Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, Vol. 13, No. 4, December 2006 ( C! 2006)DOI: 10.1007/s10816-006-9020-2

From A Paleolithic Art to Pleistocene VisualCultures (Introduction to two Special Issues on‘Advances in the Study of Pleistocene Imageryand Symbol Use’)

April Nowell1

Published online: 30 November 2006

This paper serves as an introduction to two special issues on advances in themethod and theory of Pleistocene imagery and symbol use. In order to contextualizethe contributions that comprise these two issues, this paper defines the temporaland geographic scope of Pleistocene imagery, outlines the contexts in which theimages are found, briefly reviews the history of interpretation of the images anddiscusses some of the current trends and future directions of the field.KEY WORDS: upper paleolithic; cave art; personal adornment; figurines; visual culture.

This is the first of two issues of the Journal of Archaeological Method andTheory that focus on Pleistocene “art” that I am pleased to be guest editing.Pleistocene “art” refers to a large and varied corpus of paintings and engravingson the walls, ceilings and floors of caves and rock shelters throughout regions ofAustralasia, Africa and Europe that predate the Holocene. It also includes itemsof personal adornment such as beads, pendants, bracelets and rings as well asengraved and incised bone, antler and stone. Ivory and, more rarely, clay sculpturesof animals and human figures form part of this corpus as well. Found in a variety ofarchaeological contexts from caves to open-air sites and burials, these artifacts areassociated with men and women, adults and children including infants. Thoughit is often erroneously thought of as a homogenous block of imagery primarilylocated in Western Europe (Conkey, 1995, see especially note 16), the staggeringvariety of techniques, materials, subjects, locations and contexts and associationsmakes it impossible to characterize Pleistocene “art” in a meaningful way thatwould hold true for all regions and cultural periods.

1Department of Anthropology, University of Victoria, Cornett Building Room B214, 3800 FinnertyRoad, Victoria, BC, Canada, V8P 5C2; e-mail: anowell@uvic.ca.

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The definition of Pleistocene “art” has had to broaden as research hasintensified outside of Western Europe. For example, in South Africa alone thereare more than 30,000 known rock art sites containing a total of more than 1 millionimages with many of them in excess of 10,000 years (White, 2003). Paintings,engravings, items of personal adornment and elaborate burials also date to thePleistocene of Australia (Davidson, 1997; Davidson and Noble, 1992; White,2003; Brumm and Moore, 2005) and recent research in Borneo has uncoveredPleistocene cave paintings there as well (Plagnes et al., 2003; Chazine, 2005).

For this reason, this first issue contains primarily papers that explore Pleis-tocene art outside the traditional arena of Western Europe. The paper by Lewis-Williams examines San Rock art in South Africa, and the role of the ethnographicrecord in rock art studies. Drawing on the Australian record, Ross and Davidsonexplore the contexts in which rock art is produced. The paper by Deacon laysout the ethical issues surrounding rock art tourism and conservation. The finalpaper in this issue is one by White that reexamines, not cave art, but figurinesfrom the French site of Brassempouy offering both a critical examination of thesocio-political context of these finds and new insights into their manufacture.

The second issue (March 2007), focuses on (1) Western European rock “art”studies with a unique and detailed synthesis by Bicho and colleagues of cur-rent research in Spain and Portugal and (2) on the methodological approachesto studying both cave and portable imagery. Pettit explores issues of dating,Tosello and Fritz discuss innovations in the recording and analysis of cave artsuch as 3D scanning of cave walls and Nowell and d’Errico take a taphonomic ap-proach to studying purported examples of Neandertal symboling from Molodova(Ukraine).

Following Soffer and Conkey (1997), I am using the term “Pleistocene art” in-stead of “Paleolithic art.” “Paleolithic” in a large sense refers to the archaeologicalrecord from 2.5 million to 10,000 years ago but in a strict sense it is a cultural termthat is not used in Australia whereas “Pleistocene” is a geological term with globalapplicability. The Pleistocene dates from 1.75 million to 10,000 years ago but inpractical terms its temporal span is more limited in this context as widely acceptedexamples of imagery/symbolic artifacts do not exceed ca. 100,000 years of age.

