Journal of Social Archaeology
ARTICLE
Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)
ISSN 1469-6053 Vol 6(1): 119–141 DOI: 10.1177/1469605306060571
Art, crafts and Paleolithic art
OSCAR MORO ABADÍA
École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France, and Instituto Internacional de
Investigaciones Prehistóricas de Cantabria (Becario Fundación Marcelino Botín),
Spain
ABSTRACT
This article initially examines the foundations of our modern understanding of Paleolithic art. Taking the period 1860–1905 into account,
I show that the depiction of Paleolithic art elaborated by Western
archaeologists at that time was largely based on the projection of
categories used to characterize craft at the end of the nineteenth
century with prehistoric art. As I depict in the final section of the
article, the weakening of evolutionism and the recognition of the
complexity of primitive societies at the turn of the century provoked
a new definition of Paleolithic art, which included cave paintings.
KEY WORDS
craft ● fine arts
●
Paleolithic art ● progress
●
upper-middle class
■ THE INVENTION OF PRIMITIVE SOCIET Y
When we try to go back in time so far from us, how may difficulties stop us!
Most of the monuments (remains) have disappeared, and even those that
remain have been damaged, defiled by the prejudices of following ages.
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Unable to explain the origins of society, but refusing to ignore it, we have
represented ancient barbarism with reference to modern civilization.
(Michelet, 1827: 173; emphasis added).
In this extract from the introduction to the first French edition of Vico’s
Scienza nouva, Jules Michelet anticipated two fashionable ideas from the
end of the twentieth century. First, Michelet suggested that primitive society
is a European representation or, in Adam Kuper’s words, a Western invention (Kuper, 1988). In recent years, several anthropological and prehistorical works have suggested that primitive society is not an inert fact of nature,
but rather is a historical representation constructed by archaeologists and
anthropologists (Clifford, 1986, 1988; Errington, 1998; Fardon, 1990; Hodder
et al., 1995; Kuper, 1988; Nederveen Pieterse, 1992; Stoczkowski, 1994;
Torgovnik, 1990). Second, Michelet proposed that ancient civilization had
been imagined with reference to modern civilization. Certainly, the idea of
primitive society was profoundly modified by the irruption of modernity. To
define human antiquity, North Americans and Europeans conceived their
origins as an inverted image in the mirror of modern societies: ‘To counterpose to an enlightened Europe we produced an African heart of darkness;
to our rational, controlled west corresponded an irrational and sensuous
Orient; . . . our maturity might be contrasted with the childhood of a darker
humanity, but our youth and vigour distinguished us from the aged civilizations of the east whose splendour was past’ (Fardon, 1990: 6). This ‘modern
primitive society’, which emerged between 1850 and 1900, was constructed
by the confluence of several processes: a faith in science which reigned in
Western societies, the consolidation of progress as a ‘meta-narrative’ and the
development of archaeology and anthropology.
In light of these considerations, this article suggests several critical
propositions regarding the representation of primitive art. Taking the
period 1860–1905 into account, I examine the foundations of the Western
definitions of Paleolithic art. I suggest this process was related to two
central questions: first, the emergence of progress as a ‘meta-narrative’ of
Western societies during the nineteenth century. The belief in progress as
a rational advancement through increments of perpetual improvement has
its origins in the Enlightenment thought of the eighteenth century.
However, it was only in the first half of the nineteenth century that the idea
of progress provided a general model in most Western disciplines of
knowledge (history, anthropology, archaeology, etc.). In this context, the
discovery of Paleolithic art in 1860 produced an important dilemma in the
rigid framework of evolutionism: How was it possible that such an
‘advanced’ activity as art existed in such ‘primitive’ times? This paradox is
related to the second process which I seek to analyze. In order to overcome
the seeming contradiction between art and primitive, Western societies
promoted a definition of Paleolithic art largely based on the projection of
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Arts, crafts and Paleolithic art
the concepts which structure our ‘modern system of art’ (Shiner, 2001: 3)
to the past. As Larry Shiner summarizes, ‘in the eighteenth century . . . the
concept of art was split apart generating the new category fine arts . . . as
opposed to crafts and popular arts’ (p. 5). Between 1860 and 1900, Western
archaeologists took this dichotomy as a given and defined Paleolithic art
based upon categories generally used to characterize crafts. The first artistic
objects associated with prehistoric human implements were depicted as
products of societies preserved in time, reflecting primitive impulses of
leisure common to all people. These works of art reflected the lowest stage
in the development of ‘civilized’ art. The final section of the article considers
how the weakening of evolutionism and the recognition of the complexity
of modern primitive societies at the beginning of the twentieth century
provoked a new definition of Paleolithic art, which included some prehistoric artistic phenomena, such as cave paintings, similar to present-day
conceptions of fine art.
