 ; Cochrane and Jones 2012 ; Primitiva Bueno Ramírez and Bahn 2015 ). It has often been pointed out how art made creative use of the physical features of its settings; for instance, Palaeolithic art sometimes utilises the 3-dimensional topography of cave walls to define imagery, and Swedish Bronze Age rock art may have used water running naturally over surfaces to appear animated. Bailey ( 2005 ) has discussed how figurines act psychologically upon people handling them. Gosden, Garrow and colleagues (Garrow and Gosden 2012 ; Gosden et al. 2008 ) have applied Gell’s concept of “technologies of enchantment” to Celtic art, noting its capacity for drawing in and bewildering the viewer. Wells ( 2012 ) has identified aesthetic patterns across genres of material culture in Iron Age Central Europe, relating them to social changes in the mid-late 1st millennium BC. Most relevant for this study, Jones (Jones 2012b , 2012a ; Jones et al. 2011 ) has interpreted British Neolithic rock art and material culture as reflecting an animated world view, and Ranta et al. ( 2019 ) have used art theory to identify narrative characteristics in Bronze Age Scandinavian rock art. We return to these studies below.

While prehistorians can take inspiration from modern visual culture studies, for methods, we are on our own. Our data are necessarily coarse-grained, and the social context we can assign them often is as well. Moreover, we necessarily work with “formal” methods deriving interpretive clues from the material itself rather than “informed” methods which place it within a long-standing ethnographically known tradition, as in Australia, South Africa and the Americas (Tacon and Chippindale 1998 ). Here, I take the simplest possible approach, asking straightforward questions about each body of art:

Where is it located? What kind of context was this, what kind of people had access to it and what did they do there?

Does it depict things we can identify? How do these tell us about its social context and meanings? How are things depicted? Is it part of a coherent visual strategy?

How are the art’s motifs arranged? Are images grouped spatially or related thematically? Is there an overall spatial or thematic order, or are they random accumulations of independent motifs?

As a first attempt at this project, these questions are evaluated here in a broad, qualitative way, by characterising tendencies within an entire corpus. This is what is possible; for no substantial corpus of prehistoric art would the available data allow rigorous statistical analysis, and even less possible is comparative analysis using data created by applying similar methods to disparate corpora. Characterisation is based upon both publications and in many cases personal observations. Such an analysis suffices to reveal some preliminary broad patterns.

Three Key Trends in Prehistoric Art

Location: bringing art into society.

Where was art located? Neolithic two-dimensional art is found in three distinct kinds of places: megalithic tombs, caves and open-air rock outcrops. Megalithic art, by definition, is found in specially constructed places not frequented as part of daily experience. Where exactly it is located within tombs varies, but generally carved and painted designs often emphasise specific zones such as portals (as in Sardinia and Ireland (Robin 2009 , 2016 , 2010 ), or the deeper, more inner area of tombs (as in Brittany (Shee Twohig 1981 )). In Malta and Sardinia, tomb art also defines architectural elements, effectively helping create the tomb as a special place; the same may be true for the heavily decorated kerbstones at Newgrange (Ireland). At Gavrinis (France), the tomb’s internal walls were covered with complex designs. Whether or not tomb art was related to altered states of consciousness (Lewis-Williams and Pearce 2005 ; Lewis-Williams and Dowson 1993 ), it is clear that it formed part of special places, probably imbued with some form of supernatural power.

Neolithic cave art is found principally in Italy and Spain. The most extensively painted Italian site is Porto Badisco Cave, near the tip of the Salentine peninsula in south-eastern Italy (Graziosi 1980 ). Porto Badisco is a deep karstic cave whose narrow, twisting galleries are difficult to negotiate. Whitehouse’s spatial analysis of the cave showed that “representational” motifs are found closer to the entrance, while deeper zones of the cave contained only highly schematised motifs; Whitehouse interpreted this as evidence that people penetrating deeper into the cave were increasingly initiated into secret knowledge (Whitehouse 1992 ). Deep caves were often used as loci for special ritual practices, perhaps because of their otherworldly quality (Whitehouse 1992 ). Other Italian decorated caves are shallower, but often in locations difficult to access (such as on steep rocky cliffs below the crest of the Gargano massif (Gravina and Mattioli 2010 )), and probably not used for principal habitations. The same is true for many Iberian painted caves and rock shelters (for instance, accessing some of the Rio Vero caves required scaling cliffs). Some Schematic Art caves may have been territorial markers located between sites (Lancharro Gutiérrez and Bueno Ramírez 2017 ).

Open-air Neolithic rock art occurs principally in Galicia and northern Britain. Whether people lived at or near sites is hard to assess, as few sites have been investigated archaeologically. But in areas such as northern Britain, some rock art is found on high moors, hilltops or slopes and most petroglyph sites may have no particular relation to settlement. Contemporary with these in the 4th-3rd millennia (and transitional to the changes discussed below) is the Copper Age art of Mount Bego, France. Like contemporary rock art in Valcamonica, this includes a mixture of third-millennium motifs such as weapons, oxen and ploughing, but also some figures which may represent cosmological anthropomorphs and symbols. The Mount Bego art is found at very high altitudes (above 2000 m), well above farmable zones and probably frequented only seasonally by special purpose groups.

Later art contrasts strongly with this. Art was no longer especially associated either with the dead, or with remote or difficult to access places. Nor were caves chosen as a location to place images; there is almost no cave art after the third millennium BC. Instead, art moves out into frequented zones. In Thrace, rock art occurs around the edges of lowland basins (Pivalaki 2016 ). The two mega-concentrations of later Bronze Age and Iron Age rock art are in southern Scandinavia and the Central Alps, both well-known areas where hundreds of thousands of petroglyphs are known. In southern Scandinavia, in areas such as Tanum (Bohuslän) and elsewhere, carved rock outcrops occur in lowland valleys. These are readily accessible today, and in prehistory, many were along navigable inlets, lakes or streams which would have been communication routes and loci of settlement. In the Central Alps, according to GIS study of the spatial distribution of Valcamonica’s rock art (C. Alexander, pers. comm.), major rock art sites such as Naquane and Seradina are located just above the valley bottom where habitations and cultivated land were located, within 200–400 m of settlements, in areas within easy view and possibly audible range of communities. In both areas, rock art is part of a familiar, frequented landscape.

