Pre-Historic Art & Design I – Comprehensive Study Notes

Determining Dates, Time-Blocks, Centuries

• Historians divide time into named blocks: Period / Era
  • $10\,\text{years}$ ⇒ Decade
  • $100\,\text{years}$ ⇒ Century
  • $1000\,\text{years}$ ⇒ Millennium
• Century-identification rule (add $1$ then drop the last two digits):
  • $900!\text{–}!999 \Rightarrow 10^{\text{th}}\,\text{Century}$
  • $1200!\text{–}!1299 \Rightarrow 13^{\text{th}}\,\text{Century}$
  • $1900!\text{–}!1999 \Rightarrow 20^{\text{th}}\,\text{Century}$
• Practice item: Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, c.$1503\text{–}1505$ → 16^{\text{th}} Century

Dating-System Abbreviations & Conventions

• $\text{B.C.}$ = Before Christ (older Christian/Roman calendar)
• $\text{A.D.}$ = Anno Domini (“in the year of the Lord”)
• $\text{B.C.E.}$ = Before Common Era (secular equivalent of B.C.)
• $\text{C.E.}$ = Common Era (secular equivalent of A.D.)
• $\text{B.P.}$ = Before Present (scientific/archaeological usage)
• $c.$ = circa ≈ “approximately”

Prehistoric Stone Tools

• Earliest known human-made objects; many > $100{,}000$ years old.
• Material: primarily stone (flint, chert, obsidian, quartzite, etc.).
• Significance:
  • Provide physical evidence of cognitive/technological evolution.
  • Mark successive cultural phases: Palaeolithic → Mesolithic → Neolithic.
• Illustrated sources: Ana Barany SlideShare, Britannica images, Vice article on Homo naledi, etc.

Female “Venus” Figurines (Upper Palaeolithic)

• Tiny, portable sculptures stressing reproductive features; likely carried or traded.
• Possible functions: fertility charms, ritual objects, self-portraits, teaching aids, clan symbols.
• Shared visual traits (“Venus canon”):
  • Pear-shaped, faceless heads, no feet, tapering legs.
  • Exaggerated breasts, belly, hips, thighs, vulva.
  • Arms either minimized or merely indicated by shallow relief.

Woman (Venus) from Willendorf

• Date: $30{,}000!\text{–}!25{,}000\,\text{B.C.E.}$ (Gravettian)
• Height: $11\,\text{cm}$ (~$4.3\,\text{in}$)
• Medium: limestone (possibly mammoth ivory) originally painted red → symbol of life/blood.
• Formal notes:
  • Fully in-the-round (true $3\text{D}$); semi-abstract.
  • Spiral band covers head → maybe woven cap or hair.
  • Contour & implied lines mark arms, hands, pubic triangle.
• Content/Significance:
  • Fertility, Earth-Mother, pregnancy, women’s social role.
  • Lack of face shifts emphasis from individuality to archetype.

Venus of Dolní Věstonice

• Date: $29{,}000!\text{–}!25{,}000\,\text{B.C.E.}$
• Discovery: Moravian Basin near Brno, Czech Rep. (Karel Absolon excavations, $1924$ – )
• Medium: fired clay → earliest known ceramic usage.
• Size: $11.1\,\text{cm}$ ($4.4\,\text{in}$)
• Visuals: extremely large pendulous breasts, big belly/hips/navel, tapering legs, no feet, small featureless head with indented eye dots.

Venus of Lespugue

• Date: $20{,}000!\text{–}!18{,}000\,\text{B.C.E.}$ (Solutrean)
• Found: Rideaux Cave, Lespugue (René de Saint-Périer, $1922$)
• Medium: tusk ivory
• Height: $15\,\text{cm}$ ($6\,\text{in}$)
• Traits: faceless; breasts pushed low on torso where belly should be; severely abstracted silhouette.

Why the label “Venus”?

• Term coined by Édouard Piette → reference to Greco-Roman goddess of love/beauty.
• Focus on pubic “mound of Venus” & reproductive anatomy.
• Modern critique: Classical label may impose later aesthetic/sexual values on prehistoric art.

Modern Interpretations of Purpose & Perspective

• Early (male-centric) view: carved by men as erotic objects.
• Catherine McCoid & LeRoy McDermott hypothesis: self-portraits carved by women looking down at their own bodies (explains distorted proportions: closer abdomen/breasts appear larger; feet invisible).