■ THE AGE OF PROGRESS: BET WEEN 1800 AND 1880
Though it may be inaccurate to imagine the nineteenth century as a ‘wonderful century’, as Alfred Wallace deemed it in 1898 (for it was also an age
marked by revolution, political instability, conflicts of social values, etc.), the
history of Europe between 1800 and 1880 saw an unprecedented increase in
material wealth (Briggs, 1959) associated with the development of industry
and science. The impact of this industrialization is responsible for the
material, social and political changes that transformed Western societies for
two centuries. Though the traditional position that continental nations
imitated the British model of industrialization has been largely replaced by
the notion that industrial revolution took place simultaneously in several
parts of Europe (Cameron, 1985; O’Brien, 1986; Pollard, 1973), it is clear
that industrialization provoked a deep change in European life with wider
implications. New sources of energy (first coal and steam; later electricity)
replaced human and animal energy, resulting in a shift in the organization
of human labour. Steam power, along with improvements in road construction and boating, produced (or introduced) the mechanization of transport
(Whiting Fox, 1991: 76–80). Furthermore, during the nineteenth century
most important European cities were connected by roads and railways,
which were developed for the coal trade. These changes in transportation
made it possible to increase markets far beyond the border of one’s own
country.
This growing material prosperity of nineteenth century Western societies
was associated with a demographic revolution (Heywood, 1995: 198).
Indeed, between 1750 and 1850, the population in Europe doubled from
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146 million to 288 million (De Vries, 1984: 36). As a result of this demographic increment, the European landscape was profoundly modified. Circa
1800, most Europeans lived in rural towns and the majority worked the land
as peasants. There were fewer than ten capitals with more than one hundred
thousand people. Yet, by the end of the century, the population of Europe
had doubled and more than half lived in cities. The main consequence of
this urbanization was the burgeoning of a new industrial middle class (‘les
bourgeois’) and a new working class.
These industrial and demographic revolutions coincided with the rise of
modern science and the development of the scientific community. During
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Western societies largely assumed
that human reason was capable of discovering the natural laws that
governed the universe. Newton’s work, for instance, demonstrated that
nature was governed by basic rules that could be identified using the scientific method. The period also saw a spectacular development in all branches
of scientific knowledge. In physics, it was a ‘golden age’ for electricity and
magnetism: Alessandro Volta invented the voltaic pile in 1799; Christian
Ørsted discovered electromagnetism in 1820; Michael Faraday conceived
the first generator of electricity in 1831; Samuel F.B. Morse developed his
telegraph in 1837; Alexander Graham Bell made his first successful telephone experiment in 1876; Guglielmo Marconi sent the first tentative
wireless transmissions in 1895; in chemistry, John Dalton developed the
modern atomic theory (1803), and the Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleyev
drew up his periodic table of the elements (1869). Similarity, in the life
sciences, Louis Pasteur’s vaccine against rabies revolutionized medicine in
the 1880s; Gregor Mendel laid the foundations of genetics, and the publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin in 1859 marked a
milestone for biological thought.
This unprecedented scientific growth can be associated with an equally
unprecedented economic development, which in turn induced a mood of
euphoric superiority of the modern world in the upper and middle classes:
Our mail, our road, our printing have made almost all European citizens of
the same country. A new idea, an interesting discovery . . . was it born in
London or Paris? A few weeks later it reaches a peasant on the Danube, an
inhabitant of Rome, a subject in St. Petersburg, a slave in Constantinople . . .
Nowadays, a trip to Russia, to Germany, to Italy, to France, to England, or
even, should I say, around the world, is something that can be done in a few
weeks, a few months, a few years calculated to the nearest minute . . . It
would be impossible to calculate the heights which society can obtain, at
present let nothing be lost, let there be no way it is lost: this sends us out into
the infinite. (Chateaubriand, 1797: 256)
Even if the nineteenth century was not a happy time marked by a faith
in improvement (there was suspicion of material and technological
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Arts, crafts and Paleolithic art
development; Briggs, 1959: 1; Wiener, 1981: 5–7), the period between 1800
and 1870 can be defined as the age of progress (Bowler, 1989; Briggs, 1959;
Collins, 1964). Despite a minority of skeptics on progress such as Charles
Dickens, Matthew Arnold or Thomas Carlyle, the increase in material
wealth, the challenge to the aristocratic monopoly, and the rise of Western
power in the world provoked a widespread optimism among the European
upper-middle classes. For most of the upper-middle classes, it was enough
to open their eyes and ‘to see the improvement all around . . . cities increasing, cultivation extending, marts too small for the crowd of buyers and
sellers, harbours insufficient to contain the shipping, artificial rivers joining
the chief inland seats of industry to the chief seaports, streets better lighted,
houses better furnished, richer wares exposed to sale in statelier shops,
swifter carriages rolling along smoother roads’ (Macaulay, 1848–55 V: 2284).
Most important French and English historians of the time portray similar
hymns of progress (Buckle, 1885: 309; Cousin, 1828: 279; Guizot, 1828: 77;
Macaulay, 1830: 222; Michelet, 1829: 90).
■ PALEOLITHIC ART AS CRAFT: BET WEEN 1860 AND 1900
To consider the experience of living in a time of an unprecedented
economic, social and political growth is key to understanding the notion of
history dominant in Western societies during the nineteenth century.