From Abstract Icons to Recognisable Motifs: Schematism as a Visual Strategy

“What is it a picture of?” This obvious question is very revealing, but not as we ordinarily think of it. Here, let us begin with a simple generalisation. In Neolithic imagery (Fig. 1 ), we can recognise relatively few referents confidently. Some bodies of imagery contain only abstract or geometric shapes: cup marks, circles, spirals, labyrinths, lines, crosses, zig-zags and so on. This is true for British and Irish rock art and megalithic art. Other bodies of images contain these signs, but also some recognisable anthropomorphs (images which look human, but which may represent human-ish beings rather than people per se ), or perhaps some animals, usually deer. This typifies Italian Neolithic cave art and Iberian megalithic art. Breton rock art contains highly repetitive, highly stylised motifs, but almost always connoting a referent we can only guess at; triangles may or may not represent axe heads, a doubly curved line may represent ox horns, and so on. There are also stereotyped motifs such as the “buckler” and the “Mané axe” (Shee Twohig 1981 ) whose referent is entirely a matter of conjecture. As one gets into the third millennium BC, the range of recognisable things increases. Beyond a range of geometric signs, Iberian “schematic” art and “macro-schematic” art includes anthropomorphs, animals, and a range of less frequent motifs possibly representing things such as boats. Galician rock art includes animals and weapons as well as cup marks, rings and other schematic motifs. At Mount Bego, the repertory includes common Copper Age iconography such as weapons, oxen and ploughs (de Lumley 1996 ; Huet 2017 ), and in Valcamonica, Copper Age imagery includes daggers, deer and anthropomorphs. Both Iberian “schematic” art and Mount Bego also contain stylised, abstract motifs and enigmatic motifs that look human-ish but may be supernatural beings and/or people wearing ritual costumes, and Valcamonica motifs include cosmological solar signs and spirals.

In later periods (Fig. 2 ), we see more and more things that we recognise. Southern Scandinavian rock art contains lots of people, often gendered with anatomical details or hair styles, often with stylistic differentiation or distinguishing details. People are often shown not merely standing in a stereotyped frontal pose, as in earlier periods, but in a wide range of action poses. It contains lots of boats, sometimes with specific details of construction that allow seriation or phasing. It contains identifiable deer, horses, cattle, pigs and other animals. It contains several distinct, recognisable kinds of weapons—swords, spears, bows and shields. And there are many other, less common but still identifiable motifs such as footprints. Many of these motifs mirror themes known in contemporary Hallstatt art (for instance, warriors, water birds, people jumping acrobatically). Others may depict in quite concrete terms specific narratives we can now only reconstruct, but which must have been well-known to contemporary audiences; the grouping of boats, horses, serpents and wheels may refer to a specific cosmological narrative (Kaul 2005 , 1998). Bronze and Iron Age Alpine rock art parallels these trends closely. At Valcamonica and Valtellina, there remain schematic images, sometimes simple ones such as the so-called “Camunian rose”, sometimes complex ones such as the “maps” at Bedolina. But there are many people, sometimes distinguished by headgear or costumes and often shown doing things rather than in the static frontal position of earlier petroglyphs. There are multiple kinds of weapons and animals. Other objects depicted include ploughs and houses, granaries, footprints and even musical instruments. Even when we cannot identify a motif, we can still have confidence that it represents a specific object rather than (say) an abstract concept or quality or supernatural force; the so-called “palletta” motif at Naquane is an example. At the eastern end of Europe, sporadic examples of Aegean Bronze Age rock art show boats, and Thracian rock art again similarly is dominated by recognisable imagery of warriors and horses (Pivalaki 2016 ). Overall, compared to earlier periods, later imagery is much more readily comprehensible. It still contains “abstract”, “non-representational” or highly schematised motifs, but the general subject of the art is a lot clearer and the number of things we can identify is much higher.

How should we understand this shift? Archaeologists often characterise motifs as “representational” or “abstract”, but this distinction is debatable. An “abstract” motif almost certainly had little to do with abstract meanings as in modern art; instead, it may well have denoted something quite concrete and specific which we lack the context to identify. However, nor is it useful to simply blame lack of recognisability on our modern ignorance of an image’s context and give up on interpretation. Instead, it is more useful to focus on schematism as a visual strategy. What we experience as recognisability or non-recognisability reflects a representational choice, how much information is encoded in an image. This was first pointed out by Gombrich ( 1962 ) in his discussion of “naturalism” in art. In Gombrich’s example, suppose you want to depict a cat (Fig.  3a ). You could represent a cat by a simple circle; for those who already know that circles represent cats in this context, this would be an adequate representation. But a circle can denote many other things. As you add additional detail, it increasingly precludes other interpretations and restricts interpretation to a cat. With further detail—its stripes or spots, its position—you might be able to indicate a specific cat, or a cat in a particular mood or situation. The same logic holds for an anthropomorph (Fig. 3b ). If understood contextually as such, a simple circle or line may simply indicate the presence or absence of a human being. By the time we add several levels of detail, it may show a gendered person of a particular category, activity or state of mind, perhaps even a specific individual.

