Paleolithic

Warty Pig

• Painted with ocher (clay pigment)

• Indonesia

• World’s oldest known cave painting

• A figurative depiction of a Sulawesi warty pig, a wild boar that is endemic to this Indonesian island

• Lines on the pig create texture like what the texture of an actual pig would look like

• Could be to inform others that there are these pigs around

Wall Paintings (horses, aurochs, and rhinos) from Chauvet Cave

• Ardeche Valley in France

• 2 head-to-head rhinoceroses, horses, mammoths, musk ox, ibex, reindeer, aurochs, megaceros deer, panther, and owl.

• Animals were not then a normal part of people’s diet → Painting serves as a warning for what animals are nearby

• Supposed to be seen with a flickering light cast by a flame → Illusion that animals are moving

Nude Female Figurine, so-called “Venus of Willendorf”

• 11.1 cm high → could be carried during daily nomadic travels in search of food

• Emphasis on her breasts and pubic region → able to nurse a child

• Little emphasis on limbs → small feet → not meant to be free-standing and was meant to be carried or placed lying down

• No details of the face, just a headpiece or hair

• Representation of reproductive and child-rearing aspects of a woman

Neolithic

Catal Hoyuk

• Konya, Turkey

• From nomad to shelter

• No streets or footpaths

  • Houses were built right up against each other and the people who lived in them traveled over the town’s rooftops and entered their homes through holes in the roofs, climbing down a ladder.

• Communal overs were built above homes

  • Group activities were performed in elevated spaces

• Deceased were placed under the floors or platforms in houses and sometimes the skulls were removed and plastered to resemble live faces

  • Burials show no significant variations either based on wealth or gender

  • The only bodies treated differently, decorated with beads and covered with ochre, were those of children.

    • Society started to care more about children

• Art is everywhere → geometric designs as well as representations of animals and people

  • Every house was found to contain decorations on its walls and platforms, most often in the house's main room.

    • Redone every month or season

    • Decorated with several plastered skulls of bulls set into the walls or platforms, the pointed horns thrust out into the communal space.

    • Remains of other animals’ skulls, teeth, beaks, tusks, or horns were set into the walls and platforms, plastered and painted.

  • Most animals represented were not domesticated → warning for others? or telling a story

• Figurines functioned as wish tokens or to ward off bad spirits

Landscape Mural of Catal Hoyuk

• Mural reconstruction of an early landscape shows a form of twisted perspective peaked volcano and Catal Hoyuk

Stonehenge

• Salisbury, England

• Phase 1

  • A great circular ditch about six feet deep was dug with a bank of dirt within it

  • Aubrey holes

  • Originally filled with upright bluestones or upright wooden beams

• Phase 2

  • They are involved in the setting up of upright wooden posts in the center of the henge, as well as more upright posts near the northeast and southern entrances.

  • Used for burial

    • Some Aubrey holes were emptied and reused to hold cremation burials and more cremation burial pits were dug into the ditch of the henge

    • Bones of adult males, 25-40 years, in good health, and with little sign of hard labor or disease → mark of elite status

  • Phase 3

    • Very hard sarsen stones were erected within the henge

      • Capped with lintel stones

      • Rearrangement of bluestones as well as the construction of a long processional avenue

Vocabulary

• Prehistoric

  • Relating to or denoting the period before written records

• Paleolithic / Old Stone Age

  • Relating to or denoting the early phase of the Stone Age when primitive stone implements were used.

• Ocher

  • An earthly usually red or yellow and often impure iron ore used as coloring matter

• Figurine

  • Small statue representing one or more people or animals or sometimes a religious deity

• Mobiliary art

  • Also known as portable art

  • Small, movable objects found at Paleolithic and Mesolithic sites were carved, engraved, painted, or perforated.

  • Often made from organic materials like bone, ivory, antler, shell, or amber, and inorganic materials like limestone, sandstone, or clay.

  • Figurines, personal ornaments, hunting equipment, and tools.

• Parietal art

  • Art found on the walls, ceilings, and floors of caves and rock shelters

  • Also known as cave art

  • Paintings, engravings, carvings, etchings, and finger markings.

  • Ceremonial purposes, rather than as shelter → No remnants of other items

  • Used to supplement storytelling with images appearing to move along the walls in the flickering light

• Composite creature

  • Figure that is made up of multiple parts from different animals, humans, or other beings.

• Incising

  • Mark or decorate with a cut or a series of cuts

• Megaliths

  • Very large usually rough stone used in prehistoric cultures as a monument or building block

• Relief

  • Figurines are raised from a flat background, usually a wall.

• Sculpture in the round

  • Three-dimensional sculpture that is freestanding and can be viewed from all sides

  • Not attached to a flat background, unlike relief sculptures

  • Statues, busts, and sculptural groups

  • Can walk around it and see it from different angles and perspectives

• Henge

  • Prehistoric monument consisting of a circle of stone or wooden uprights

• Neolithic / New Stone Age

  • Relating to or denoting the later part of the Stone Age, when ground or polished stone weapons and implements prevailed.

  • Beginning of a settled human lifestyle

• Twisted perspective

  • Drawing technique that depicts a figure in mostly profile but with a portion of the body facing the viewer.

  • Also known as a composite view

• Sympathetic magic

  • Prehistoric people believed their artistic representations could directly influence real-world events

  • Cave paintings

    • Created by shamans who entered a trance state and painted images of their visions

  • Hunting rituals

    • Images of animals in cave art were used to ensure a successful hunt

• Fertility

  • The ability to conceive children or young

• Ideal

  • A standard of perfection, beauty, or excellence.

• Ritual

  • A religious or solemn ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order

• Hunter-gatherer

  • A member of a nomadic people who live chiefly by hunting fishing, and harvesting wild food.

• Nomadic

  • Anything that involves moving around a lot

• Animal husbandry

  • Controlled cultivation, management, and production of domestic animals, including improvement of the qualities considered desirable by humans using breeding

  • Animals are bred and raised for utility, sport, pleasure, and research.

• Agriculture

  • The science or practice of farming, including cultivation of the soil for the growing of crops and the rearing of animals to provide food, wool, and other products.

• Human agency

  • The humanistic perspective attempts to understand ancient people and social reproduction by considering the relationship between people’s actions and their social, ideological, and material conditions.

• Visual analysis

  • Method of understanding art by examining its visual elements, such as color, line, texture, and scale.

  • Fundamental part of art history

  • Understand how an artist made visual choices to create a work of art

  • Help you understand how visual material communicates, generates meaning, or creates a mood.

• Post and lintel

  • Building a system that uses vertical posts to support horizontal elements to create a building

  • Post: strong vertical element that supports the lintel

  • Lintel: strong horizontal element that spans the space between two posts

  • Stonehenge