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In the previous post, Prehistory, the beginning of everything, we dealt with aspects of Prehistory from the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Metal Age periods. Let us now deal with the artistic manifestations of our ancestors during this period.
What is prehistoric art
Throughout Prehistory, nomadic peoples followed animal migrations for reliable sources of food. There were also sedentary tribes, fortunate enough to find places rich in natural resources, game, or seafood. Some of these people lived inside caves and others under the protection of natural structures.
Although all homo sapiens developed visual expressions of creativity, most evidence has disappeared. What remains are Paleolithic artifacts excavated at the sites of nomadic hunting settlements and the drawings and paintings that were protected from erosion deep in the caves.
In Central Europe, Russia and Central Asia, nomadic hunters on the plains and grasslands carved symbolic carvings of humans, animals and birds, of mammoth and deer bone as early as 40,000 BC.
In somewhat later art, there is evidence that prehistoric man defined his appearance with individual expression. He was portrayed bearded or clean-shaven, wearing hair long or short, braided or straight. It is likely that he decorated his body with ink or tattoos and created simple "jewelry" using bones, stones, shells and perhaps feathers to adorn himself. All over the world - from North and South America to Europe, Mongolia, Indonesia and Australia - Aboriginal peoples, whose cultures are 10,000 years old or more, have made illustrative art. We can presume that the act of illustrating is as old or even older than homo sapiens.
Periods of prehistoric art
Paleolithic art - the oldest and most primitive of all, is mainly composed of paintings and reliefs made by hand or with stone tools, using rudimentary techniques or pigments extracted from ground minerals. Its trends are:
Parietal and cave art - cave paintings on the walls with artistic forms that represented hunting scenes, human representations, or signs, through pigments on the face of the rock. It is not known whether they served to decorate the house or to mark ritualistic places. They were particularly common in Europe and North Africa, especially in the region between France and Spain.
Mobile art - reliefs and small sculptures, mostly anthropomorphic figurines, such as the different “Venus,” naked women carved in stone, with very exaggerated proportions of breasts and hips in relation to the rest of the body.
Mesolithic art - the art of this period represents a transition between the old forms of the Paleolithic and the new forms of the Neolithic. His best-known record is that of Levantine art, originating from the eastern periphery of Spain. Their rituals were represented by very schematic figures, pre-hieroglyphs, which is why it is also known as schematic art.
Neolithic art - during the so-called Neolithic Revolution, man abandoned nomadism in favor of a sedentary life. With that, prehistoric art took a turn, with new materials and new sedentary techniques, such as ceramics, the result of clay cooking.
Megalithic art - at the end of the Neolithic period, megalithic art or megalithic architecture appears, with its huge stone figures such as menhirs, stone galleries, or dolmens.
Pragmatism, art with material utility
As is evident, prehistoric art being a broad category, with plastic and visual manifestations of several types and origins. Its deposits are usually found in caves and sites of primitive settlements, mostly on the European continent, although there are important archaeological sites in Africa, Asia, and America.
Prehistoric art was a consequence of the expansion and diversification of the human species across the planet, giving rise to diverse cultures and civilizations, each with its own, albeit still primitive, vision of the world and themselves.
It is known that Homo Neanderthalensis collected materials with striking shapes and colors used in the decoration of their caves and in funeral ceremonies. The first forms of prehistoric art belonged to this hominid, dating back more than 67,000 years. But the Cro-Magnons left more and better artistic traces, in the form of paintings, engravings and small sculptures. Some of them date back 35,000 years.
There are no written documents that reveal anything about the history of men at that time; everything we know is due to the research of anthropologists and historians. They reconstructed the culture of primitive man based on objects found in distinct parts of the world and paintings inside several caves.
All manifestations of this period are considered prehistoric art. The oldest signs of artistic expression found were paintings and drawings engraved on cave walls and ceilings, female sculptures in stone and ivory and small objects made and decorated. This presupposes a wide variety of productions, developed in various places and by different peoples, but with a common characteristic, pragmatism, that is, an art with material, every day or magical-religious utility.
The oldest representational art
Human beings make art for many reasons and with whatever technologies are available. Non-representative, extremely ancient decoration was found throughout Africa. The oldest accurately dated example is a collection of 82,000-year-old Nassarius snail shells, pierced and covered with red ochre, found in Morocco.