Schematism and detail as visual strategies. Each detail added specifies a specific interpretation and precludes other possible polysemic interpretations. a Cat (image: redrawn after Gombrich 1962 : Fig. 3 ). b A rock-art style anthropomorph (image: author)

Schematism, therefore, is not simply a matter of style; it is a visual strategy prompting specific ways of reading an image. Schematic images are useful when you want a simple, broadly applicable categorical identification (as with bathroom doors, brand logos, and icons identifying social groups). It can be useful when you want to invoke or summarise complex or immaterial referents compactly (a cross summarises Christianity as a complex set of beliefs). It can also be useful for depicting things that can have meanings on multiple or shifting levels, or that mean different things to different audiences. For example, some Australian aborigine groups represent narratives through highly schematic, polysemic iconography; while each sign can have multiple referents, their combination restricts possible meanings and constructs a specific interpretation (Munn 1973 ). This may be particularly appropriate in a cosmology that can have multiple layers of reality which reference each other. In contrast, adding detail constrains the potential interpretations you can apply to an image. It restricts polysemy and layered or creative interpretation. Adding detail allows nuanced categories, avoids ambiguity and guides complex or specific interpretation, as in the anthropomorph example (Fig. 3b ). It also demands less of viewers, by presenting more of the context and interpretation rather than requiring them to supply it. There are many familiar examples of how images vary in schematism or detail according to how they are intended to be interpreted or to act upon viewers. The simple glyph indicating a male or female public bathroom connotes a simple category, very much in rock art style. A wiring diagram or subway map eliminates some information (for instance, about actual distances and directions) in order to communicate other information (topological relationships between nodes). At an intermediate level, mixing schematism and naturalism, saints in medieval art are often shown as generic figures distinguished by a single symbolic diacritic—the arrows for St. Sebastian, the skull for St. Jerome, the wheel for St. Catherine. Schematism as a rhetorical strategy is exemplified by the kind of semi-naturalism found in both Classical sculpture and modern clothing catalogues (Robb and Harris 2013 : Chapter 4). In this, people are shown in “naturalistic” detail, but without individualising features; the effect is to draw the viewers into a generic lifestyle they can identify with and aspire to. At the most detailed end of the scale, the photograph on a passport has enough detail to be matched to a specific individual.

As we go from the Neolithic to the Iron Age, therefore, we are not really seeing a shift from “abstract” to “representational” art. Instead, we see a shift in visual strategy, from highly schematised images to more detailed and explicit images. In terms of what acts of interpretation they required of the viewer, it is a shift from more highly encoded, contextually defined meanings to meanings which are more visually transparent and tied to single concrete referents—even to the point where uninformed viewers such as ourselves can identify them.

From Single Motifs to Composed Scenes

If you look at a panel of rock art, cave art or tomb art, do the motifs touch each other? Are they in some evident spatial arrangement? Do thematic relations among them group them into sets of related objects?

Neolithic visual culture rarely includes composed scenes. Motifs are typically jumbled on a surface in a way which suggests that they were added one by one. Moreover, they do not often form recurrent sets. To the extent that we can deduce a spatial logic, it is minimal: motifs usually avoid directly intersecting one another. The rest appears randomised and accumulative. To take an example, Porto Badisco Cave has one or two famous (and often reproduced) panels that form scenes, but all the rest of the cave’s art consists of apparently random scatters of motifs, and this is true of the rest of Italian Neolithic cave art. Throughout Neolithic art, the only consistent spatial arrangements occur in Sardinian, Breton and Irish tomb art, where there are some weak but consistent patterns of how different motifs are distributed within tombs to define architectural spaces (Robin 2009 , 2016 , 2010 ). These occur at the level of the entire site; panels themselves usually appear unordered. The individual motif may have been the unit of citation or inscription, and the act of making a motif more significant than the result.

From the 3rd millennium BC onwards, tendencies to spatial patterning in rock art appear. A simple test is to ask how many motifs touch another motif, are grouped thematically with other motifs, or occur in clear spatial arrangements such as arrays. Third-millennium sites in the Alps already show these features. At Valcamonica, Copper Age rock art contains repetitive arrays of animals and weapons. At Mount Bego, oxen motifs are shown yoked in pairs, occasionally with a plough. This tendency towards spatial order accentuates in the later Bronze and Iron Age. In southern Scandinavia, the Central Alps, and Thrace, rock art is full of arrays, connected motifs and even scenes. Boats and animals form lines. A human figure holds a sword, shield, bow or spear. A horse has a rider on its back. A boat motif is combined with line-strokes representing its crew members. People face each other, fighting. A human drives a team of animals. A hunter chases deer, helped by dogs. Such composed groups appear in almost every rock art panel. There may also be less obvious thematic groupings, as with the Scandinavian sun-boat-cart-snake-horse narrative (Kaul 1998 ). In some ways, this is a logical extension of the trend discussed above, of adding detail to motifs to characterise specific situations more explicitly: at some point the informational burden becomes too great to communicate through a single motif. Increasingly, the unit of visual communication is not a single motif, but an interconnected group of motifs.

Interestingly, it is at the same time that composed scenes appear in other media, usually as small inset scenes (Fig.  4 ). Prehistoric Europeans had made pottery since the 5th or 6th millennium BC, and pottery provides an ideal surface for expression; Neolithic and Bronze Age pottery is often highly decorated. But, except for a few rare anthropomorphic or animal images, it is entirely schematic. Recognisable images on pottery increase from the third millennium BC onwards. Only in the Iron Age do actual composed scenes of associated imagery occur, as on the Sopron Iron Age vessels from Austria (Rebay-Salisbury 2016 ). In metalwork, motifs grouped into composed scenes occur from the later Bronze Age, as in Danish razor art. Iron Age “situla art” from the upper Adriatic shows elaborate pictures of social life and mythology; the Gundestrup Cauldron is covered in floridly mythological scenes. Statue-stelae are large stone anthropomorphic sculptures; the genre begins closely linked to megalithic ritual sites in the 3rd millennium BC and evolves into individual commemorative markers by the 1st millennium BC (Robb 2009 ). They are sometimes decorated with inset scenes. In early ones, at Valcamonica and nearby regions such as Lago di Garda, motifs more or less randomly accumulate on the statue-stela’s surface. In later ones, such as Iberian Bronze Age examples, they form thematic groups (for example, a spear, shield and horse as part of a male biographical narrative). Taking this further, the Iron Age Daunian stelae of south-eastern Italy (mid-1st millennium BC) sometimes have quite detailed inset scenes. It is easy to miss the significance of such composed, narrative scenes on pottery, metalwork and statues because they have been a staple of Western art ever since the Iron Age. But the point is not only that they occur increasingly from the 2nd millennium BC onwards, but also that they virtually never occur before this period. They confirm the thesis of a general reorganisation of visual culture in later prehistory.