Throughout this turbulent period, the history of the world was emphatically
the history of progress. Indeed, the idea of universal history (Cousin, 1828:
280; Quinet, 1827: 191) as a constant and irreversible movement from the
darkness of the first ages of humanity to the splendour of the modern world
appeared in the Enlightenment, during the eighteenth century. Vico’s
Scienza Nouva (1744), Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations
(1756) or Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit
(1785) all sought to trace the history of humanity through several different
stages. This unilinear evolutionism was present in most anthropological and
archaeological works from the second half of the nineteenth century. In the
field of anthropological studies, several works illustrated ‘the way up from
savagery to civilization through the slow accumulations of experimental
knowledge’ (Morgan, 1877: 3). Among these studies are Maine’s Ancient
Law (1861), Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht (1861), McLennan’s Primitive
Marriage (1865) and Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877). Each of these
authors called for an evolutionary understanding of societies. Unilinear
evolutionism had an even stronger impact in archaeology. An early example
of the influence of the idea of progress is within the work of Christian J.
Thomsen. Thomsen was the first to organize the collections of the Danish
National Museum of Copenhagen in a unilinear scheme of technological
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change, moving from the stone to bronze artifacts and ultimately to iron.
The museum opened to the public in 1819, and Thomsen’s Three-Age
System became quite influential in European archaeology in the nineteenth
century. In Britain, for instance, Daniel Wilson used this system to arrange
the Societies of Antiquaries of Scotland collections in Edinburgh. Wilson
also recommended that the British Museum reorganize their collections on
the basis of Thomsen’s Three-Age System. Similarly, John Lubbock
produced the most influential ‘hymn of praise of progress’ (Bowler, 1989:
81) at the end of the nineteenth century. His Prehistoric Times (Lubbock,
1865) suggested that humankind had developed from primitive savagery to
modern civilization through a steady linear progression. In France, the
chronology of De Mortillet (1872) defined a strictly unilinear evolutionism.
Perhaps the sole author who suggested a dual system based on the evolution of two parallel lines was the Belgian Édouard Dupont (1874: 145) – a
theory which was predictably not well received by the scientific community.
In order to understand how Paleolithic art was defined at the end of the
nineteenth century, it is important to stress that ‘art’ was generally
considered as a primary characteristic of the most developed societies (i.e.
Western societies). In this definitional context, the discovery of many
artistic objects associated with prehistoric human implements by Lartet and
Christy produced a contradiction which marked the period: ‘With the
knowledge that Paleolithic men were responsible for works of art, it became
essential to explain, somehow, how such an apparently “advanced” activity
could possibly have existed among such obviously “primitive” people’
(Ucko and Rosenfeld, 1967: 117). In short, the authentication of Paleolithic
art posed difficulties in the 1860s, for prehistoric humans had been defined
as primitive. In 1864, for instance, Hugh Falconer wrote that ‘if primeval
man really had made such progress in the conception of art, without having
yet attained the knowledge of metals, it will be as curious an anthropological phenomenon as are the art objects themselves, which express that
degree of luxury which ease, leisure, and comfort beget’ (Falconer, 1864:
630). In 1867, John Evans pointed out that ‘in looking at the state of civilization of these peoples of the reindeer period of the south of France, we are
struck with their skill, at all events in one of the fine arts. We find that they
were capable of producing carvings and drawings such as are rarely to be
found, even known, among savage tribes’ (Evans, 1867: 22). Some years
later, Édouard Dupont, a Belgian prehistorian, commented on the contradiction that exists between the works of art of primitive people and their
lack of metal implements (Dupont, 1872: 94). In 1880, Quiroga and Torres,
two Spanish scientists, discussed the same problematic in their report about
Altamira (Quiroga and Torres, 1880: 266). The examples are innumerable
(Cartailhac, 1889: 78; Girod and Massénat, 1900: 87; Lubbock, 1865: 303;
Nilsson, 1868: ix; Piette, 1894: 237).
To seek to make compatible the supposedly incompatible (i.e. the art
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Arts, crafts and Paleolithic art
and the primitive), anthropologists and archaeologists proposed a depiction
of Paleolithic art largely based on the projection to the characterization of
craft at the end of the nineteenth century onto the definition of primitive
art.1 To understand this process necessitates an initial examination of the
‘modern system of art’ (Kristeller, 1950).
As several authors have suggested, the contemporary Western understanding of art dates only from the eighteenth century (Becq, 1994;
Bourdieu, 1992; Mortensen, 1997; Woodmansee, 1994), when the traditional
concept of art was split into the categories of fine art and craft (Kristeller,
1950; Shiner, 2001). Until that time, the word ‘art’ had meant any human
skill, whether horse breaking, verse writing, or governing. Yet, during the
eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, a division separated fine art from
craft and artist from artisan. Why was the traditional concept of art replaced
by the modern system of art? Largely because of an interplay amidst institutional and socioeconomic factors. First, the new idea of fine art provided
a solution for several conceptual questions raised in previous centuries.
