Chapter 1:
Prehistoric Art in Europe
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Art History 1
In this Chapter You Will...
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• Be able to examine the origins of art in the prehistoric past.
• Discover the location and motifs of Paleolithic cave art and assess
the range of scholarly interpretations for them.
In this Chapter You Will...
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• Investigate the early use of architecture in domestic and sacred contexts,
including megalithic monuments such as Stonehenge.
In this Chapter You Will...
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• Explore the use and meaning of human figurines in the
Paleolithic and Neolithic periods.
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In this Chapter You Will...
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• Be able to trace the emergence of pottery making and
metalworking and examine the earliest works made of fired clay
and hammered gold.
What is Prehistory?
• Prehistory includes all of human existence before the emergence of writing;
long before that, however, people were carving objects, painting images,
and creating shelters and other structures
Discovering Ancient Art
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• In the Chauvet Cave in southeastern France we find images of horses,
deer, mammoths, aurochs, and other animals that lived 30,000 years ago
covering the walls and ceilings.
What’s so special about ancient art?
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• It is important to realize that 30,000 years ago our ancestors were not
making “works of art”
• Things we view as “art” today, may have only been tools of necessity or
survival for their ancient makers.
Learning from the Past:
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• Art historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists use ancient art- along
with fossils, pollen and artifacts- to help understand early human life and
culture
How Early Art is Dated
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• Relative dating
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• Absolute dating
• Radiometric dating
• Radiocarbon dating
Homo sapiens & Homo sapiens sapiens
• The species called Homo sapiens are said to have appeared about 400,000
years ago
• The subspecies to which we belong, Homo sapiens sapiens evolved about
120,000 to 100,000 years ago
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Movement of Modern Humans
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The Stone Age
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• Researchers divide the Stone Age into the Paleolithic & the
Neolithic periods
• Paleolithic (from the Greek paleo- “old”, & lithos- “stone”)
• Neolithic (from the Greek neo- “new”)
• Paleolithic has three phases: Lower, Middle, and Upper
(Upper being the most recent, lower is the earliest)
Prehistoric Art
• In Australia, some of the oldest images date 50,000 to 40,000 years ago.
• In western Arnhem land, rock art image of the Rainbow Serpent have their origins in
prehistory, & were perhaps first created during times of substantial changes in the
environment.
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Prehistoric Art
• Africa, as well, is home to ancient rock art in both its northern & southern regions.
• Archaeologists associate the arrival of Homo sapiens sapiens in these regions with the
advent of image making.
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The Paleolithic Period
• Human beings made tools long before they made “art”
• 2 million years ago during the Lower Paleolithic period in Africa, early
humans made tools using flint
• “Art”, or image making, is the hallmark of the Upper Paleolithic period
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Paleolithic Hand-Axe
• By 1.65 million years ago, significant changes in our ancestors’
cognitive abilities and manual dexterity can be seen in
sophisticated stone tools, such as the teardrop-shaped hand-axes
that have been found at sites across Eurasia.
Neanderthals
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• Evolutionary changes took place and by 400,000 years ago,
during the late Middle Paleolithic period, Homo sapiens
subspecies called Neanderthals inhabited Europe
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The Homo sapiens sapiens
• Homo sapiens sapiens- fully modern humans- must have
had social organization, rituals, & beliefs that led them to
create art.
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Decorated Ocher, Blombos Cave, South Africa
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• The world’s earliest pieces of art come from South
Africa: two 77,000 year old, engraved blocks of red
ocher.
Shelter or Architecture?
• Architecture: the enclosure of spaces with at least some aesthetic intent
• In the Upper Paleolithic period, humans in some regions used great
ingenuity to build shelters that were far from simple.
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Mammoth-Bone Houses
• The bone framework was probably covered with animal hides & turf.
• Most activities centered around the inside fire pit, or hearth, where food was prepared
& tools were fashioned.
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Artifacts or Works of Art?
• These self-contained 3-dimensional pieces are examples of sculpture in the round.