Bronze-Iron Age inset scenes in other media. a Inset scene of boats, razor, Bronze Age Denmark (National Museum, Copenhagen) (image: John Lee, Wikimedia Commons under CC licence). b Situla art: inset scene of athletes on Iron Age metal plaque, Vienna, Natural History Museum (image: redrawn after National History Museum, Vienna). c Inset scene of lyre player, Iron Age Sopron pottery, Natural History Museum, Vienna (image: Wolfgang Sauber, Wikimedia Commons under CC licence). d Inset scene of warriors on Mycenaean pottery, mid-2nd millennium BC (National Archaeological Museum, Athens)(image: author). e Inset scene of charioteer on stela, Mycenae, Greece (mid-2nd millennium BC) (National Archaeological Museum, Athens) (image: author). f Biographical imagery of warrior on funerary statue-stela, Caceres, Spain ( Museo Arqueologico Nacional , Madrid) (image: author). g Inset mythological scene, statue-stela, Puglia, Italy ( Museo Nazionale di Manfredonia ; image: author)

Besides parallels in other media, the Bronze Age reorganisation of vision has strong echoes in burial practice. Neolithic deathways varied, but they often involved disassembling the body into fragments and dispersing it among landscapes or sites. There is little attempt to preserve or portray a recognisable individual; the body is unbundled into cosmological citations, perhaps much as art motifs are. Beginning in the 3rd millennium BC, it is increasingly common to present the dead person as a composed individual defined by key objects tying him or her to stable story lines of social prestige. This echoes the emergence of individuals in art, not only in themes such as gendered action, but also in the idea of the body as a central, constant and recognisable unit giving continuity to social presence. Such close parallels are not surprising, given that burial itself is a form of visual culture, and Bronze and Iron Age burial in particular was often aimed at composing a memory-fixing tableau of the social persona in death.

Visual Culture and Society

Compare the imagery in Figures  1 and 2 . This overview has highlighted three basic trends:

Between the Neolithic and the Iron Age, art increasingly comes out in the open, moving from caves, tombs and sometimes remote areas to well-frequented landscapes.

Between the Neolithic and the Iron Age, images become less schematic, increasingly detailed, and more transparently recognisable.

The unit of visual communication shifts increasingly from single motifs to arranged groups of motifs, often in action poses or scenes.

These trends are not visible in any single body of material, since virtually all bodies of prehistoric art are restricted to a single period and thus cannot reveal long-term change; moreover, the available corpora are patchily distributed and provide geographically scattered windows into what must have been a continuous, widespread process. And these are not black and white changes. Neolithic art contains some recognisable motifs and composed scenes; there are plenty of schematic and unarranged motifs in the Bronze and Iron Ages. But if we view all prehistoric pictures collectively, as a kind of single, diverse super-corpus attesting prehistoric visual culture, the outlines of a big history of prehistoric art begin to emerge.

The Neolithic: “Art” as Cosmological Knowledge and Action

To move from describing this change to interpreting it, the key is asking how people interacted with imagery. Fortunately, the art’s context and structure themselves contain clues to this. People often encountered Neolithic art in unusual or out of the way places such as tombs or inaccessible caves, not everyday places; many of the sites are what might be broadly characterised as specialised ritual settings. When people encountered it, its highly schematised mode of representation demanded contextual knowledge; understanding it correctly required them to already know which of the many things a circle or wavy line could connote was meant in a particular context. The same is true on the scale of a whole panel of motifs. Except in a few cases in which imagery was used to customise architectural areas of built structures, the viewer is not presented with an overall pattern to recognise. The grain of the assemblage is that of episodic single acts accumulating on a surface which was important for some reason.

This raises the question of the ontology of “art”. Perhaps because we understand imagery representationally ourselves, we tend to see something like a carved circle or painted line semiotically, as a communicational medium which represents something to a viewer. Indeed, our reflex to ask about the “meaning” of imagery inherently invokes a representational paradigm in which signification is distinct from the thing itself, which merely acts as a vehicle. But, as colleagues have pointed out (Jones 2017 ), representation may be the wrong way to understand Neolithic art. A representational paradigm implies that the material signifier is arbitrary or unimportant, but Neolithic art was demonstrably concerned with material, light and location (Cochrane et al. 2014 ; Jones 2012a ; Jones et al. 2011 ). The minimalism of Neolithic art suggests that, once something is specified enough to define what it is, there is actually very little further concern with representation. Similarly, a semiotic framework would imply that being seen was the important thing; in its size, medium or landscape position, Neolithic art often shows little concern for visibility, and the act of making a mark or its simple existence may have been the important thing. Neolithic art may have been not about representing reality but acting upon it, as a material operation on the world. Both Australian and South African rock art are known to sometimes have acted as interventions in a spirit world, as ways of contacting or channelling cosmological forces. To take an example, much of British Neolithic rock art consists simply of circles and connective lines (Fig. 1 ). If you imagine an earth whose underlying stones contain cosmological power, then such interventions may have been a way of creating points of contact with the inner world of stones, perhaps similar to the way in which, in South African rock art, rock surfaces acted as the interface between human and spirit worlds (Lewis-Williams and Pearce 2004 ). If so, petroglyphs acted not as a picture on a wall, but as electrical sockets and circuits, points of access to a hidden network of power. The point is that much of Neolithic imagery may not have been imagery at all; it may have been a material operation on the world, important for what it was or for what the act of making it accomplished.

This is consistent with what we know of European Neolithic society. Many Neolithic groups show clear evidence for a preoccupation with ritual activities. From henges and “temples” to monumental tombs and complex processing of the dead, we can see a concern with understanding and intervening in the cosmos. At the same time, there is little convincing evidence anywhere for political or economic inequality. Building and using ritual structures may have required people in positions of authority, but such inequality as existed was probably restricted to the ritual sphere rather than involving generalised social control. This is typical of what Spielmann ( 2002 ) has called the “ritual mode of production”, in which ritual was an end in itself. It was a world in which (to coopt a phrase of Geertz ( 1980 )), politics served ritual, not ritual politics. It may have been accompanied by a model of personhood which was situational or contextual, rather in the manner of so-called “Great Man” societies (Godelier and Strathern 1991 ): authority or capacity in one sphere of action did not necessarily convey power in other spheres (Fowler 2004 ; Robb and Harris 2018 ). In such a world, ritual knowledge can be both powerful and dangerous, and access to ritual knowledge may be unevenly distributed (Whitehouse 1992 ). Ritual knowledge may have been reproduced through practices which were contextually segregated if not downright secret, polysemic and encoded rather than superficial and transparent.