Second, the fine arts system was the result of a process of dissolution of
several structures of medieval society into distinct spheres of politics,
religion, science, and art. Third, the change was related to the rise of the
market economy and the middle classes. As a result of these processes,
throughout the eighteenth century, art was thus divided into the new
categories of the fine arts (which included poetry, painting, music, sculpture,
and architecture) as opposed to crafts and popular arts (pottery, jewelry,
embroidery, etc.). The former was associated with cerebral art (mind over
body), refined pleasure, originality, transcendental spirituality, inspiration,
geniality, individual creation, contemplative attitude, and freedom, while
the latter often referred to art requiring only skill and rules, ordinary
pleasure, repetitive imitation of models, mere use or entertainment, calculation, and reproductive imagination (Shiner, 2001: 5, 115).
Many authors writing during the latter half of the nineteenth century
commented on this split. In 1853, for instance, Victor Cousin (one of the
most influential French commentators on art at that time) wrote that:
The arts are considered the fine arts because their sole objective is to
produce a disinterested emotional representation of beauty, without regard
for the utility of the spectator nor of the artist. They are moreover
considered as the liberal arts because they are from free men and not slaves,
who bear their souls, charm and ennoble existence: from there derives the
sense and origin of these expressions of antiquity, artes liberales, artes
ingenuæ. There are arts without nobility, where their goal is practical and
material; we call these crafts . . . Veritable-real art can join, even shine, but
only in the appendages and in the details. (Cousin, 1853: 191)
One of the best examples characterizing the distinction between fine art
and craft during the second half of the nineteenth century was the creation
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of the Arts and Crafts Movement, promoted by William Morris (1834–96)
and John Ruskin (1819–1900). They dedicated themselves to attacking and
overcoming the separation of fine art from craft and the denigration of the
crafts and the crafts persons or artisans who made them. The fact that they
labored so hard, developing various organizations, as well as delivering
many lectures and writing books against the division between fine art and
craft, is the strongest argument that the split was a generally accepted
cultural fact. Several passages from the work of William Morris illustrate
this point. In his lecture ‘Art under Plutocracy’ delivered at Oxford
University (11 November 1883), Morris wrote that ‘art must be broadly
divided into two kinds, of which we may call the first Intellectual, and the
second Decorative Art’ (Morris, 1883: 759). In his essay The Lesser Arts of
Life, originally published in 1882, Morris speaks of the contrast between
the artist and the handicraftsman: ‘The artist came out from the handicraftsmen, and left them without hope of elevation, while he himself was
left without the help of intelligent, industrious sympathy’ (Morris, 1882:
753). A very different sort of thinker, the painter Paul Serusier, wrote in a
letter to a fellow painter, Maurice Denis, contrasting ‘I. ART a) immutable
principles b) personality’ with ‘II. CRAFT a) knowledge b) skill’ (Serusier,
1889: 1021).
Other tangible evidence of the split between fine art and craft is the fact
that in Britain, Germany, Austria and France there were separate schools
and museums for fine art and for the crafts (usually called ‘applied arts’ or
‘decorative arts’). For instance, the National Gallery in London held fine
art works like painting and sculpture and the Victoria and Albert Museum
(originally the South Kensington Museum) conserved ceramics, textiles, etc.
The South Kensington Museum opened in 1862 and similar museums for
applied art opened in Vienna in 1864, in Paris in 1864 and in Berlin in 1867.
Indeed, as the highly influential work of Clement Greenberg (1939)
attests (Greenberg assumes the distinction between serious modernist
painting and art based upon popular culture), the distinction between ‘high
art’ (assimilated to aesthetics) and ‘crafts’ or ‘popular arts’ (Carrier, 1996:
xviii) was completely consolidated by the beginning of the twentieth
century: ‘By the time Picasso had re-represented the human figure in Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon . . . the antagonistic relation of modernism to
popular culture was irreversible: it gradually led to almost complete bifurcation of serious and popular culture’ (Vargish, 1998: 448). This modern
system of art, as I shall argue, is the key to understanding the definition of
Paleolithic art at the end of the nineteenth century.
The discovery of several sculptures associated with prehistoric human
implements in 1864 dealt with the question of the classification of these
objects. What were the categories used by Western societies to catalogue
these pieces? As Thomas Wilson summarized, the distinction between fine
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Arts, crafts and Paleolithic art
arts and crafts (or decorative arts) was the basis for the construction of the
new category of ‘Paleolithic art’:
Art is susceptible of several divisions. The commonest division is into fine,
decorative and industrial . . . Fine art deals with painting, drawing, engraving,
sculpture, architecture, music, poetry and the drama . . . Prehistoric
decorative art explains itself. (Wilson, 1898: 350)
In other words, between 1860 and 1900, Paleolithic art was defined through
a set of values and ideas generally used to depict craft or popular arts.
