{"id":107,"date":"2015-04-10T19:55:02","date_gmt":"2015-04-10T19:55:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.candelalearning.com\/masteryart1x6xmaster\/?post_type=chapter&p=107"},"modified":"2018-07-10T20:38:45","modified_gmt":"2018-07-10T20:38:45","slug":"oer-1-17","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/sac-artappreciation\/chapter\/oer-1-17\/","title":{"raw":"Paleolithic and Neolithic Art","rendered":"Paleolithic and Neolithic Art"},"content":{"raw":"

The Paleolithic:\u00a0A Nomadic Life<\/h2>\r\nHumans make art. We do this for many reasons and with whatever technologies are available to us. Extremely old, non-representational ornamentation has been found across the Middle East and Africa. The oldest firmly-dated<\/em> 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<\/a> in South Africa, pierced shells and small pieces of ochre (red Haematite) etched with simple geometric patterns have been found in a 75,000-year-old layer of sediment. Keep in mind that Paleolithic people engaged in a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle and therefore the objects that they created were typically small and portable; worn, held, or placed in a pouch.\r\n\r\nSome of the oldest known representational imagery comes from a broad swath of Europe (especially Southern France, Northern Spain, and Swabia, in Germany) including over two hundred caves with spectacular paintings, drawings and sculpture that are among the earliest undisputed examples of representational image-making. The oldest of these is may be a 2.4-inch tall\u00a0female figure carved out of mammoth ivory<\/a> that was found in six fragments in the Hohle Fels cave near Schelklingen in southern Germany. It dates to 35,000 B.C.E. But perhaps the most famous Paleolithic object is the nude figure sometimes called the Venus of Willendorf<\/em>. Watch this video to learn more about this object:\r\n\r\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ENAZqOoOVaI\r\n
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The caves at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc<\/a> (see the image below), Lascaux, Pech Merle, and Altamira<\/a>\u00a0contain the best known examples of prehistoric painting and drawing. Here are remarkably evocative renderings of animals and some humans that employ a complex mix of naturalism and abstraction. Archeologists that study Paleolithic (old stone age) era humans, believe that the paintings discovered in 1994, in the cave at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc in the Ard\u00e8che 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.<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\"Cave\r\nWhat 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 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 ever-present.\r\n\r\nThe 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<\/i> 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 shown above 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.\r\n\r\nIn 2009, Dr. Randell White, Professor of Anthropology at NYU, 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 tracks of a wolf. There is also a foot print thought to have been made by an eight-year-old boy.\r\n

The Neolithic: A Settled Life<\/h2>\r\nWhen people think of the Neolithic era, they often think of Stonehenge, the iconic image\u00a0of this early era. Dating\u00a0to approximately 3000 B.C.E. and set on Salisbury Plain in\u00a0England, it is a structure larger\u00a0and more complex than anything built before it in Europe.\r\n\r\nStonehenge is an example of the cultural\u00a0advances brought about by the Neolithic\u00a0revolution\u2014the most important development in\u00a0human history. The way we live today,\u00a0settled in homes, close to other people in towns and cities, protected by laws, eating\u00a0food grown on farms, and with leisure time to learn, explore and invent is all a result\u00a0of the Neolithic revolution, which occurred approximately\u00a011,500-5,000 years ago. The\u00a0revolution which led to our way of life was the development of the technology needed\u00a0to plant and harvest crops and to domesticate\u00a0animals.\r\n\u00a0<\/b>\r\nBefore the Neolithic revolution, it's likely you would have lived with your extended family\u00a0as a nomad, never staying anywhere for more than a few months, always living in\u00a0temporary shelters, always searching for food and never owning anything you couldn\u2019t\u00a0easily pack in a pocket or a sack. The change to the Neolithic way of life was huge and\u00a0led to many of the pleasures (lots of food, friends and a comfortable home) that we\u00a0still enjoy today.\r\n\r\n\"Stonehenge<\/a>\r\n