The Bronze and Iron Ages: the Birth of Narrative Art

Things changed dramatically in the late 4th and 3rd millennia BC. Between 3500 BC and 2400 BC, in a transition beginning earlier in southern and eastern Europe and reaching north-western Europe later, there was a continent-wide reorganisation of society. As generations of archaeologists have noted, Bronze Age society differed profoundly from Neolithic society, with the 3rd millennium as a pivotal age of transition. Economically, people diversified from subsistence horticulture, with the widespread use of ploughing and with extended pastoralism as a way of colonising mountain landscapes. People mined, principally for exchangeable substances such as high-quality flint, copper and tin. Metals were important above all as a social valuable and a visually impressive body enhancement for both men and women. Both trade and new methods of transport (the horse, the sailed boat) meant that societies were more interconnected than ever before. The era of big ritual systems ended, and ritual as a whole was much less prominent; as a collective social project tying society and societies together, it may have been supplanted by trade systems. In many areas, collective burials were replaced by individual burials with grave goods displaying gender and status; even where collective burials persisted (as in Mediterranean collective tombs), burials were often deposited with status kits of individual goods.

These changes were clearly closely related within a basic social charter. What changed? Mass migration models have been discredited as over-simplistic; in every region of Europe, there is clear evidence for substantial continuity from the Neolithic. Technological and economic models correctly highlight the importance of metals and the “secondary products revolution” (Sherratt 1981 ), but tend to regard these as independent prime movers rather than as the consequences of human social choices. More to the point, social models have highlighted three key factors. First, Bronze Age society seems to have been much more gender-conscious; gender emerges as a key organising principal and an obligatory social category in contexts in which it often had not been marked before (Robb and Harris 2018 ). Secondly, in death rituals, Neolithic people emphasised generalised, possibly collective or anonymous ancestors; Bronze Age people thought in terms of genealogies anchored by specific forebears, perhaps reflecting a new emphasis on lineal descent (Barrett 1994 ; Thomas 1999 ). Finally, among the living, ritual was supplanted by prestige as a means of regulating society (Shennan 1982 ; Thorpe and Richards 1984 ). It is no accident that we see a coherent suite of symbols emerge, focused around ornaments for women and weapons for men. These form an interlocking group of displayable, transactable things which motivated and choreographed social interaction across diverse spheres of life (production, trade, display, deathways, art). It is also no accident that these things were used to identify and distinguish particular kinds of bodies. Obtaining, displaying and redistributing these items helped distinguish a new, gender-specific kind of social person, the generalised political leader.

These changes provide a context for the macro-changes in art identified here. In terms of location, Bronze and Iron Age art was placed in less particular or specified locations than previously. It may not have been made or used equally by all members of society, but it is less restricted. It is part of a discourse less segregated from ordinary life and groups, part of a more integrated discourse of social process. It is also more accessible cognitively. Its imagery contains more explicit information about what it is and how to interpret it, making it less dependent upon the viewer to supply context. It is more transparent, an art of surfaces rather than layers. And in adding detail to elements, and combining elements into groupings, it is increasingly about representation, about carrying a greater semantic burden than a single schematic motif can convey.

Above all, the Bronze Age sees the birth of narrative art. Archaeologists have often recognised a narrative element in Bronze and Iron Age art, either explicitly (Ranta et al. 2019 ) or implicitly by discussing the stories motifs may reference. What makes art narrative? Bronze and Iron Age art rarely includes explicit reference to sequential time (as in a comic-book style series of images, or the Chauvet Cave lion in which multiple images may show the same thing in a series of stop-action moments). But it is built out of recognisable elements which carry clear references to a broad audience (Ranta et al. 2019 ). Moreover, it often explicitly shows actions—people ploughing, warriors fighting, a boat loaded with crew and sailing, a rider mounted on a horse, a hunter chasing a quarry. Objects may also imply actions: a game animal implies hunting, a boat implies a journey and indeed a system of “maritime praxis” (Ling 2012 ). In some cases, they may have referenced specific narratives, much in the same way that any Christian image of Jesus references the narrative of his life, death and resurrection; this has been most explicitly suggested for a Bronze Age Scandinavian cosmological narrative (Bradley 2006 ; Kaul 1998 ). Above all, narrative art prompts the viewer to infer the nature of the connections between elements—a person on a horse is a hunter or a warrior, a boat full of people is on a journey, two armed people facing each other are having a duel, petroglyphs even have sex (Fig.  5 ). The images furnish hooks to hang stories upon. Viewing it re-orders your vision to see the world in terms of narratives of personhood.

Actions in Bronze and Iron Age art. a Ploughing, Valcamonica, Italy (drawing: Vicki Herring). b Two warriors fighting, perhaps in ritual duel, Valcamonica, Italy (image: author). c Hunting, Valcamonica, Italy (image: author). d A ship filled with crew, Tanum, Sweden (drawing: Vicki Herring). e Two pairs of ithyphallic warriors fighting or dancing, Tanum, Sweden (redrawn after Coles 2005 : Fig. 162). f Dance, Tanum, Sweden (image, author). g Acrobats, Tanum, Sweden (drawing: Vicki Herring). h Sexual activity, Svälte, Sweden (redrawn after Coles 2005 : Fig. 55). i Horsemen riding, Thrace (redrawn after Pivalaki 2016 : Fig. 14.2)

What are these narratives about? They varied a lot—Bronze and Iron Age rock art depicts a huge range of things. But the major outlines show few surprises, converging well with what is known from archaeology. It is much more visibly gendered. There are a few gendered images in two-dimensional Neolithic imagery, but not many. In Bronze and Iron Age art, they abound. Gender may be shown anatomically, via conventional signs such as dot between the legs to indicate a woman, or via gendered objects and contexts. Much of it reflects male concerns. Indeed, it may have been made and used by gendered and aged sub-groups, perhaps to accompany story-telling (as with Comanche rock art (Fowles and Arterberry 2013 )); there is no reason to suppose it reflects an accurate cross-section of society rather than sectional interests. But the themes are socially central ones.