Throughout the last third of the nineteenth century, archaeologists and
anthropologists approached Paleolithic art with several a priori conceptions, informed by the theory of evolutionism. In order to adapt their
conception of Paleolithic art to this theory, these prehistorians introduced
speculative sequences, which introduced the theory of a unilinear and
progressive evolution of art. The most popular of these schemes was Piette’s
chronology, which established a progression from works of art that imitated
nature to works of art born from complex mental processes (Piette, 1875:
279). Art was imagined as having progressed from simpler forms to more
complex ones throughout the history of humankind, and could thus supposedly be judged according to its degree of proficiency. As a result, Paleolithic
art was conceived of as craft in contradistinction to modern art. By the end
of the nineteenth century, craft was seen as an inferior art, reflected by the
fact that ‘objects crafted . . . within artistic traditions [were] not represented
in world art museums until after World War I’ (Price, 1989: 2). For the middle
classes of the nineteenth century, the beaux-arts of their own times functioned as a point of reference, in comparison to which other artistic manifestations were evaluated. As is well-known, the later half of the nineteenth
century was the era of the intellectual arts, of easel painting, of the glory of
the great museums. It was the time of la modernité, which Baudelaire
described as ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art
whose other half is the eternal and the immutable’ (Baudelaire, 1863: 497).
Paleolithic art, then, was defined as the inverted image reflected by the
‘distorting mirror’ (Kuper, 1988: 5) of modernity. It was thus depicted as
ornamental art (De Mortillet, 1897: 241; Evans, 1872: 448; Wilson, 1898:
351–2), as a non-reflexive art that fulfilled a mainly decorative function
(Dreyfus, 1888: 225; Dupont, 1872: 155; Lartet and Christy, 1864: 280), as a
bodily art that displayed a taste for necklaces, amulets and tattoos (De
Quatrefages, 1884: 274; Lubbock, 1870: 58), as a naïve art (De Mortillet,
1883: 293; Dreyfus, 1888: 224), as a simple pastime (Cartailhac, 1889: 78; De
Mortillet, 1883: 287; Lartet and Christy, 1864: 282). This opposition between
civilization (supposedly best incorporated in the beaux-arts and especially
in painting) and savagery (which produced decorative objects) occupied a
fundamental conceptual space within the European imagery. This binary
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emerges very clearly in Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness (written
between 1898 and 1899). Conrad’s fictional character Kurtz can be interpreted as a representative of Western civilization and, as such, excels in all
of the most important ‘achievements’ of the latter: he is a painter, a writer
and, most importantly, an orator (Conrad, 1902: 98). The ‘savages’, on the
other hand, are depicted as displaying a taste for adornment, decoration
and what one may call a ‘bodily art’ (clearly opposed to the image of
Western art as cerebral): ‘In front of the first rank, along the river, three
men, plastered with bright red earth from head to foot, strutted to and fro
restlessly. When we came abreast again, they faced the river, stamped their
feet, nodded their horned heads, swayed their scarlet bodies . . .’ (Conrad,
1902: 96).
The utilization of dualistic categories generally used to define crafts in
order to depict Paleolithic art is not rare (Figure 1). This representation
reflects a general inability to accept Paleolithic people as real artists. While
most anthropologists and archaeologists accepted, with reservations, that
primitive people had luxury instincts (De Mortillet, 1897: 241; Lartet and
Christy, 1864: 280), they did not attribute any aesthetic faculty to Paleolithic art: ‘The inartistic simplicity inseparable from all infantile arts,
[made of ornamental Paleolithic art] only an improvement on the accidents of manufacture’ (Wilson, 1862: 289). Even if there were some exceptions (Grosse, 1894: 131), most Westerners living in the age of progress
believed that Paleolithic art was not ‘art’ in the same sense as modern fine
arts, that primitive artists were not ‘artists’ like Raphael or Michelangelo.
This refusal characterizes the rejection of the authenticity of Paleolithic
cave art before 1900. Indeed, the discovery of paintings on the walls of
prehistoric caves in the 1880s (Altamira, Grotte Chabot) produced a
significant dilemma: their complexity – on the level of artistic skill – was
supposedly incompatible with the low degree of ‘civilization’. Art – defined
as fine arts – was incompatible with the primitive. Contemporaries, such as
Quiroga and Torres, therefore expressed their inability to imagine primitive people producing paintings that display such an advanced understanding and knowledge of perspective laws (Quiroga and Torres, 1880:
266). Paleolithic paintings contradicted the ideal of progress, which determined the writing of the history of art. The fact that the paintings that were
found in Altamira were more ‘advanced’, according to the nineteenth
century definition of art, than the artistic manifestations of advanced civilizations such as, for example, that of ancient Egypt (Quiroga and Torres,
1880: 267), posed a great problem. As a result, parietal art could not
possibly be accommodated within the nineteenth century conception of
Paleolithic art, which was restrained to engravings on bone and stone
(what we call today ‘mobiliary art’): ‘The portable art, the crafts of carving,
were more readily accepted, whereas the sometimes polychrome and
“naturalistic” paintings in cave “galleries” were unlikely products of
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Figure 1
Arts, crafts and Paleolithic art
L’Homme primitif. (Image from L. Figuier, 1876: 167)
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distant beings who had barely been admitted into the human family’
(Conkey, 1997: 175).