While there are examples of symbol use dating to between 100,000 BP and40,000 BP (e.g. McBrearty and Brooks, 2000; d’Errico et al., 2003; Brumm andMoore, 2005; Vanhaeren et al., 2006), more than 99% of the known Pleistocene“art” dates roughly from 35,000 BP to 10,000 BP. While the origin and develop-ment of symbolic behavior remains a contentious issue (see Nowell and d’Errico,this volume), in Europe at least, this is a time period (known here as the UpperPaleolithic) of unparalleled creativity and symbolic expression. As White (2003,p. 68) observes, “it is not an exaggeration to state that just a few square me-ters at certain Aurignacian sites have yielded more representational objects thanare known for the entire planet in the period before 40,000 years ago.” This ex-plosion of human creativity did not take place in a vacuum but was associated

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with global changes in technology, trade, subsistence, human migration and socialorganization (Bar-Yosef, 2002).

It should be emphasized that “Pleistocene art” does not refer to contemporaryor historic rock art such as that of the San or Australian Aboriginal peoples. Thesebodies of imagery are discussed in this volume because issues such as conservationand tourism development (Deacon, this volume and references therein) are of greatsignificance to all rock art researchers and a tremendous amount of the method andtheory related to these issues is being generated in the context of contemporaryand historic rock art. Furthermore, many researchers are interested in what canbe learned from the ethnographic record in terms of methods and meanings ofrock art and the contexts in which it was produced (e.g. Lewis-Williams, 1981;Gamble, 1982; Lewis-Williams and Dowson, 1999; Lewis-Williams, this volume;Ross and Davidson, this volume).

For historical and practical reasons the majority of what we know aboutPleistocene “art” comes from studies of cave sites in Western Europe. Afterviewing Lascaux, Picasso is said to have observed that we have learned nothingnew in art in 17,000 years (e.g. Spivey, 2005 but see Bahn, 2005/2006). Extensiveresearch into the techniques and materials of Pleistocene “art” at various sites hasrevealed that painters heated ochre, sometimes up to 1000 degrees Celsius, andblended ochre and other pigments to create a variety of colors (Bahn and Vertut,1997). They built scaffolding to extend their reach. They used brushes, their fingers,their mouths, animal hides and bird bones (“spit painting”) to apply the paint andexperimented with different binders and extenders to create different paint recipes(Clottes et al., 1990). In some cases the painters took great care to prepare andthen create entire panels or to work around existing images while in other casesthey painted over earlier images or purposely damaged them. In some caves thereare examples of images that were initially sketched and then “corrected”—theproduct of what Lamarque, (2005) terms “an internal critical tradition.”

Upper Paleolithic peoples achieved visual effects normally associated withlater periods including the intentional distortion of an image to enhance view-ing from the ground such as the well known anamorphosed cow from Lascaux(Clottes, 2005). Some images, such as the Bison from Marsoulas were createdby hundreds of dots—thousands of years before Pointillism in the history of art(Bahn and Vertut, 1997). Upper Paleolithic peoples also added shading and reliefto animals to give a sense of texture and even movement. In fact, a light sourceheld at just the right angle will cause painted and engraved images of animals to“project” from the cave walls giving them a three dimensional quality (Easthamand Eastham, 1991). This is aided by the practice of working with the cave’s natu-ral topography—convexities were used to give corporeal substance to an animal’storso while concavities were sometimes used to create an animal’s eye. Advancesin dating techniques (Pettit, March 2007 issue), chemical analyses of paint recipes(Chalmin et al., 2003), the use of infrared and digital photography (Clogg andDiaz-Andreu, 2000 and Tosello and Fritz, March 2007 issue), the meticulous,

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almost forensic, study of newly discovered caves such as Chauvet (Clottes, 2001)and experimental research into lighting conditions (de Beaune, 1987), techniquesof manufacture (Lorblanchet, 1991; White this volume) and the acoustic propertiesof caves (Waller, 2006) are revolutionizing how we see, record and think aboutPleistocene “art.”

Ironically, this body of research has raised as many questions as it has an-swered. We still do not know, for instance, who made the images (see for example,Russell, 1992), who was its intended audience(s) or even if there was an intendedaudience. Some of the images are located in such narrow and awkward places thatnot even the artist could have seen what he or she was creating. From handprintson cave walls and footprints we know that men, women, children and even babieswere entering these caves on occasion (e.g. Clottes et al., 2005) but there is noevidence to suggest that they were habitation sites. This last point leads us toquestions of context.