Hunting art provides an apposite example. It is a rarely appreciated paradox of European prehistoric art that all imagery which shows the act of hunting itself—as opposed to simply the animals hunted and eaten—was actually made not by hunter-gatherers but by farmers. The earliest hunting art per se seems to be one panel at Porto Badisco, Italy, which dates to the later Neolithic; there are similar scenes in Iberian Schematic Art. Hunting art becomes much more frequent in both Scandinavian and Alpine Bronze-Iron Age rock art; there are also representations in contemporary media such as Mycenaean metalwork and the Daunian stelae which suggest it represents a Europe-wide genre of action. Why? It has nothing to do with subsistence; all of these groups lived on crops and domesticated animals. Instead, perhaps expressly because hunting was superfluous to subsistence, hunting became a prestigious activity, a social drama of individual maleness and status—which was not only done, but narrated.

The most prominent example of visual narrative, warfare, shows how imagery echoes what we see in traded and displayed goods and in burials. Archaeologists have noted the Bronze Age origin of the warrior as a new kind of social figure (Harding 2007 ; Guilaine and Zammit 2005 ); this is based above all on how weapons are used to define personas in burial, but weapons also figure as important items of material culture among the living. Bronze and Iron Age rock art is full of warriors. Weapons make their appearance in Copper Age imagery at Valcamonica and Mount Bego, occasionally with people holding them. From the Bronze Age onwards, in southern Scandinavia, beweaponed men are common, and boats loaded with men probably reference armed raids. Armed figures in Iron Age Valcamonica often occur in pairs fighting what may have been understood as ritual duels. It is also a common theme in inset scenes on Iberian Bronze Age stelae, Iron Age situlae, and even Greek Geometric pottery. We do not know whether such images referenced real people and their histories, or figures of myth or legend, or indeed whether the images formed part of some visual speech act—a declaration of prowess, a prayer for an outcome. But in all these cases, in visual narratives, the warrior has arrived. Indeed, as Ling and Cornell ( 2010 ) have argued powerfully, such visual narratives may have been the means by which warriors were produced.

Conclusions: Sketching art’s (Pre)History on a Broad Canvas

Prehistoric Europe’s visual culture travelled a long road between 6000 and 0 BC. The Neolithic inspires a deep feeling of alterity. There is an unfamiliar logic at work which often refuses to make sense to us. It is telling that comparative models for the Bronze Age tend to look forward to historic times, to the threshold of the Classical period; comparative models for the Neolithic tend to look elsewhere, to “tribal” worlds in the Americas, in Africa, in Melanesia. This is as true for visual culture as for other aspects of life. Not only do we usually not know what Neolithic “art” depicts, we often do not even know how to interpret it. This is not simply due to our ignorance of a prehistoric denotative code. The carvings and paintings themselves are schematic, perhaps intentionally obscure, perhaps polysemic, perhaps restricted (Bradley 1997 ). It may represent encoded ritual knowledge with little concern to be understood by non-practitioners; it may not have been intended to represent anything, but rather to do something, to perform some ritual action or to provide the means for doing so. In any case, it is not pictures as we know them.

The continent-wide revolution of the 3rd millennium BC reformulated European society along new principles of social reproduction. Not surprisingly, visual culture changed too. Indeed, it is striking that nowhere in Europe can we identify a single specific body of art which spans the two periods continuously, something which makes it difficult to highlight such trends based upon studies of single corpora alone, but which also underlines the broad change in how art worked and what it was used for. The nearest we can find are occasional bodies of imagery which include characteristics of both periods (e.g. Monte Bego, the Copper Age component at Valcamonica). On a thematic level, it reflects new concerns: gender, economic production, hunting, warfare. As visual culture, it works differently, with more detail and more grouped images tying in to narratives about protagonists and their situations. It is also more transparently representational. Representational narrative art created a new way of seeing ( sensu Berger 1972 ). And this tied into a new social role for imagery. By the Iron Age, it increasingly resembles pictures as we understand them: visual signs which represent narratives, increasingly narratives of personhood populated with social types known from other contexts.

Explicitly or implicitly, art histories work from and against the baseline of a big history which brings major forms of visual culture together into a continuous narrative. In any study of a particular artist’s oeuvre, writer and reader both already know what makes a work “Classical” or “Medieval”, “Impressionist” or “Modernist”. Indeed, such knowledge forms the background for understanding the unique features of each artist or school and the ways their works must be viewed. For prehistoric visual culture, we have never had such a history. This article aims to show that such a history is both possible and useful. Here, I have discussed only two-dimensional imagery, leaving aside 3D works such as figurines and sculptures, which may have followed their own pathways. Both the patterns I identify and the interpretations I give them are simple and obvious in retrospect. Prehistorians have long acknowledged that Neolithic art works differently than we expect it to and have related this to the alterity of Neolithic society. Similarly, they have responded, usually implicitly, to the comprehensible style of transparent imagery and narrative reference of Bronze and Iron Age art, and the fact that the narratives involved reflect the gendered prestige and politics of the time. The provocative element of this paper is simply posing the question of how the two periods relate as part of a general history, a project prehistorians have never really conceived of, much less tackled seriously. As a first attempt, it is tentative, and future work will no doubt prove some aspects incorrect. But if it inspires future work, even to contradict it, it will have accomplished its goal. The potential is great. Here I explore merely one moment in such a history, albeit a central one; much as histories of art have built progressively outwards over time from a focus upon the medieval-to-Renaissance transition, the transition from Neolithic to Bronze Age art can anchor a global prehistory of art yet to be developed. Such a history would encompass periods of alterity such as Palaeolithic and Mesolithic art and the fascinating world of Iron Age to early medieval art in Northern Europe, different genres—how does three-dimensional art tell the same or different stories?—and relations with alternative traditions such as circum-Arctic, North African and Near Eastern palaeo-art.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to many colleagues who have put up with questions about bodies of prehistoric art about which they know much more than I do, including among others Craig Alexander, Chris Chippindale, Marta Díaz-Guardamino, Oliver Harris, Lila Janik, Sheila Kohring, Alberto Marretta, Katherina Rebay-Salisbury and Guillaume Robin. None of them are responsible for the use of this information! Vicki Herring kindly drew some of the illustrations. Comments from the editors and reviewers helped improve the argument.