■ THE RECOGNITION OF CAVE ART AT THE TURN OF THE
CENTURY
After the turn of the twentieth century, a more complex image of prehistoric people developed. Indeed, a significant change occurred in the conception of Paleolithic societies and, subsequently, in the conception of
Paleolithic art. Ucko and Rosenfeld summarize this process as follows:
‘Towards the end of the century, however, a great change took place and
the first analytical reviews of modern primitive life appeared, coinciding
with the first reliable studies and reports on the every-day life of tribes
which could still be studied by ethnographers’ (Ucko and Rosenfeld, 1967:
119). This ‘great change’ is based on, or composed of, three important and
interrelated developments: first, the weakening impact of the theory of
evolutionism; second, the gradually growing awareness of the complexity
of modern ‘primitive’ societies through studies conducted within the fields
of anthropology, ethnography and sociology; third, an increasing awareness
of the complexity of Paleolithic societies through, mainly, the discovery of
Paleolithic funeral rites.
As Peter Bowler observed, the weakening of evolutionism, or, to employ
his formulation, the ‘eclipse of Darwinism’, occurred during the last years
of the nineteenth century (Bowler, 1983). This eclipse was correlated with
an increasingly widespread rejection of the idea of progress, a rejection
produced by the disillusionment of European society with its own
‘successes’ (Briggs, 1959: 5–6; Thomson, 1950: 103; Trigger, 1989: 150;
Wiener, 1981: 5). As Asa Briggs observed:
‘The age of improvement’, a useful label, derived from contemporary
language, for the whole period between 1783 and 1867, was certainly over by
1880. The 1880s were difficult years of confusion and conflict, and even when,
during the late 1890s, there was a reaction to the so-called ‘late Victorian
revolt’ – and Wilde was in exile – there was no return to the liberal mood of
the 1850s and 1860s. (Briggs, 1985: 245)
As the result of this disillusionment, the unilinear evolutionary conceptions
found in archaeological studies were interrogated and criticized. The
‘eclipse’ of evolutionism, which was particularly pronounced in England
and France (Trigger, 1989: 146), was propelled by the works of Friedrich
Ratzel (1844–1901) and Franz Boas (1858–1942). Ratzel is considered as
the most important representative of diffusionism. Boas, originally a geographer, also opposed evolutionism, understanding ‘each culture as the
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product of a unique sequence of development in which the largely chance
operation of diffusion played the major role in bringing about change’
(Trigger, 1989: 152).
Furthermore, the weakening of evolutionism must be considered within
the context of the new sciences of anthropology, ethnography and sociology (Ucko and Rosenfeld, 1967). At the turn of the century, studies dealing
with ‘savage’ societies increased significantly in number: L’Anthropologie
appeared in 1890 and, the same year, Frazer published the first volume of
his Golden Bough; in 1895 Durkheim published Les règles de la méthode
sociologique (Durkheim, 1895), followed some years later by Les formes
élémentaires de la vie religieuse (Durkheim, 1912); in 1897 Durkheim
founded L’Année sociologique, which was to become an influential journal
of that time; two years later, Gillen and Spencer published The Native Tribes
of Central Australia (Spencer and Gillen, 1899). Furthermore, the period of
the turn of the century was marked by the debates regarding the symbolism of totemism, instigated by McLennan’s Primitive Marriage (1865). This
growth within sociological, anthropological and ethnographic studies
eventually produced the recognition of the complexity of modern ‘primitive’ peoples. Ethnographic reports from Australia illustrated that ‘savages’
(Naturvölker), who, as one might conjecture, lived in similar conditions to
those of Paleolithic people, could produce complex paintings (some of
which were found in caves). Anthropology and sociology had the greatest
influence on the interpretations of Paleolithic art (Laming-Emperaire, 1962:
71), due to the profound link that existed, and still exists, in Western thought
between the definition of the ‘primitive’ and the construction of ‘savagery’.
This link is made explicit in the title of Lubbock’s major work: Pre-historic
Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of
Modern Savages (1865). Ucko and Rosenfeld noted that ‘there resulted a
tacit equation in the minds of both archaeologists and ethnographers
between the primitiveness of hunters and gatherers living in the remote
times of the Paleolithic and the primitiveness of hunters and gatherers still
living in the remote corners of their own worlds’ (Ucko and Rosenfeld,
1967: 117). The development of studies about contemporary savage
societies consequently had a strong influence on the redefinition of prehistoric Paleolithic art (p. 126).
Simultaneously, an awareness of the complexity of Paleolithic people
also developed in the field of the science of prehistory, which, as aforementioned, was due to the discovery of evidence of Paleolithic funeral rites.
One of the first references to the existence of religious phenomena during
the Paleolithic are in a 1864 article by Lartet and Christy, in which the
authors refer to the funeral meals and funeral rites that may have taken
place in the cave of Aurignac (Lartet and Christy, 1864: 268). Their observations initially received little attention from the scientific community. The
first serious debate about the existence of funeral rites in Paleolithic times
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was instigated by Lartet’s discoveries of the Cro-Magnon graves in 1868.