Context, as they say, is everything and this is especially true in archaeology.As with all archaeological materials, Pleistocene images, regardless of media areenmeshed in multiple layers of context (see Conkey, 1997). These include the re-lationships between different images (location, techniques, styles, materials), theirassociations with artifacts (e.g., stone tools, bird bones with traces of pigment inthem, items of personal adornment, sculptures) and features (hearths, burials, foot-prints) and their immediate physical surroundings. As White writes (2003, p. 117)

Photographs . . . do not capture any of the dynamic, non-visual qualities of cave images andindeed of the caves themselves; what Leroi-Gourhan described as “the cave as participant.”In other words, one cannot hope to enter the “ancient dialogue with the caves” withoutexperiencing the images in all the multisensorial richness of the caves themselves. Add fear;uncertain footing; flickering lamplight; moving shadows; sounds of dripping water, the cavefloor underfoot, children’s cries; the smell of humid limestone confronted by smoldering,sizzling, juniper wick of a fat-burning lamp or torch, and one begins to reassemble theoriginal cloak of the context, meaning and state of mind that wrapped itself around thevisual perception of paintings and engravings.

To this we need to add the acoustic properties of caves and the existence of numer-ous flutes which hint at yet another layer of context (d’Errico et al., 2003; Waller,2006). The imagery is also situated within particular technologies, subsistencepractices, climates, and landscapes including social landscapes (Davidson, 1989).Conkey’s research (1997, p. 360), for example, is an attempt to create a social ge-ography of the imagery in order to “‘fill in’ the heretofore vacant spaces ‘betweenthe caves’ and to provide a sense of the pathways and lines of sight that may havelinked caves, materials and people” (see also Eastham and Eastham, 1991). Byjuxtaposing the physical and social landscapes of Upper Paleolithic peoples andidentifying the resonances and discords she is working toward what she has calledan ice age sensibility (Conkey, 2004).

The notion of an ice age sensibility brings us to the central question ofmeaning. For more than a century, approaches to this question have mirrored

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contemporary issues and directions in archaeology generally. Initial explanationsin the late 1800’s were based on discoveries of portable examples of “art.” Re-searchers argued that the “art” was made by hunter-gatherers to pass the time(Bahn and Vertut, 1997; see also Moro Abadıa, 2006 and see Lorblanchet, 2002).In the 1900’s as more painted caves were discovered this explanation gave wayto a series of functionalist hypotheses focusing on hunting magic, fertility rites,shamanistic trances and the like (Bahn and Vertut, 1997). In this researchers drewheavily on the ethnographic record and the hypotheses were used to explain bothparietal and portable “art.” For instance, the hunting magic hypothesis explainedbroken engravings of animals on plaquettes (flat pieces of stone)—“once the ani-mal was killed and the ritual was over, the image was of no further use.. and it wasdiscarded (Bahn and Vertut, 1997, p. 172).” Some of these initial approaches havebeen revived in the last two decades. Examples include Halverson’s (1987) “art forart’s sake” and numerous aesthetic approaches to the imagery (see papers in Heydand Clegg, 2005) and the hunting hypothesis which has been reinvented as the“cave as a source of hunting information” approach and in ecological approaches(e.g., Mithen, 1991).

The beginning of the second half of the 20th century was a turning point inthe study of cave imagery with what Conkey (1989) has termed the “structuralistbreakthrough” stemming from the work of Leroi-Gourhan (1958) and Laming-Emperaire (1962). By looking for the structuring principles underlying the choiceand location of the images these researchers moved away from a literal interpre-tation toward a semiotic study of the “art” (Leone, 1982; Conkey, 1989). As Bahnand Vertut (1997, p. 196) note, “the images could no longer be seen as simplerepresentations with an obvious and direct meaning; instead it was realized thatthey were full of conceptual ideas . . .” Subsequent interpretations of Pleistoceneimagery have drawn on their results and have modified or rejected them (ibid.).In the late 1970’s and 1980’s there was a concern with social explanations (e.g.Gamble, 1982). For example, Jochim (1983) hypothesized that as a result ofclimatic conditions at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (18,000 BP) largenumbers of people migrated into Southwestern France and Northern Spain wheremuch of the cave art is found and made images to demarcate their territory.