Male Figurines

Man from Brno

• Date: $27{,}000!\text{–}!20{,}000\,\text{B.C.E.}$
• Location: Brno, Moravia, Czech Republic.
• Material: ivory; height $15\,\text{cm}$ ($8\,\text{in}$).
• Visual cues: shallow eye-grooves, nipples, navel, penis all carved in light relief.
• Content & Theory:
  • Possibly the earliest puppet; found in shamanic context (burial with occult specialist).
  • May have functioned in rituals connecting physical and spiritual realms.
  • Shaman = person mediating between natural & supernatural via trance, magic, healing.

Animal Ivory Carvings – Vogelherd Cave (Lonet Valley, Sw Germany)

• Cultural horizon: Aurignacian $c.40{,}000!\text{–}!26{,}000\,\text{B.C.}$
• Materials: mammoth ivory (largest available organic medium).
• Technical achievement: high polish, delicate under-cuts; mastery of animal anatomy.

Key Pieces

• Cave Lion – naturalistic stance, muscular build.
• Horse – dynamic curvature; fore-quarters emphasized.
• Woolly Mammoth (Elphas primigenius)
  • Oldest known ivory carving at site: $c.35{,}000\,\text{B.C.}$
  • Significance: records Ice-Age megafauna; ancestor of modern elephant; popularised in media (Ice Age: The Meltdown, $2006$).

Paleolithic Cave Paintings – Lascaux, France

Discovery & Context

• Found September $1940$ by four teenagers.
• Dates to Upper Palaeolithic; among earliest known large-scale pictorial programs.

Subject Matter

• Over $600$ images, chiefly large animals contemporary to painters:
  • Equines (horses)
  • Aurochs (wild cattle, progenitors of domestic cows)
  • Bison, deer, ibex, Megaloceros, rhinoceros
  • Occasional birds, abstract signs, human stick figures

Interpretive Frameworks

• Seasonal narrative of Palaeolithic life: migration, mating, herd behaviours.
• Means of coping/mediating aspects of life & death, hunting success/failure, sympathetic magic (i.e., painting animals to control the hunt).
• Potential ceremonial or initiatory space; acoustics & difficulty of access support ritual use.

Key Zones & Motifs

• Hall of Bulls (Main Hall) – monumental polychrome embroidering of bulls, horses, deer.
• Herd-interaction panel (Slide 38): horses vs. aurochs; ecological notes (aurochs/deer → forest & marsh; horse → adaptive across biomes).
• Megaloceros with Line of Dots – “Green-horn” giant deer; dots may count seasons, arrows, or clan symbols (Slide 40-41).

“Shaft of the Dead Man” Scene (a.k.a. “the Well”)

• Visual elements: wounded bison, disembowelling rhinoceros, bird-headed human (apparently dead or in trance), bird-topped staff, spear.
• Abbé Henri Breuil interpretation:
  • Literal hunt gone wrong → accidental deaths of man & animals; funerary staff marks grave.
• H. Kirchner interpretation:
  • Shamanic vision: bird-masked shaman in trance; animals as helping spirits in otherworld journey.
• Importance:
  • Earliest narrative tableau involving a human figure.
  • Demonstrates symbolic thinking, storytelling, possibly mythic cosmology.

Ethical, Philosophical & Practical Implications

• Modern taxonomy (“Venus”, “Shaman”) embeds later cultural frames; scholars must recognise biases.
• Representation of fertility, death, spiritual mediation underscores universality of existential themes.
• Portable art vs. parietal (fixed) art documents dual strategies: personal amulets & communal sanctuaries.
• Technological leaps (earliest ceramics, ivory micro-sculpture, mineral pigments) foreshadow Neolithic craft specialisation.

Quick Reference Glossary

• Aurignacian: Early Upper Palaeolithic tool/culture complex $c.43{,}000!\text{–}!26{,}000\,\text{B.P.}$
• Gravettian / Solutrean: Subsequent Upper Palaeolithic phases characterised by Venus figurines & refined lithic/ivory work.
• Sympathetic Magic: Ritual principle that one can influence reality by acting on a representation of it.
• Disembowelled: Having internal organs removed/cut open, often fatal in hunting incidents or depictions.
• Megaloceros giganteus (Irish Elk): Extinct giant deer with massive antlers.