Funding was provided by the Wellcome Trust (Biomedical Humanities Pilot Grant 096510/Z/11/Z), and the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

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Robb, J. Art (Pre)History: Ritual, Narrative and Visual Culture in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe. J Archaeol Method Theory 27 , 454–480 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-020-09471-w

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Prehistoric Art

Updated 04 August 2023

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Category Art

Topic Artwork

The Earliest Civilization and Prehistoric Art

The earliest civilization and experience of the human race points to the existence of art, therefore the presence of art could be considered as old as the existence of the human race. In the history of art, the concept of prehistoric art is referred to as all the works of art produced in the preliterate era. Prehistoric art began during the late period of geographic history and developed consistently into culture that was formed either by writing or other methods of keeping records, (White 12).

Types of Prehistoric Art

Based on the research and findings of archeologists, there are for basic typologies of prehistoric arts which were primarily developed in the Stone Age. First, the petroglyphy which consists of rock carvings, cupules, and graving. Second, the pictography which also includes symbols, ideograms, and pictorial images; Third, the prehistoric sculpture which was based on ivory carvings, forms of zoomorphic, and relief sculptures. The last category is referred to as the megalithic art; with examples such as petroforms and distinct arrangement of stones, (White 44). Irrespective of the methods by which these arts were completed, each prehistoric art was an expression of the fundamental feature of the society where they were developed.

The Characteristics of Prehistoric Art

In conclusion it is essential to note that art has always been a primary feature of the human society; however prehistoric arts were of distinct characteristics. This form of artworks was highly primitive and could not be regarded as perfect as what is currently obtainable in the today's modern society. It is therefore essential to mention that the ingenuity of the artworks that were developed in the prehistoric era paved the way the heights of sophistication that is currently witnessed in today's world of art.

Works Cited

White, Randall. Prehistoric art: the symbolic journey of humankind. Harry N. Abrams, 2003.

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Prehistoric art (2010)

2010, Published in Stokstad, M. and Cothren, M. (eds.) Art History (4th edition), pp. 1-26. New York: Pearson/Prentice Hall.

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The Enigmatic Animal Images of Prehistoric Art Essay

Animal images used in prehistoric art and Mesopotamia depict the work of the world’s first artists. In fact, the researchers confirm that the images of animals were presented in the same style and did not differ in style variability. It was always an image of a strict profile of the animal, in which all parts of the body are visible. At the same time, it was a rare occasion to depict human bodies.

In ancient times, profile drawings of animals may have been important purely for functional purposes – such drawings helped to understand how the animal’s body works. However, much remains unsolved since the ancient people did not leave records deciphering their messages. For example, although bulls and horses were not the main sources of food in the ancient Stone Age, these animals were often depicted. Therefore, researchers need to explore the meanings of animal drawings for a greater understanding of human history.

Perhaps exclusively animal depictions have ceased as human thought, and drawing skills have evolved over time. The needs of the ancients rose to new levels, so they wanted to depict human bodies, religious symbols, or even tell a story through images. Besides, the ancient people probably felt the strength in their bodies, realizing they could be on an equal footing with the most developed animals. Consequently, the focus shifted from admiring the images of animals to focusing on the human body.

In the era of rationalism and pragmatism, the images of animals lost their extra human essence. Many artists strive to depict animals as accurately as possible. Others create mythical unions that combine the signs of man and animals (centaurs). But these archetypes certainly do not have the same qualities and meanings that animal images had in prehistoric times.

One of the key findings from the readings is that painters in prehistoric times depicted animals in the same way: in a strict profile. It is crucial to note this because the similarity in approach between different tribes is fascinating. The second key aspect is that these pictures of animals were usually found in caves. Most likely, this is because ancient people chose caves as a place to live. The new fact was the absence of any consensus between scholars on the meanings of animal images. This topic is still a matter of active debate among researchers.

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Prehistoric art essay (401 words).

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Prehistoric art is art created before written history, often the only record of early cultures. (Thefreedictionary.com) Prehistoric art is in three classifications, Paleolithic, Neolithic and thee Bronze Age. Paleolithic is the Old Stone Age. Neolithic is the New Stone Age. The Bronze Age is when metals such as copper, iron, and gold are used.

An example of Paleolithic art is the cave painting, Hall of the Bulls. The surface on which it is painted is not smooth. The painters used the contours of the cave to give composition. The painters also used the technique “twisted perspective”. This means the heads appear in frontal perspectives. The bodies appear in profile perspectives. Colors in the painting appear in black, red, and brown. Ground ocher pigments and charcoal make these colors.

I believe the purpose of this painting is to show the scene before a hunt. It depicts cows, bulls, horses, and deer in relative peaceful harmony. This observation came to me looking at the painting.

An example of Neolithic art is Stonehenge. Stonehenge is in Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, England. Stonehenge is an example of Megalithic Architecture also. Built with huge stones about 20 feet tall of gray sarsen. The stones arranged in a circle around an altar. I believe Stonehenge was a monument to celebrate the summer solstice. Observing its size and shape, it would cast various shadows with the sun shining, the altar most likely for offerings to the sun god. I came to this conclusion knowing what I know about the druids and sun worship.

The end of the Neolithic age was the beginning of the Bronze Age. Known also as the Metal Age for its metal working which took place. The metals most used were copper, iron, gold, and tin. Iron was the cheapest and more available of the other metals. Iron used to forge weapons like swards, spears, and shields. Plows for farmers also forged from Iron helped in landscaping their farms. Gold and copper were predominately reserved for royalty and the gods, forming it in the form of golden idols.

