PREHISTORIC ART- (a time before writing and recorded history)
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is
worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?" -
Cicero
If people lacked this capacity to receive the thoughts conceived by the men who preceded them
and to pass on to others their own thoughts, men would be like wild beasts, or like Kaspar
Houser.
Prehistoric art can be several things, from megaliths to little stone figurines, to paintings on the
walls of caves.
The term “prehistoric” indicates that the culture that produced the artwork did not have a written
language.
Stone Age
• “The first known period of prehistoric human culture characterized by the use of stone
tools.”
• Earliest Stone Age art comes from Southern Africa
• Variety of materials used (clay, stone, cave paintings, relief sculptures)
Types of Art:
1. Portable – figurative
2. Stationary – non-figurative
Major Art Forms:
1. Sculptures & Figurines
2. Cave Art
3. Megaliths
Dating Conventions and Abbreviations
• B.C.=before Christ
B.C.E.=before the Common Era
• A.D.=Anno Domini (in the year of our Lord)
C.E.=Common Era
• c. or ca.= circa (approximately)
• C.=century
Outline of Prehistoric Period
1. Paleolithic
• Lower
• Middle
• Upper
2. Neolithic
Paleolithic Art
Paleo (Greek) = Old
Lithic (Greek) = Stone
Paleolithic = Old Stone Age
40,000 BCE – 8,000 BCE in Near East
40,000 BCE – 4,000 BCE in Europe
Sculptures
• Oldest surviving art objects
• Made from bone, ivory, stone, or antlers
• Either engraved (by incising an outlined figure with a sharp tool), carved in deep
relief or fully rounded three-dimension
• Lion-Human is half man, half beast
Eg.-
1. Lion-Human
• From Hohlenstein-Stadel (cave), Germany
• ca. 30,000-26,000 B.C.E.
• mammoth ivory
• 11 3/8 in. high
2. Woman “Venus” of Willwndorf
• c. 28,000 – 21, 000 BCE
• Limestone
• Emphasized reproductive parts
• Deemphasized face, arms, legs
3. Bison c 13,000 BCE (Spain)
4. Woman from Brassempouy, France, c 22,000 BCE (ivory, 1¼ “)
Prehistoric Art Tools
• Cave artists used charcoal to outline the walls; sometimes they incised the wall with
sharp stones or charcoal sticks
• The “paints” used were ground minerals like red & yellow ochre
• The minerals were applied directly on the damp limestone walls
Prehistoric Paintings
Characteristics
1. Images of animals dominate
• with black outlines
• realistically represented
2. Images Of humans
• stick figures
• little detail
3. Handprints
• negative prints
• left hand
Cave Art Theories
• The first “paintings” were probably made 15,000 years ago
• Caves were not dwellings
o Prehistoric people lived migratory lives following herds of animals
• Pictures of bison, deer, horses, cattle, mammoths & boars are in the most remote
recesses of the caves, from the entrance
• Scholars proposed the social function of art lead to rites and increase ceremonies used
to enhance fertility
• Paintings placed deep inside the cave
• Used to ensure a successful hunt?
• Ancestral animal worship?
• Shamanism
• A religion based on the idea that forces of nature can be controlled by a highly regarded
religious figure called a shaman
• Archeologists speculate the animal images were meant to guarantee a successful hunt
• Drawing a picture of it gave you power over it?
• Sympathetic magic
• Artwork has been depicted with realistic features that enables scholars to identify
animals
Paleolithic Cave Art
• Focus on Southern France and Northern Spain
• At least 300 sites discovered
• Still rare considering they range in date from ca. 30,000 BCE – ca. 10,000 BCE
• Most are paintings on walls (deep in caves); some relief sculptures (in clay), some
wall engravings
• Paintings red or black (red or yellow ochre, iron oxides like hematite, charcoal or
manganese dioxide)
• Crushed into powder and mixed with binder (water) then applied with brushes made
of twigs, reeds
• Or blown onto surface through hollowed reed or bone
• Illuminated work through stone lamps using fat as fuel
• Could complete a wall in a day
• These deep, dark spaces uninhabited by man
Eg.
1. Lascaux Caves
• 15,000-13,000 BCE, Dordogne, France
• Largest bull at Lascaux is 17’ long
• No compositional adjustment to suggest perspective or other naturalistic devices
suggests a conceptual orientation
• Paint is made of natural products
• Charcoal, iron ore, plants bound with animal fat
• 650 paintings
• Cows, bulls, horses, and deer
• Figures are overlapping
• Negative handprints: signatures?
2. Altamira, Northern Spain
Bison Ceiling
Artists used the irregularities of the cave to create sculptural effects by painting over them
Neolithic Age
Neo (Greek) = New
Lith (Greek) = Stone
Neolithic = New Stone Age
8,000 BCE – 3,000 BCE in the Near East
4,000 BCE – 2,000 BCE in Europe
Neolithic Revolution
End of Ice Age (100,000 – 8000 BCE) brought ability to search for new food
Systemic Agriculture – Making the conscious decision to plant & grow food
Domestication – Raising goats, sheep, pigs & cattle
Development of permanent, year-round settlements (and eventually, civilization)
Neolithic People
Cultivated land
Raised livestock
Live in organized settlements
Created occupations = division of labor
Built the first homes
Neolithic Architecture
Shelters were huts built with animal bones
Places of worship were built to last!
Ḉatalhöyük
Neolithic community from 7,000 – 5,000 BCE in present-day Turkey
First excavated in 1958
One of first city dwellings
Houses constructed by timber frame and mud-brick
Plastered walls with platforms
Dead buried beneath floor
Walls typically decorated with mural paintings and plaster reliefs
Shrines?
Shows striking change since Paleolithic cave painting
Regular use of human figure (alone and in groups)
Introduction of pictorial narrative
Organized hunting party
Heads and facial features delineated
Details include bows, arrows, and clothing
Painted on prepared (plaster) surface (vs. directly on wall)
Use of composite frontal and profile views (head in profile, torso frontal, profile view
for arms and legs)
Composite view would become standard (pictorial definition of subject) for millennia
Megalithic Architecture
“Large stone” (mega + lithos)
Powerful religious or political figures and beliefs was the impetus for these massive
building projects
2 types:
Dolmen – large, vertical stones with a covering slab like a giant table (mounded over
with dirt to form a cairn)
Menhir – single stone set on its end
Positioned:
Henge – circular arrangement of stones
Alignment – in rows
Menhir
large individual stone placed on end alone or in rows
Dolmen-
is a type of single-chamber megalithic tomb, usually consisting of three or more upright stones
supporting a large flat horizontal capstone (table)
Dolmen Menhir
Post-and-lintel architecture - the most basic
Post -two uprights
Lintel - horizontal on top
Mortise and Tenon
Cromlech
A circle of megaliths with lintels placed on top
Structures were aligned to important dates: solstices, equinoxes, and lunar.
Eg- Stonehenge, c. 2100 BCE, Wilshire, England
Stonehenge (c. 3100 BCE)
Post and lintel construction
Megaliths are 21 to 24 feet tall, including height of lintel, and buried four feet in the
ground
Solar and lunar orientation
Stones dragged from far away to this site
Circle of megaliths embrace structure, enclosing it
Inside circle of megaliths is a larger horseshoe-shaped group of megaliths which
frame an “altar stone”
Skara Brae Architecture
Neolithic settlement in northern Scotland
3100 and 2600 BCE
Corbeling – layers of stones are piled on top of each other to form walls without
mortar