• Carvers also produced relief sculpture, which the surrounding material is carved
away, forming a background that sets off the figure
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The Lion-Human
• Example of sculpture in the round- the Lion-Human- depicts a human figure
with a feline head
• Made around 30,000 - 26,000 BCE & found during an excavation in
Hohlenstein-Stadel, Germany
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Female Figures
• While a number of figurines representing men have been found recently,
most human figures from the Upper Paleolithic period are female.
• The most famous female figure, The Woman from Willendorf, from Austria,
dates from about 22,000-21,000 BCE
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Woman from Willendorf
• The female attributes have been exaggerated by giving it
large breasts, a big belly with deep navel, wide hips, dimpled
knees and buttocks and solid thighs
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Understanding the Female Figures
• The most recent analysis of the Paleolithic female sculptures has replaced
the traditional fertility interpretation with more nuance understandings of
how and why the human figure is represented in this way, and who may
have had these kinds of objects made.
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Who are these Female Figures?
• Art historian Leroy McDermott suggests that the body-shape of the
female figures tell us a great deal about who made them.
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Woman from Dolni Vestonice
• The site of Dolni Vestonice is important because it marks a very early date
(23,000 BCE) for humans to use fire to make durable objects out of
mixtures of water and soil.
• By mixing soil with water and placing the wet figures in a hot kiln to bake,
the makers were not intending to create durable, well-fired statues.
Woman from Brassempouy
• It’s a tiny ivory head (1 1/4 in.) & dates as early as 30,000 BCE
• The carver captured the essence of a head in what psychologists
call the memory image- those generalized features that reside in
our standard memory of a human head
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Discovering Cave Painting
• No one knew of prehistoric cave painting until one day in 1879, a young girl,
exploring with her father, Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, in northern Spain,
crawled through a small opening in the ground and found herself in a
chamber with ceilings covered with painted animals
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Cave Painting Questioned
• Marcelino told authorities about the paintings and published his discovery
the following year.
• Few people believed that these amazing works could not have been done
by “primitive” people and were originally called a hoax
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Explaining Cave Art
• Since the discovery of Altamira, anthropologists and art historians
have come up with several hypotheses to explain the existence of
cave art.
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What do Cave Paintings Mean?
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• Early scholars proposed that the cave paintings might be products
both of totemistic rites to strengthen clan bonds & increase
ceremonies to enhance the fertility of animals used for food.
Other Possible Meanings
• In 1903, French scholar Salomon Reinach suggested that cave paintings were
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expressions of sympathetic magic
• Others believed they were also used for initiation rites & as places of worship
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Meanings Change...
• Scholars have always agreed that cave art must have special meaning.
• There is evidence of people returning to these caves over several
generations, in some cases over thousands of years.
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Chauvet Cave
• The earliest known site of prehistoric cave paintings today was discovered in
December 1994 in southeastern France.
• The caves hold hundreds of paintings with dramatic images of animals grazing,
running, or resting.
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Pech-Merle Cave, Dordodne, France 25,000- 24,000
BCE
• A cave site in southern France where images of animals, handprints, &
nearly 600 geometric symbols have been found in thirty different parts of
the underground complex
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Prehistoric Wall Painting Methods
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• The best-known cave paintings are those found in 1940 at Lascaux in southern
France.
• The Lascaux artists painted cows, bulls, horses and deer along the natural ledges of
the rock.
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Scenes from Lascaux Cave
• One scene at Lascaux was discovered in a remote setting on a wall at the bottom of a 16 foot
shaft that contained a stone lamp and spears.
• Bird-Headed man with Bison dates from 15,000 BCE.
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Altamira - Bison
• The cave paintings at Altamira have been dated to about 12,500 BCE.
• To produce the herd of bison on the ceiling of the main cavern artists used red &
brown ochers to paint the large areas of the animals’ shoulders, backs, & flanks, then
added details in black & brown.
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Cave Sculpture
• Caves were often adorned with relief sculpture as well as painting.
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Lamp with Ibex Design, 15,000-13,000 BCE
• Painters & sculptors worked not only in large caverns but
also in far back smaller chambers and recesses, so the use
of stone lamps such as this one helped them see.