Wear patterns suggest they may have been strung like beads. Nassarius shells that may be over 100,000 years old have also been found in Israel. Holed shells and small pieces of ocher (red hematite) etched with simple geometric patterns were found in Blombos Cave, South Africa, in a sediment layer estimated to be 75,000 years old.
The oldest known representational images come from the Aurignacian culture of the Upper Paleolithic period. Archaeological discoveries made across a wide swath of Europe (especially in Southern France, Northern Spain, and Swabia in Germany) include more than two hundred caves with Aurignacian paintings, drawings and sculptures that are among the first indisputable examples of representative imagery. The oldest of them, with an estimated age of 35,000 BC, is a six-centimeter-tall female figure carved from mammoth ivory, found in six fragments in the Cave of Hohle Fels near Schelklingen in southern Germany.
Rock art
From the French word rupestre, the term refers to engraving, tracing, or painting on a rocky support. Considered the oldest artistic expression of humanity, this art was performed in caves or outdoors. Some specialists criticize the use of the term “art” to refer to inscriptions on stone that go back to peoples of prehistoric times, since the paintings and engravings discovered by archaeological research do not always have a clear aesthetic sense.
Older examples date back to glacial times, it is possible to locate it in the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras and even in recent times. European examples are older (Altamira in Spain and Lascaux in France) made between 40,000 and 30,000 years before Christ.
The techniques employed constitute another aspect explored by the researchers. The painting is the oldest achievement. Traces may have been made with the fingers or with the help of utensils. Colors were obtained from coal (black), iron oxide (red and yellow), fat or wax. The painting was done with geometric lines and shapes and portrayed the daily life of the first human beings and animals.
In the cave of Lascaux, the paintings are black in color containing ground charcoal and manganese dioxide. Liquid substances such as water, egg white and, very rarely, blood was also used in paintings.
Prehistoric art is extremely diverse and contains not only drawings and carvings intended to represent real life, but also utensils, buildings, and artifacts for funerary purposes.
Naturalism was the main characteristic of art in that period, that is, drawing and painting what one was seeing, nature as it appeared to the artist. A representation of reality, or imagination, as natural as possible, so that the observer could identify and understand the content.
Art in the Upper Paleolithic – 45,000 to 8,000 BC.
The first artistic manifestations made by man began in this period. They are simple lines like the “hands in negative,” made on the clay walls of caves. The artist blew a powder obtained from crushed rocks over his hand, leaning against the cave wall. The part around the hand was colored, but not the part covered by the hand. Something like current graffiti.
Painting
Cave painting is a manifestation of prehistoric art, manifested with drawings on rocks in the open air or on the inner walls of caves. Some paintings are around 40,000 years old. They resisted time precisely because they were inside caves.
According to research, Paleolithic naturalism was an art totally connected to nature. Paleolithic man lived in isolated tribes, hunting, and gathering fruits. He had not yet created his gods and did not believe in the existence of life after death and did not have a formalized religion.
Everything gravitated around subsistence, which leads one to believe that art had no other purpose than that of obtaining a means of obtaining food. As we have already seen, the art produced had a material and everyday utility.
The hunter artist developed a keen vision and deep knowledge of animal life. He was thus able to realistically reproduce the shapes of animals, with details and colors that would only be seen later, in the evolution of the visual arts.
Based on this feeling of possession, the hunter painter assumed that, by producing the image of an animal, he would have power over its “soul,” thus being able to interfere with reality. The paintings were conceived as a living being, as an animal that really existed and not as a simple representation. He believed that each image should only be “used” once.
When he drew an animal and felt that he already had it, he would no longer touch the image. Then another image began that could even overlap the previous one. He believed that he would kill the "life spirit" of the real animal if he injured it in a drawing, the same belief as in voodoo.
Much more than a doll with pins stuck in it, voodoo is a common religion in West Africa and Haiti. Its rituals are marked by music, dancing, and lots of food. In the ceremony, participants go into a trance and embody the loa (good or bad) and ask for guidance to solve everyday problems.
Most of the paintings are located deep inside caves, in dark places. The clear impression is that these images could not have a decorative character. Nor could they be interpreted as a form of expression. This leads to believe in the thesis that they were used in rituals. By evolving intellectually, man becomes capable of understanding an image according to its symbolic meaning.