Already in the title of his article about this discovery, Lartet refers to a
‘sépulture’ (Lartet, 1869). De Mortillet, however, insisted on the recent age
of the graves (Richard, 1993: 63). Only a few years later, in 1873, the existence of funeral rites in the Paleolithic Age was accepted by the majority of
scholars – with the exception of De Mortillet and Verneau – as a result of
Émile Rivière’s discovery of the ‘sépultures de Menton’ (Richard, 1993: 63).
In the same year, Piette wrote on primitive fetishism in relation to some
representations in the Grotte de Gourdan (Piette, 1873), and, two decades
later (in 1896), he elaborated upon the existence of a solar religion in his
discussion of les galets colorés (Piette, 1896: 400). The most important aspect
of this gradual acceptance of the existence of Paleolithic funeral rites was
the formation of a new conception of primitive societies, which, as became
increasingly evident, were far more complex than previously assumed. This
acceptance was a necessary precondition for the eventual recognition of
Paleolithic cave paintings.
Scholars have generally argued that the theory of Paleolithic art as
leisure art was rejected in 1902/1903, when it was replaced by a different
interpretation known as ‘hunting magic’ (Laming-Emperaire, 1962: 68). It
is commonly held that this shift was caused by the impact of Cartailhac’s
article ‘Mea culpa d’un sceptique’ in which he recounted his conversion to
the authenticity of Paleolithic parietal art, the general acceptance of the
great antiquity of cave paintings, and of Salomon Reinach’s famous article
entitled ‘L’Art et la magie’ (Reinach, 1903). Yet, as I have argued, these landmarks in the history of prehistory must be read within the context of the
changing concept of the savage and correlated developments, and, as such,
were the effect rather than the cause of a change of mentality. The weakening of evolutionism, the development of ethnographic studies and the
debate about funeral rites produced a recognition of the complexity of
savage and/or primitive societies and thus had a crucial influence on the
redefinition of Paleolithic art at the turn of the century and on the acceptance of cave paintings as art. In sum, as soon as one admitted the intelligence of primitive people, one had to rethink the definition of their artistic
capacity as a naïve savoir-faire. The primitive craftsman thus became a
painter. What had been invisible to the eyes of a prehistorian in 1880
became an object of general analysis at the turn of the century: ‘At the sight
of these curious drawings, I had the clear feeling that, my attention not
being drawn to such works, . . . I would have gone past without suspecting
anything, and this had perhaps happened elsewhere to some colleagues and
to myself. We would have to revisit all our caves, such was my conclusion’
(Cartailhac, 1902: 349).
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Arts, crafts and Paleolithic art
■ THE FOUNDATIONS OF PALEOLITHIC ART AND ITS
INFLUENCE ON TODAY’S CONCEPTS
The period between 1860 and 1905 is essential to an understanding of the
contemporary definition of prehistoric art at the beginning of the twentyfirst century. As illustrated in section three, in order to evaluate ‘artistic’
objects found next to flint instruments and fossilized bones from extinct
animals, Western archaeologists and anthropologists employed the
dichotomy of art vs craft during the second half of the nineteenth century.
These two categories have structured the modern Western system of art: fine
arts (painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, music) are associated with the
realm of the aesthetic and related to concepts of inspiration and the genius
of the individual, whereas craft is understood in terms of utility and pleasure,
occupying either functions of practical use or entertainment. Therefore,
between 1860 and 1895, Paleolithic art was understood in terms of the latter,
as if it existed for trivial pleasure or entertainment alone. The production of
artistic objects supposedly required only skill, as they were the works of an
‘artisan’. In this context, cave art discovered towards 1880 could not be
accepted as ‘Paleolithic art’ because it was too similar to what was
considered as the fine arts and therefore required the existence of an artist.
The rejection of unilinear evolution and the discovery of the complexity of
primitive/savage people eventually resulted in the re-definition of Paleolithic
art at the end of the nineteenth century.
To conclude, I question the importance of this historical process in
relation to present-day conceptions of Paleolithic art. Recent well-known
developments in the study of Paleolithic art have led to a ‘loss of innocence’
of the field. First, several scholars have pointed out the problems posed by
the use of the term ‘art’. For some, the categorization of ‘prehistoric art’ is
not a legitimate term for what is studied by anthropologists and archaeologists (Conkey, 1983, 1987: 413, 1997: 174; Forge, 1991: 39; Shiner, 1994;
Soffer and Conkey, 1997: 2–3). Second, the Eurocentric model (largely
dominant in the field) has traditionally considered European Paleolithic art
as representative of Paleolithic art as a whole. Yet, the confirmation that
most of the Australian Pleistocene art is from Middle Paleolithic contexts
and the discovery of new evidence of Pleistocene arts in South America,
China, Japan, Siberia and Africa have seriously discredited this longestablished interpretation. Third, recent controversies about the Paleolithic
age of the pictures of the Chauvet Cave (Pettitt and Bahn, 2003; Zuechner,
1996) Cosquer Cave (Clottes et al., 1992) and Foz Côa (Bednarik, 1995;
Zilhão, 1995) have challenged the traditional stylistic chronology of this art.