More recently, researchers have applied the methods and theory of landscapearchaeology (Conkey, 1997), cognitive archaeology (d’Errico, 2001; but see alsoMarshack, 1990 and his interpretation of sequentially marked bones as calendars)and neuropsychology (Hodgeson, 2006) to both cave imagery and portable “art.”They have focused on issues of taphonomy (Chase and Nowell, 1998; d’Errico andNowell, 2000; Nowell and d’Errico, March 2007 and references therein), agency,space and place. Shamanism (or altered states of consciousness) as an explanationhas remained popular especially for South African rock art (e.g. Lewis-Williamsand Dowson, 1988; Lewis-Williams, 2002, this volume). Similarly, in Australia,researchers argue that due to historical circumstances a continuity of interpretive“threads” or themes can be found between Pleistocene images and those from the

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ethnographic present which are “potentially capable of shedding considerable lighton technical, spiritual, ceremonial, religious and symbolic underpinnings of thethousands of known prehistoric representations” (White, 2003, p. 180; see alsoFlood, 2004). Currently, Paleolithic archaeologists are also involved in debatesconcerning conservation and cultural resource management (e.g. Chorruchagaand Monforte, 2003; Clottes, 2003; Allemand and Bahn, 2005; Castellani, 2005)of painted caves. In this, they engage in a broader conversation with specialistsconcerned with the ethics of rock art tourism, cultural appropriation and conser-vation when studying the rock art of contemporary peoples in Australia and SouthAfrica (see Deacon this volume; Heyd, 2003; see Lewis-Williams this volume fora detailed discussion of the historical and political context of methods and theoryin southern African rock art studies).

It has been argued by Bahn and Vertut (1997) (see also Conkey, 1989) that“grand” explanatory schemes such as hunting magic and structuralism do notaccount for the majority of parietal or portable Upper Paleolithic “art” and are nottestable. As Trigger observes (1989, p. 395), “how can it ever be proved that Leroi-Gourhan was correct or even moving in the right direction, in associating bisonwith female principals and horses with male ones in European Upper PaleolithicCave Art?” My own view is given the temporal and regional span of the imagesand the different contexts in which they were produced it does not make sense thatthere could be one explanation for all of Pleistocene art (see also Davidson, 1997).As White (2003, p. 220) observes, “we should not imagine that these systems ofrepresentation were everywhere inspired by the same perceived needs and culturalbodies of ideas.” Furthermore, Paleolithic archaeologists have moved away fromunicausal explanations in much the same way that archaeologists of other periodshave long abandoned the search for the single “cause” of agriculture or for therise of “civilizations”. These are far too complex phenomena. As Conkey (1997,p. 344) wrote a decade ago, “we are now at a point in the history of research wherewe can decouple the imagery from grand vitalistic and evolutionary schemes. . .theimagery. . . can now be fruitfully approached as local, historical phenomena” (seealso Davidson, 2005/2006).

The search for meaning is not for specific meanings but rather “why wouldthe making of imagery have been meaningful and to whom, in what contexts?”(Conkey, 1997, p. 359, my emphasis, see also Davidson, 1997). This brings usback to the idea of contextualization and the cultivation of a historically situatedice age sensibility that will allow us to move away from a homogenous Paleolithic“art” toward Pleistocene visual cultures (Soffer and Conkey, 1997; see also White,1992). As progress toward this we have largely decoupled our analyses fromassumptions associated with the term art. “Art” as a modern Western construct isanachronistic with the Paleolithic (Conkey, 1983, 1987; White, 1992, 2003; papersin Conkey et al., 1997, Moro Abadıa, 2006) and largely predetermines how wewill interpret images (Nodelman, 1985). It should be noted that the use of the termvisual is not meant to undermine the importance of tactile (e.g. the choice of raw

From A Paleolithic Art to Pleistocene Visual Cultures 245

material because of texture, for instance), olfactory or acoustic properties of theparietal and portable imagery and the contexts in which they were experienced(see d’Errico, 2001 and papers in Scarre and Lawson, 2006).

