Old and Fat:  Were there obese people 35,000 years ago?

Flutes Offer Clues to Stone-Age Music

The Chauvet Cave has a fantastic website, in English.  When you click on “Visit the Cave” in the bottom right, the site takes you to a highly comprehensible plan of the cave with informative click-able views. 

Following my standard procedure, I began with the photograph in Gardner’s- the Panel of the Horses in Figure 1-12 (Here is the image on the official website of the same painting).  First I showed a detail of the confronted rhinoceroses and asked for a student to describe what s/he saw.  We noticed their slight overlapping and the differentiation in the rendering of the legs closer to the viewer from those farther, and here began our semester-long discussion of the representation of space.  We then shifted our gaze upward and looked at the horses, and then to the bulls/aurochs.   At this point, I just elicited a simple description.

Then I projected onto the screen a plan of the cave and led them on this plan to the location of the painting reproduced in Gardner’s - the Hillaire Chamber.  I oriented the students within this chamber toward the north wall, flanked by the entrances to the Skull Chamber and the Megaceros Chamber.  Then I showed a view of the north wall, but showing only the area between these two entrances.  This view amazes me.  The alcove at the center gives this wall the appearance of an intentionally highlighted location.  (Please note that the alcove does not appear clearly in the image to which I link.) 

So then we looked at the other painted animals to the right of the alcove, the Panel of the Cervids, and then in the alcove itself, although the images therein do not photograph easily. 

At this point, I introduced the notion of program.  It is audacious to speak of program and cave paintings in the same class, but this wall, to me, is clearly an intentional assemblage of images, which is the loosest definition of program. 

But to qualify this, I returned to the Panel of the Horses.  I showed the students a photograph of some animal figures incised above the aurochs.  Here then enters the material/archaeological evidence.  I showed a series of images from the above-mentioned book that recreate the phases in which the Panel of the Horses was painted.  The first two images show a bear scratching the wall and then the incised animal figures, and the sequence continues through nine phases.  The question then arises whether in each new phase, the painter responded to the pre-existing imagery. This makes for a compelling discussion.

N.B.  The Bradshaw Foundation also publishes much useful on the Chauvet Cave as well as on other prehistoric sites. 

I did not, however, discuss these objects beyond demonstrating their scale and discussing each object’s monumental or miniature qualities.

But as I prepared, I came across the following useful websites, which I happily share.

The Stadt Museum in Ulm has a highly informative website on the Lion Man.  They have translated an introductory page into English, but leave the remainder in German.  They provide fascinating details, but you may only save these images through copying your screen (Control + Prt Sc).  The Natural History Museum in Viennaoffers much less on the Venus of Willendorf. 

For images, Wikimedia Commons has many, including a nice image from the side and back.  I always show other angles, if I can find them, for few it always interests me to see what viewpoints the carver intended.

Prehistoric art finds many proponents on the internet.  Christopher Witcombe, of Art History Resources on the Web fame, has published a brief illustrated essay on the Venus of Willendorf on his website, in the traditional art history survey style.  A poem by Yusef Komunyakaa published by the Atlantic monthly demonstrates the popularity of the object as well as offers a surprisingly perceptive description.  But, in general with such enigmatic works, I tread gently and prefer the insights that the students can gain through their own examination of the object.

In this first class, before the examination of one particular object or monument and as part of the training of the students in their use of the survey text, I would have the students reorder the works presented in the text according to their actual chronology.  Gardner’s seldom presents the works in their actual chronological order, and this misleads the inattentive reader.  We must therefore develop the students’ awareness of the chronology of works of art, for Gardner’s fails on this account. The previous edition presented an abbreviated timeline at the end of each chapter, but the newest edition lacks such a gesture. 

The carved works, by chance, appear in chronological order.  The cave paintings have no such luck.  Special sections isolate the oldest cave paintings toward the end, and the main text begins with the cave first to be discovered, but the last to be painted. 