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The Neolithic Period
• To determine the onset of the Neolithic Period in a specific region, archaeologists look for evidence
of three conditions:
– One: an organized system of agriculture
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– Two: the maintenance of herds of domesticated animals
– Three: permanent, year-round settlements
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New ways of living...
• People responded to these new conditions by inventing new
hunting technologies or improving old ones.
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Neolithic Farming
• As larger numbers of people became farmers, they began to live in villages & produce more than
enough food to support themselves.
• Over time early societies became more complex and by the end of the period, villages were larger,
trading developed and advanced building technology produced awe-inspiring architecture.
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Neolithic Architecture
• At the site of Lepenski Vir, on the Serbian banks of the Danube River, rows
of trapezoidal buildings made of wooden posts, branches, mud and clay
face the river from which inhabitants took large river fish.
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Human-Fish Sculpture, Lepenski Vir, Serbia
6300-5500 BCE
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Architecture
• Early structures were rectangular with a row of posts down the
center supporting a ridgepole- a long horizontal beam against
which the slanting roof poles were braced
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Architecture
• Walls were made of wattle and daub- branches
woven in a basketlike pattern and covered in mud or
clay
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• Most likely they were roofed with thatch- a plant material
such as reeds or straw tied over a framework
Ceremonial & Tomb Architecture
• Examples known as megalithic architecture, mega- “large” litho- “stone”
• The simplest type of megalithic tomb was the dolmen, built on the post and lintel principle
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Stonehenge
• Stonehenge from Salisbury Plain, England, 2900-1500 BCE, has stirred the
public’s imagination for years
• A henge is a circle of stones or posts, often surrounded by a ditch with builtup embankments
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Durrington Walls, 2600 BCE
• The settlements built near Stonehenge follow circular layouts,
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connecting them in plan to the ceremonial site
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Sculpture & Ceramics
• Ceramics- wares of baked clay- display a high degree of technical skill and
aesthetic imagination
• Pottery- includes all baked clay wares except porcelain, which is the most
refined product of ceramic technology
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Early Pottery: From Japan’s Jomon Culture, 12,000 BCE
• The “pot revolution” marked a shift from the complete
reliance on skin, textile, and wooden containers to the use of
pots made by firing clay.
Early Pottery: Franchthi Cave, Greece 6500 BCE
• Archaeologist Karen Vitelli’s detailed studies of the early Neolithic site at
Franchthi Cave, Greece, have shown that pottery making at this site started with
an experimental stage during which nonspecialist potters produced a small
number of pots.
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Human Figure, Jordan 6500 BCE
• In addition to firing clay to make pots, cups, pitches, and large storage
containers, Neolithic people made thousands of miniature figures of humans.
• In Jordan in the Near East, at the site of Ain Ghazal, archaeologist Gary
Rollefson found 32 extraordinary Human Figures.
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New Metallurgy, Enduring Stone
• The technology of metallurgy is closely allied to that of
ceramics.
• The age of metals made its appearance in much of Europe
about 3000 BCE.
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Gold Scepters, Varna, 3800 BCE
• While the cemetery consisted of several hundred burials of men, women and children,
a few special burials contained gold and copper artifacts.
• Objects such as gold-covered scepters, bracelets, beads, arm rings, lip-plugs, and
copper axes and chisels mark out the graves of a few adult males.
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The Bronze Age
• Bronze- an alloy- or mixture, of tin and copper
• The Bronze Age is the period that followed the introduction of
metalworking.
• The introduction of bronze, especially for weapons such as
daggers and short swords, change the peoples of Europe in
fundamental ways.
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Rock Carvings: Boat and Sea Battle, Sweden 1500-500
BCE
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• Bronze Age artistry is not limited to metalworking; indeed, some of the most
exciting imagery of the period is found in the rock art of northern Europe.
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• Remember that these slides are ONLY brief
summaries of the chapter- you are responsible for
reading each chapter fully from the textbook.
• While reading the textbook, take note of bold key
vocabulary terms to help you study as well.
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