Integral to the establishment of Pleistocene visual cultures is the integrationof cave imagery with studies of items of personal adornment. The importanceof these items is often overlooked. For example, in a discussion of imagery fromEastern European Gravettian sites, Oliva (2000) states that “disregarding numerouspersonal adornments, real works of art are known only from four large sites.”There is, however, ample ethnographic evidence to support the fact that “. . .personal adornment is one of the most powerful and pervasive forms in whichhumans construct and represent beliefs, values and social identity. . .” (White,1992, p. 539; see also Vanhaeren, 2005). Joyce (2005, p. 142) in her paper onthe archaeology of the body goes even further by arguing that we need to movefrom ‘body ornaments’ to ‘ornamented bodies’ in order to emphasize the factthat items of personal adornment actively construct identity and are not “simplysignaling independently existing identities” (but see Ross and Davidson, thisvolume). While she does not discuss cultures of the Pleistocene, her work isapplicable to a construction of a Pleistocene visual culture. In much the sameway that Conkey (1997) plays off traditional settlement archaeology against thephenomenological approach of landscape archaeology (see also Mack, 2004 asan example in a different context) to contextualize cave imagery, the interfacebetween more traditional bioarchaeological studies and the phenomenologicalapproach of the archaeology of the body may have a lot to offer studies of bodyornamentation in the Pleistocene.

Similarly, the importance of other types of portable representational artifactssuch as engraved and incised bone, antler and stone as well as figurines madefrom a variety of materials are often underestimated. While their geographicaldistribution does overlap with that of painted caves there are concentrations ofartifacts in Eastern and Central Europe where cave imagery is rare or absent(Davidson, 1997; White, 2003). It is interesting to note that the world’s firstceramics were not pots or other containers associated with agricultural peoples butrather were clay figurines. Dating to approximately 26,000 BP and associated withthe world’s first evidence of textiles (Adavasio et al., 1996; Soffer et al., 2000)figurines from the sites of Dolni Vestonice and Pavlov in the Czech Republicattest to a well developed ceramic technology at a very early date. Pleistocenefigurines have been variously interpreted as pornographic objects made by menfor men, fertility charms, women’s self-portraits and goddess icons (see Conkeyand Tringham, 1998 for a review; see also McDermott, 1996). Detailed, contextbased analyses (see White, this volume), however, can reveal much about skilllevels, decision making, and raw material exchange and can more fully integratethem into a holistic understanding of Pleistocene visual cultures.

Finally, the methods and theory of visual anthropology, a sub-discipline ofanthropology that focuses on aspects of culture that rely on visual representations,

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may be key to establishing robust Pleistocene visual cultures when interpreting andrecording cave imagery and portable representational artifacts. This sub-disciplinemay also be useful in defining the archaeologist’s role in creating context (whatLewis-Williams (1990) refers to as the contexts of contexts) through notions ofspectatorship, in exploring issues of cultural appropriation through media, tourism,merchandising and advertising and in examining narratives of museum displays(Nowell, in prep.). This includes exploring the consequences of choices we makewhen deciding what images to reproduce and what ones to leave out in replicas ofpainted caves for tourists (e.g., Chorruchaga and Monforte, 2003).

In sum, the study of Pleistocene visual cultures is a dynamic, creative andproductive field. A realization of the importance of visual cultures outside ofWestern Europe, new discoveries (Jones, 2001; Bahn et al., 2003; Ripoll et al.,2004; Vanhaeren et al., 2006), advances in the technical aspects of recording,analyzing, conserving and dating of these materials coupled with fresh perspectiveson their interpretation suggest that the next decade will be a remarkable periodin the history of Paleolithic archaeology. The authors in this and the subsequentvolume of the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory exemplify thesedevelopments by offering new historical or regional syntheses (Bicho et al.; Lewis-Williams), re-analyses of existing finds (White; Nowell and d’Errico); recentadvances in technology (Tosello and Fritz; Pettit), new interpretations of thecontext of rock art production (Ross and Davidson) and engaged discourses inthe ethics of rock art tourism and conservation (Deacon).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Catherine Cameron, Iain Davison, and Randall Whitefor their helpful comments. I would also like to thank Catherine Cameron andJames Skibo for their continued enthusiasm, patience, good humor and supportthroughout this project. Finally, I would like to thank all of the authors andreviewers of these papers for sharing their research and their time.

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