Neolithic Art<\/h2>\r\nThe massive changes in the way people lived also changed the\u00a0types\u00a0of art they made.\u00a0Neolithic sculpture became bigger, in part, because people didn\u2019t have to carry\u00a0it\u00a0around anymore; pottery became more widespread and was used to store food\u00a0harvested\u00a0from farms. This is\u00a0when alcohol was invented and when architecture, and its interior\u00a0and exterior decoration,\u00a0first appears. In short, people settle down and begin to live in\u00a0one place, year\u00a0after year.\r\n\r\n<\/b>It seems very unlikely that Stonehenge could have been made by earlier, Paleolithic,\u00a0nomads. It would have been a waste to invest so much time and energy building a\u00a0monument in a place to which they might never return or might only return\u00a0infrequently. After all, the effort to build it was\u00a0extraordinary. Stonehenge is approximately 320 feet in circumference and the stones\u00a0which compose the outer ring\u00a0weigh as much as 50 tons; the small stones, weighing\u00a0as much as 6 tons, were quarried\u00a0from as far away as 450 miles. The exact meaning and use of Stonehenge are not clear, but\u00a0the design, planning and execution could have only been carried out by a\u00a0culture in which\u00a0authority was unquestioned. Here is a culture that was\u00a0able to rally\u00a0hundreds\u00a0of people\u00a0to\u00a0perform very hard work for extended\u00a0periods of time. It is likely that Stonehenge was used for rituals related to death and the afterlife and therefore had at least in part a religious function-- another element of most Neolithic cultures.\r\n\r\n\"Plastered<\/a>\r\n

Plastered Skulls<\/h2>\r\nThe Neolithic period is also important because it is when we first find good evidence\u00a0for religious practice, a perpetual inspiration for the fine arts. Perhaps most fascinating\u00a0are the plaster skulls found around the area of the Levant, at six sites,\u00a0including Jericho\u00a0in Israel. At this time in the Neolithic, c. 7000-6,000 B.C.E., people\u00a0were often buried\u00a0under\u00a0the floors of homes, and in some cases their skulls were\u00a0removed and covered\u00a0with\u00a0plaster in order to create very life-like faces, complete with\u00a0shells inset for eyes\u00a0and\u00a0paint to imitate hair and moustaches.\r\n\r\nThe traditional interpretation of these\u00a0the skulls has been that they offered a means of\u00a0preserving and worshiping male ancestors. However,\u00a0recent research has shown that\u00a0among the sixty-one plastered skulls that have been\u00a0found, there is a generous number\u00a0that come from the bodies of women and children. Perhaps the skulls are\u00a0not so much\u00a0religious objects but rather powerful images made to aid in mourning lost\u00a0loved ones.\u00a0Neolithic peoples didn't have written language, so we may never know.1\r\n<\/sup>\r\n1<\/sup>\u00a0The earliest example of writing develops in Sumer in Mesopotamia in the late 4th\u00a0millennium B.C.E. However, there are scholars that believe that earlier proto-writing\u00a0developed during the Neolithic period.\r\n\r\nhttps:\/\/youtu.be\/ld8kHvz1yN4","rendered":"

The Paleolithic:\u00a0A Nomadic Life<\/h2>\n

Humans make art. We do this for many reasons and with whatever technologies are available to us. Extremely old, non-representational ornamentation has been found across the Middle East and Africa. The oldest firmly-dated<\/em> 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<\/a> in South Africa, pierced shells and small pieces of ochre (red Haematite) etched with simple geometric patterns have been found in a 75,000-year-old layer of sediment. Keep in mind that Paleolithic people engaged in a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle and therefore the objects that they created were typically small and portable; worn, held, or placed in a pouch.<\/p>\n

Some of the oldest known representational imagery comes from a broad swath of Europe (especially Southern France, Northern Spain, and Swabia, in Germany) including over two hundred caves with spectacular paintings, drawings and sculpture that are among the earliest undisputed examples of representational image-making. The oldest of these is may be a 2.4-inch tall\u00a0female figure carved out of mammoth ivory<\/a> that was found in six fragments in the Hohle Fels cave near Schelklingen in southern Germany. It dates to 35,000 B.C.E. But perhaps the most famous Paleolithic object is the nude figure sometimes called the Venus of Willendorf<\/em>. Watch this video to learn more about this object:<\/p>\n