The pigments used are materials easily found in nature, such as clays, minerals, coal, carbonized bones, and vegetables mixed with binders to give viscosity and fix the pigment. For this purpose, the solid elements were crushed and egg whites, blood, excrements (from bats), animal fat, as well as vegetable waxes and resins were added.
Sculpture
The sculptures, made with limestone and realistically represented, also had pragmatic purposes. They could be domestic utensils, with a predominant theme of animals and human figures. The female sculptures, known as Venus, had large breasts and wide hips associated with the cult of fertility.
Among the most important works of prehistoric art is the Venus of Willendorf, a statuette of female forms, associated with the group known as the Paleolithic Venuses, a series of sculptures that share characteristics such as their exaggerated feminine attributes. Its height is eleven centimeters. Its face is covered, and it does not have a base that allows it to stand. It was discovered in 1908 during an excavation of a Paleolithic settlement on Austrian soil. It is estimated to have been created between 24,000 and 22,000 BC. Today it is possible to admire it in the Museum of Natural History in Vienna.
The Venus of Tan-Tan, a possible anthropomorphic figure, was described by Robert G. Bednarik. The object is 6 cm long, 2.6 cm wide and 1.2 cm thick, ten grams of quartzite. It was discovered in 1999 during an archaeological survey by the German archaeologist Lutz Fiedler. It was in a river terrace deposit on the north bank of the Draa River, about 10 km northeast of the city of Tan-Tan, Morocco.
No dating of the artifact or the deposit has been conducted. Both are attributed to the Middle Acheulian, between 500,000 and 300,000 BC. in that region. The object, including its "arms" and "legs", was created by natural geological processes. The horizontal grooves on either side appear to be formed partly naturally, partly artificially (by percussion). According to preliminary studies, it contains traces of iron and manganese-like pigment. It is a controversial finding, as many scientists think its resemblance to humans could be mere coincidence.
Music
Information about Prehistory is based on unwritten documentary references, which function as historical sources, such as cave paintings, fossils and bones, archaeological sites, sculptures, and tools, among others. There are rudimentary drawings made on cave walls, where dance manifestations appear, indicating body movements accompanied by primitive music and vocal sounds.
Man, in the Paleolithic, was surrounded by countless sound events produced by nature, sounds that he tries to imitate with his voice, body and materials. He used tools for many purposes, including music. His body was also used as a musical instrument, both melodic and rhythmic, through voice and body percussion. Music was used on the most varied occasions, for example: to celebrate hunting, to perform rituals of thanks, to appease fury or to make requests to the gods. In this sense, music was used as a means of communication with the divine.
A bear bone flute, discovered in 1995 at the Divje Babe archaeological site in Slovenia. Submitted to carbon fourteen examination, its estimated age is approximately 50,000 years BC, the time of Neanderthal man. It is the oldest melodic wind instrument in the world. It was named the Neanderthal Flute, in honor of its probable creator.
The first examples of music therefore arise from the need for communication. It is believed that he tried to imitate the sounds of nature with onomatopoeia. One of the goals would be to imitate sounds of smaller animals to hunt them or to attract predators, whom he also hunted. The act of hitting his feet on the ground and his hands on his chest, drove away enemies in fights or scared the animals you wanted to hunt.
This primitive man thought that the sound of rain or the rumble of thunder had a divine origin. By imitating them, he supposed he was communicating with the deities, driven by a strong need for spirituality. The first dances were used at parties, to court or to obtain the favor of the deities. The voice was also used as a rhythmic instrument, with tongue clicks and rhythmic vocal sounds.
With the materials found in nature, he built the first musical instruments, simple stones or beaten wood; rattles made from leaves or shells; strumming instruments made with taut strings; wind instruments such as bone or stone whistles and bamboo flutes.
Art in the Neolithic – 8000 to 4000 B.C.
During this period, man underwent a real change in his material and spiritual way of life. He went from nomadic to sedentary, not in the connotation it has today. He abandoned the status of hunter and food gatherer, dominated nature and developed agriculture and livestock. The production of agricultural surpluses and their storage ensured the necessary food for times of drought or floods. With more food, the communities grew and soon the need for exchanges with other communities arose.