Even if examples like these highlight how little we know about Paleolithic
art, there is one certainty: Since the recognition of the high antiquity of
Altamira in 1902 until the last decades of the twentieth century, most of the
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Figure 2 Group of artists of the Chelléen period engaged in chipping flint
implements. (Image from T. Wilson, 1898, plate 18)
academic analyses of Paleolithic art have been largely based on the
categories of ‘mobiliary art’ (or ‘portable art’) and ‘parietal art’ (also called
‘cave art’). Although this division has been challenged by recent developments2 and by several critics,3 most archaeologists confirm the ‘mobiliary art’
– ‘parietal art’ dichotomy. This distinction appears to be objective: the former
clearly refers to Paleolithic works of art which are of a certain size and
‘portable’, the latter defines engravings, bas-reliefs and paintings on the walls
of the caves. However, as I have argued in this article, this distinction is a
result of the delay in the recognition of parietal art and of the dichotomy on
which our understanding of art is based. As we have pointed out in a recent
work (Moro Abadía and González Morales, 2004), we archaeologists need
to remind ourselves that what we now call ‘Paleolithic mobiliary art’ refers
to the same crafted objects that were thought to make up the whole of Paleolithic art between 1860 and 1900. ‘Paleolithic parietal art’, on the other
hand, defines artistic phenomena which were recognized as Paleolithic only
after 1902. I suggest that the very meaning of the term ‘mobiliary art’ is
therefore related to the definition of primitive art between 1860 and 1900,
whereas the very meaning of ‘cave art’ is related to the acceptance of the
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Arts, crafts and Paleolithic art
complexity of primitive art. Therefore, the seemingly neutral definitions of
both concepts (which apparently only refer to size and portability of the
work of art) mask more complex problems, namely our anachronistic
attempts to impose our modern conceptions of art on the Paleolithic times.
It has been my objective to demonstrate the importance of our modern
categories (fine art and crafts) in the definition of Paleolithic art.
Acknowledgements
I dedicate this article to Professor Bruce Trigger, who has taught me much about
the history of archaeology. I am grateful to Alain Schnapp (Université de Paris I),
Margaret W. Conkey (University of California, Berkeley), Nathan Schlanger
(Université de Paris I), Randall White (University of New York), Iain Davidson
(University of New England), Denis Vialou (Muséum National d’Histoire
Naturelle), Andrew Gardner (Institute of Archaeology, London), Víctor M.
Fernández (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) and, especially, Larry Shiner
(University of Illinois at Springfield) for reading and criticizing the manuscript.
I owe a debt of gratitude to Wiktor Stozckowski and François Hartog who welcomed me at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris). I want to
acknowledge the help given by Elisabeth Göschl (Universität Wien), Kerstin Oloff
(University of Warwick) and, especially, Jennifer Selby (McMaster University) in
proof-reading the text. Finally, very special thanks must go to Manuel R. González
Morales (Universidad de Cantabria) for his constant help and encouragement with
this article.
Notes
1 Paleolithic art was generally identified with the commonly accepted term of
‘primitive art’. The latter (that eventually won out over such phrases as ‘l’art de
temps premiers’, ‘archaic art’, or ‘l’art des non-civilizés’) was used by
anthropologists, sociologists, historians and aesthetes to describe the art from
‘primitive societies’ both of ancient and modern times. Indeed, in the mentality
of Western societies of the nineteenth century, both prehistoric men and
modern ‘savages’ were linked by the notion of ‘primitive’. In this context,
Paleolithic art was often defined by analogy with art from ‘modern primitives’
(Du Cleuziou, 1887: 263; Dupont, 1872: 155; Lubbock, 1865: 305).
2 The discovery of open air petroglyph sites in the Côa Valley of northern
Portugal (Bednarik, 1995) has shown the existence of ‘cave art without caves’
(Bahn, 1995: 231). As a result, archaeologists now use the term ‘rock art’ (or
‘l’art des parois’ in French literature) to ‘describe the distinctive practice of
painting or carving natural surfaces in the landscape’ (Bradley, 1997: 5).
3 According to Denis Vialou, for instance, the division between ‘parietal art’ and
‘mobiliary art’ is taken for granted by most archaeologists, even if there is not a
logical reason to justify this split in the interpretation of Paleolithic art (Vialou,
1998: 269). Randall White has criticized the ‘trivialization of bodily adornments
as “decorative art” or “trinkets”’ (White, 1992: 539). For him, ‘despite dozens of
demonstrations in modern social anthropology that personal adornment is one
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of the most powerful and pervasive forms in which humans construct and
represent beliefs, values, and social identity, the thousands of body ornaments
known from the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic have been ignored in the
fetishization of “art” as depiction’ (White, 1992: 539).
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Moro Abadía
Arts, crafts and Paleolithic art
OSCAR MORO ABADÍA is a Fellow at the École des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales (Paris). He has been a visiting scholar at the Universities
of Paris I, University of California, Berkeley, University College London, and
Maison de l’Archéologie et de l’Ethnologie (Nanterre, Paris X). His most
recent book is on Nietzsche and Foucault’s social history (La Perspectiva
Genealógica de la Historia, Universidad de Cantabria, in press).
[email: [email protected] and [email protected]]
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