Prehistoric art gave a written voice to those whom would not have had one otherwise. We are fortunate for these artists, and the stories their art tells. Prehistoric art was a way of self-expression and necessity, not to mention for people to feel closer to their gods. I wonder if prehistoric art served as a decorative purpose too.

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Savages! Innocents! Sages! What Do We Really Know About Early Humans?

In “The Invention of Prehistory,” the historian Stefanos Geroulanos argues that many of our theories about our remote ancestors tell us more about us than them.

By Jennifer Szalai

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THE INVENTION OF PREHISTORY: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession With Human Origins , by Stefanos Geroulanos

History may not be bunk, but prehistory is: So argues Stefanos Geroulanos in his spirited new book, “The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession With Human Origins.” Best-selling authors like Yuval Harari , Jared Diamond and Steven Pinker have all distilled (or cherry-picked) research about early humanity in order to make grand claims about the near inevitability (or impossibility) of human progress. Even “The Dawn of Everything” (2021), by David Graeber and David Wengrow, which took issue with the simplistic narratives offered by the Big Thinkers with their Big Books, provided an alternative narrative of its own — that of early human communities experimenting and making do without resorting to structures of hierarchy and domination.

Geroulanos expends few words addressing his contemporaries, preferring instead to guide us through several centuries of research into (and consequent conjecture about) human origins. “The Invention of Prehistory” begins around the mid-18th century, moving through various concepts of early humanity to conclude that even as our knowledge of specifics becomes undeniably richer and more detailed, our sense of the bigger picture remains tenuous and subject to change.

I already anticipate some grumbling from fans of Harari & Co. that Geroulanos, a professor of European intellectual history at New York University, is advancing an anti-science argument. He is not. He has plenty of praise for geneticists and paleontologists who have enlarged our understanding of various areas of inquiry, including human migration, food intake and the Neanderthal genome. What both fascinates and troubles him is our seemingly irrepressible urge to look to the lives of early humans — to that mysterious time before recorded history — to tell us who, essentially, we are. Not to mention that such interpretations can condition how we relate to others: Prehistoric “findings” have been used to shore up a prejudice, justify an injustice or expand an empire.

“Human origins are not mere abstractions,” Geroulanos writes. “Nor are they simple prompts for thought experiments and pure scientific inquiry. Promises and violence have regularly been unleashed in their name.”

Geroulanos dates the invention of prehistory, at least as we understand it, to sometime around 1750, when Enlightenment imperatives meant that religious tales of creation would no longer do. In 1651, Thomas Hobbes had already declared that “man is wolf to man” in the state of nature, and so it was in everyone’s interest to submit to a sovereign for protection from fellow humans. A century later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued something different. Disgusted by the extreme inequality in French society, Rousseau proposed that the “noble savage” had instead been corrupted by civilization. He assumed an analogous notion of childhood: innocent and pure. “Man is born free,” he wrote, “yet everywhere he is in chains.”

The more you want to upend the status quo, the more likely you’ll be to venerate an idyllic past. The reverse is also true: The more you want to preserve the status quo, the more likely you’ll be to scorn the past as horrific — or, at least, unsustainable. Geroulanos traces the long history of Europeans depicting Indigenous and colonized peoples as “savage” — thereby rationalizing every violent measure used against them, from brutality to annihilation. One trope that came up again and again was that of “the disappearing native,” which Geroulanos deems a “convenient euphemism,” because of how it couched colonial destruction in terms of biological inevitability. “Natives don’t die of diseases introduced by settlers,” he writes, in an acerbic aside. “They’re not murdered in asymmetrical warfare; really, they disappear.”

“The Invention of Prehistory” mostly follows a rough chronology, though the chapters are arranged conceptually. Geroulanos, who started his research for this project more than a decade ago, includes so many thinkers and theories that it can be hard to keep track of the mounting contradictions. But the tumbling cadence of conflicting ideas also serves to illustrate his point. He is dismantling, not synthesizing. He devotes an entire chapter to the French Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who tried to reconcile evolution with Christian theology. Another chapter starts with Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”; turns to the “Out of Africa” thesis of the Australian-born anthropologist Raymond Dart; discusses the work of the German anthropologist Leo Frobenius and its influence on the Negritude movement; brings in the racism promulgated by the Hollywood screenwriter turned-nonfiction naturalist Robert Ardrey; and ends with a mention of Wakanda.

Most readers will already be familiar with the pejorative uses of “savage” and the positive uses of “civilization”; they will also recognize reversals like Rousseau’s. Less familiar to me were the distinctions that 19th-century Europeans made between “good barbarians” (Germanic tribes) and “bad barbarians” (Mongols, Huns and other “Asiatic” invaders). And Geroulanos reminded me that depictions of Neanderthals have undergone a transformation during my own lifetime. No longer the hunched and hairy creatures of the 1980s and ’90s, they are now blond and blue-eyed tool users.

Given the racialized stereotypes embedded in these iterations, it’s perhaps no surprise that the current, lighter-skinned version has figured in grotesque, far-right talking points about “white genocide” and a “great replacement.” Geroulanos quotes an anthropology paper describing the Neanderthals as “the Indigenous European race” that was “demographically and genetically swamped by the African biological race of Homo sapiens.” Over on the dark web, Geroulanos finds white supremacists portraying Neanderthals as victims of “diversity.” He doesn’t dispute the science that has added to our store of knowledge, but he does dispute the meanings we project onto it. “The Neanderthals themselves say nothing,” he writes. “We arrange them into whatever position we need them to take.”

“The Invention of Prehistory” isn’t simply critique for critique’s sake. “When early humanity is presented as violent or weak, we pronounce ourselves triumphant,” Geroulanos writes. “When it is presented as strong or complex, we empathize with it.” Meanwhile, we “make excuses for the real humanity that burns forests and oil and cares little for the poverty right outside our door or on the other side of the planet.”

It’s a thought that’s both undeniably unsettling and surprisingly hopeful: Why cling to speculations of what our forebears may or may not have done, way back when, in order to make sense of what we actually do, right now?

THE INVENTION OF PREHISTORY : Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession With Human Origins | By Stefanos Geroulanos | Liveright | 498 pp. | $29.99

Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times. More about Jennifer Szalai