It was at this time that an intense interchange between villages and small towns took place. The hordes (tribes), which were previously isolated, and many lived in constant transition, give way to organized and united communities. Life has become more secure in terms of survival due to the development of agriculture.
With the evolution from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic, there is a marked transformation in their way of life, resulting in the division of society into classes, the division of labor and professional differentiation, primary production and manufacturing, specialized trade, handicrafts, and male and female work.
All these achievements were reflected in art. The naturalistic style, predominant in the Paleolithic, gave way to a simplified and geometric style. The artist's power of observation was replaced by the stylization of forms, rationalization, and abstraction in geometric forms.
When this primitive man is aware that his death is governed by good and severe weather, rain and sun, lightning and hail, plagues and hunger and a series of other factors, he starts to believe that there really is a greater force that controls nature for or against him. They are species of demons and spirits incorporated into his beliefs to justify the severe weather.
These questions become the focus of this phase. Animism replaces magic. In general terms, animism is the doctrine that living organisms are animated by a soul, that is, the soul is the principle of organic and psychic life. It is the worldview in which non-human entities have a spiritual essence.
The concept refers to crude and naive beliefs, in which images, feelings and reality are confused. It is present in the anthropology of religion as a term for the belief system of some Indigenous peoples, especially before the development of organized religions.
Animism divides the world into reality and super-reality that transcends everyday objective and material reality, the real world, and the world of spirits. Neolithic man begins to feel the need to create images for his idols and various other symbols of worship, as he believes that they will favor greater control over populations that proliferate.
The art of this period seeks to portray reality as the confrontation of two worlds. The forms that before in the naturalism of the Paleolithic period were faithful reproductions of animals, give way to simple and stylized forms of representation.
They establish a division between sacred and profane art; that is, the art of religious representations and the art of secular ornamentation. They produce portraits of idols and sepulchral art as well as secular ceramics, with decorative forms.
Megalithic art
The first works of architecture recorded in history are from this period, the megalithic monuments (from the Greek mega = big and lithos = stone). These monuments have three organizations: menhirs (large stones driven vertically into the ground), dolmens (covered galleries that provided access to a tomb) and cromlechs (menhirs and dolmens arranged in a circle).
The Menhir of Mollet, from the late Neolithic, between 3300 and 2200 BC, this stone statue measuring 4.9 meters high and sixty-eight centimeters thick was found in 2009, in Mollet del Vallés, Barcelona. It represents a human figure in low relief, sometimes completed or replaced by engravings.
Stonehenge, architecture and prehistoric art
Stonehenge is a monument whose immense popularity goes beyond the limits of knowledge and interest in prehistoric art. Its diameter is just over one hundred meters, and it is estimated that it was built between 3,100 and 1,600 BC, a period that goes from the end of the Neolithic to the beginning of the Bronze Age. It was discovered in the 1920s after an archaeologist photographed the site from an airplane.
Stonehenge was completed around 4,600 years ago. It may have been partially constructed from elements of older megalithic monuments located hundreds of kilometers away.
Its importance is because it raises many questions regarding its origin, especially due to its sophisticated architecture, which has no competition in its historical context.
Nobody knows for sure the function of Stonehenge. Theories vary. One of them is that it would be a solar celestial calendar, demonstrating that the men of the Neolithic period had an advanced astronomical knowledge. The main entrance aligns with the sunrise on the summer solstice.
Recent archaeological research, however, points out that Stonehenge was used for ceremonial burial after the incineration of the body. Fifty-six graves were discovered containing the cremated bodies of at least sixty-four people who lived during the Neolithic period. According to mineralogical analyzes conducted by British scientists, the stone blocks located in Wiltshire, in the south of England, were transported by land. Fifty-two stones exist today, but experts believe there were eighty. The smaller stones within the inner circle are known as the blue stones, erected around 3000 BC.
The sanctuary is one of the main architectural monuments of the Neolithic period. Medieval literature guarantees that the monument would have been erected by the wizard Merlin, adviser to the mythical King Arthur. Already in the modern period, around the seventeenth century, it was the turn to claim that Stonehenge would be a space for funerary rites of Celtic high priests, called druids.
In the next post we will deal exclusively with prehistoric caves.
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