First, I would project on the screen the cave paintings in the order in which they appear in the book and ask the students put them in chronological order.  This activity should encourage some fresh discussions about style and assumptions about its development.  I would then reveal that the cave paintings, in chronological order, begin with the ChauvetCave, follow with Peche-Merle, and end with Lascaux and Altamira.  The implications of their dating according to scientific evidence should contrast with their dating according to assumptions about stylistic development.

Then I would reshuffle all the works.  The Lion Man and the Paintings at the Chauvet Cave together form the beginning of paleolithic art in Western Europe, dating to 30,000-28,000.  The Venus of Willendorf, the relief carvings from Laussel, and the cave paintings from Peche-Merle date to the later 30th millennium BCE.  Finally, the paintings of Lascaux and Altamira, the bison spear thrower, and the relief carvings of Le Tuc d’Audoubert belong to the second half of the 20th millennium.  The second awareness that I explicitly cultivate in my students is that of scale.  The new Gardner’s includes a scale with each figure.  But even this takes some training to understand.  Rather, I would require the students to purchase a sewing tape measure, such as the Spring Fiberglass Tape Measure-60″, and would then model its constant use in class.  The captions in Gardner’s are extremely helpful in this regard, as they now indicate the length of particular figures in the cave painting. 

So in this first class, rather than explaining the importance of scale, I would ask the students to arrange the three carved portable objects – the Lion Man, the Venus of Willendorf, and the Bison Spearthrower – according to their height.  This can lead to a discussion of how certain features give an object a monumental or miniature appearance.  But then, out come the tape measures and discussion turns to the deceptiveness of cropped photos in textbooks!

Finally, the final awareness to develop in the students is that of period.  So I would also include among preliminary tasks a discussion of what defines the paleolithic (and would return to it at the end of class).  The textbooks do generally deliver in this regard, but students often skim through these passages (if they read them at all).  A good perpetual reading assignment would be for the students to identify the features of the period(s) under consideration. 

Gardner’s chapter on African art only covers one rock painting from Tassili n’Ajjer in Algeria, ca. 6000-4000 BCE (Fig. 15-2), but Stokstad also includes an incised ocher plaque, ca. 70,000 BCE, from the Blombos Cave in South Africa (Fig. 13-2), in its chapter on African Art.  Adams’ Art Across Time does not take a global perspective, but includes small sections throughout the text, called “Windows on the World”, which actually facilitate meaningful chronological connections between western and non-western civilizations.  To accompany the prehistoric chapter, Adams offers three pages on the rock paintings of Australia. The potential for a truly global treatment of prehistoric art is entirely within reach.

As a rule, however, I did not present monuments or objects in class that Gardner’s did not also cover.  I wanted the students to have a point of reference in the textbook for any image that I showed in class. So, sadly, this rock from the Apollo 11 Cave in Namibia remained a token, for to incorporate more meaningfully the Paelolithic art of Africa would require more monuments and objects than Garnder’s provides.

For those who do not adhere to this rule, The Metropolitan Museum of Art has published on-line the text of a lecture on the earliest African art by Ian Tattersall, “Africa: Continent of Origins,” from which an effort to incorporate the earliest African art could begin.  This lecture accompanied the exhibition, Genesis: Ideas of Origin in African Sculpture. 

Now, many months later, I may have a change of heart.  First, an archaeological context permits us to speculate that some creature actually preserved the pebble.  Perhaps, rather than describing it as the ante-type of Duchamp’s ready-mades, one could pose the question of how this pebble does in fact differ from the recognition of a familiar shape in a cloud formation, for this pebble does not represent some universal timeless phenomenon, but has an archaeological context that reveals its use, and a discussion of this discovery of meaning through the reconstruction of context creates an ideal prelude to the study of ancient and medieval art.  Furthermore, the findspot of the pebble, South Africa, opens our mind to the existence of paleolithic art beyond Europe.

Web resources include material on the website of Jeffrey K. McKee, a professor of Anthropology at Ohio State University.  A page of the website of the Australian Rock Art Research Association, headed by Robert Bednarik, also provides useful analysis.   In each instance, appearance belies its authority.

On a side note, that the caption in Gardner’s does not identify the Natural History Museum in London as the holder of this pebble surprises me.

Click on chart for clear view: