Periods & Definitions
Prehistory (or the prehistoric period) refers to the time before written records, however, human expression existed across the globe long before writing.
Writing emerged at different times in different parts of the world. The earliest writing is found in ancient Mesopotamia, c. 3200 B.C.E.
Often, art history texts begin with the prehistoric art of Europe. However, very early art is found worldwide.
Homo sapiens (modern humans are a subspecies - homo sap migrated out of Africa between 120,000 and 50,000 years ago.
The stone age is a prehistoric period when stone implements were widely used. The stone age is divided into the Paleolithic (old stone age) and Neolithic (new stone age). After the Stone age, the next periods are known as the bronze age and the iron age.
Historians distinguish the Neolithic period by the transition from people living as hunter-gatherers to the development of farming and the domestication of animals. The "Neolithic revolution" allowed people to create a more settled way of life. This happened at different times in different parts of the world. The first agriculture occurred in southwest Asia�in an area historians call the "fertile crescent."
Prehistory was a time of major shifts in climate and environment.
Modern archaeology uses a stratigraphic process, where archaeologists precisely record each level and the location of all objects.
Paleolithic Art
30000 BCE - 8000 BCE in the Near East
30000 BCE - 4000 BCE in Europe
Neolithic Art
8000 BCE - 3000 BCE in the Near East
4000 BCE - 2000 BCE in Europe
Art Making
The earliest peoples were hunter-gatherers (until about 12,000 years ago) who created imagery in many different media�fired ceramics, painting, sculpture and who built architecture.
The oldest "art" found to date are rock paintings and sculpture from c. 77,000 years ago.
Art making in Asia
we have found Paleolithic and Neolithic cave paintings that feature animal imagery (in the mountains of Central Asia and Iran). Animal imagery has also been found in rock shelters throughout central India. In prehistoric China, we find ritual objects created in jade, (beginning a 5,000-year tradition of working with the precious medium). Ritual, tomb, and memorializing arts are found across Neolithic Asia, including impressive funerary steles from Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
Art making in Europe
we have found small human figural sculptures (central Europe), cave paintings (France and Spain), and outdoor, monumental stone assemblages (British Isles) that date from the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods.
Art making in the Pacific region
people migrated from Asia approximately 45,000 years over land bridges. The earliest created objects have been dated to c. 8,000 years ago. The Lapita peoples, who moved eastward from Melanesia to Polynesia beginning about 4,000 years ago, created pottery with incised geometric designs that appear across the region in multiple media today.
Art making in the Americas
peoples who migrated from Asia (before 10,000 B.C.E.) first made sculptures from animal bone and later from clay.
Handaxe, our earliest technology?
Made nearly two million years ago, stone tools such as this are the first known technological invention.
This chopping tool and others like it are the oldest objects in the British Museum. It comes from an early human campsite in the bottom layer of deposits in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. Potassium-argon dating indicates that this bed is between 1.6 and 2.2 million years old from top to bottom. This and other tools are dated to about 1.8 million years.
Using another hard stone as a hammer, the maker has knocked flakes off both sides of a basalt (volcanic lava) pebble so that they intersect to form a sharp edge. This could be used to chop branches from trees, cut meat from large animals or smash bones for marrow fat�an essential part of the early human diet. The flakes could also have been used as small knives for light duty tasks.
Deliberate shaping
To some people this artefact might appear crude; how can we even be certain that it is humanly made and not just bashed in rock falls or by trampling animals? A close look reveals that the edge is formed by a deliberate sequence of skilfully placed blows of more or less uniform force. Many objects of the same type, made in the same way, occur in groups called assemblages which are occasionally associated with early human remains. By contrast, natural forces strike randomly and with variable force; no pattern, purpose or uniformity can be seen in the modifications they cause.
Chopping tools and flakes from the earliest African sites were referred to as Oldowan by the archaeologist Louis Leakey. He found this example on his first expedition to Olduvai in 1931, when he was sponsored by the British Museum.
Handaxes were still in use there some 500,000 years ago by which time their manufacture and use had spread throughout Africa, south Asia, the Middle East and Europe where they were still being made 40,000 years ago. They have even been found as far east as Korea in recent excavations. No other cultural artefact is known to have been made for such a long time across such a huge geographical range.
Handaxes are always made from stone and were held in the hand during use. Many have this characteristic teardrop or pear shape which might have been inspired by the outline of the human hand.
The beginnings of an artistic sense?
Although handaxes were used for a variety of everyday tasks including all aspects of skinning and butchering an animal or working other materials such as wood, this example is much bigger than the usual useful size of such hand held tools. Despite its symmetry and regular edges it appears difficult to use easily. As language began to develop along with tool making, was this handaxe made to suggest ideas? Does the care and craftsmanship with which it was made indicate the beginnings of the artistic sense unique to humans?
Paleolithic art
While this term can refer to the art of any gathering and hunting society, it is typically used to describe the hundreds of Paleolithic paintings discovered in Spain and France and dating to about 20,000 years ago; these paintings usually depict a range of animals, although human figures and abstract designs are also found. The purpose of this art is debated.
The oldest art: ornamentation
Humans make art. We do this for many reasons and with whatever technologies are available to us. Extremely old, non-representational ornamentation has been found across Africa. The oldest firmly-dated example is a collection of 82,000 year old Nassarius snail shells found in Morocco that are pierced and covered with red ochre. Wear patterns suggest that they may have been strung beads. Nassarius shell beads found in Israel may be more than 100,000 years old and in the Blombos cave in South Africa, pierced shells and small pieces of ochre (red Haematite) etched with simple geometric patterns have been found in a 75,000-year-old layer of sediment.
The oldest representational art
The oldest known representational imagery comes from the Aurignacian culture of the Upper Paleolithic period (Paleolithic means old stone age). Archeological discoveries across a broad swath of Europe (especially Southern France, Northern Spain, and Swabia, in Germany) include over two hundred caves with spectacular Aurignacian paintings, drawings and sculpture that are among the earliest undisputed examples of representational image-making. The oldest of these is a 2.4-inch tall female figure carved out of mammoth ivory that was found in six fragments in the Hohle Fels cave near Schelklingen in southern Germany. It dates to 35,000 B.C.E.
The caves
The caves at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc, Lascaux, Pech Merle, and Altamira contain the best known examples of pre-historic painting and drawing. Here are remarkably evocative renderings of animals and some humans that employ a complex mix of naturalism and abstraction. Archeologists that study Paleolithic era humans, believe that the paintings discovered in 1994, in the cave at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc in the Ard�che valley in France, are more than 30,000 years old. The images found at Lascaux and Altamira are more recent, dating to approximately 15,000 B.C.E. The paintings at Pech Merle date to both 25,000 and 15,000 B.C.E.
Questions
What can we really know about the creators of these paintings and what the images originally meant? These are questions that are difficult enough when we study art made only 500 years ago. It is much more perilous to assert meaning for the art of people who shared our anatomy but had not yet developed the cultures or linguistic structures that shaped who we have become. Do the tools of art history even apply? Here is evidence of a visual language that collapses the more than 1,000 generations that separate us, but we must be cautious. This is especially so if we want to understand the people that made this art as a way to understand ourselves. The desire to speculate based on what we see and the physical evidence of the caves is wildly seductive.
Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc
The cave at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc is over 1,000 feet in length with two large chambers. Carbon samples date the charcoal used to depict the two head-to-head Rhinoceroses (see the image above, bottom right) to between 30,340 and 32,410 years before 1995 when the samples were taken. The cave's drawings depict other large animals including horses, mammoths, musk ox, ibex, reindeer, aurochs, megaceros deer, panther, and owl (scholars note that these animals were not then a normal part of people's diet). Photographs show that the drawing shown above is very carefully rendered but may be misleading. We see a group of horses, rhinos and bison and we see them as a group, overlapping and skewed in scale. But the photograph distorts the way these animal figures would have been originally seen. The bright electric lights used by the photographer create a broad flat scope of vision; how different to see each animal emerge from the dark under the flickering light cast by a flame.
A word of caution
In a 2009 presentation at UC San Diego, Dr. Randell White, Professor of Anthropology at NYU, suggested that the overlapping horses pictured above might represent the same horse over time, running, eating, sleeping, etc. Perhaps these are far more sophisticated representations than we have imagined. There is another drawing at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc that cautions us against ready assumptions. It has been interpreted as depicting the thighs and genitals of a woman but there is also a drawing of a bison and a lion and the images are nearly intertwined. In addition to the drawings, the cave is littered with the skulls and bones of cave bear and the track of a wolf. There is also a foot print thought to have been made by an eight-year-old boy.
The Neolithic Revolution
development of villages, hunting and gathering to systematic agriculture
A settled life
When people think of the Neolithic era, they often think of Stonehenge, the iconic image of this early era. Dating to approximately 3000 B.C.E. and set on Salisbury Plain in England, it is a structure larger and more complex than anything built before it in Europe. Stonehenge is an example of the cultural advances brought about by the Neolithic revolution�the most important development in human history. The way we live today, settled in homes, close to other people in towns and cities, protected by laws, eating food grown on farms, and with leisure time to learn, explore and invent is all a result of the Neolithic revolution, which occurred approximately 11,500-5,000 years ago. The revolution which led to our way of life was the development of the technology needed to plant and harvest crops and to domesticate animals.
Before the Neolithic revolution, it's likely you would have lived with your extended family as a nomad, never staying anywhere for more than a few months, always living in temporary shelters, always searching for food and never owning anything you couldn't easily pack in a pocket or a sack. The change to the Neolithic way of life was huge and led to many of the pleasures (lots of food, friends and a comfortable home) that we still enjoy today.
Stonehenge
2550-1600 BCE. Neolithic Period. Sarsen and bluestone. Salisbury, England
Neolithic art
The massive changes in the way people lived also changed the types of art they made. Neolithic sculpture became bigger, in part, because people didn't have to carry it around anymore; pottery became more widespread and was used to store food harvested from farms. This is when alcohol was invented and when architecture, and its interior and exterior decoration, first appears. In short, people settle down and begin to live in one place, year after year.
It seems very unlikely that Stonehenge could have been made by earlier, Paleolithic, nomads. It would have been a waste to invest so much time and energy building a monument in a place to which they might never return or might only return infrequently. After all, the effort to build it was extraordinary. Stonehenge is approximately 320 feet in circumference and the stones which compose the outer ring weigh as much as 50 tons; the small stones, weighing as much as 6 tons, were quarried from as far away as 450 miles. The use or meaning of Stonehenge is not clear, but the design, planning and execution could have only been carried out by a culture in which authority was unquestioned. Here is a culture that was able to rally hundreds of people to perform very hard work for extended periods of time. This is another characteristic of the Neolithic era.
Neolithic plastered skulls
Plastered skulls
The Neolithic period is also important because it is when we first find good evidence for religious practice, a perpetual inspiration for the fine arts. Perhaps most fascinating are the plaster skulls found around the area of the Levant, at six sites, including Jericho. At this time in the Neolithic, c. 7000-6,000 B.C.E., people were often buried under the floors of homes, and in some cases their skulls were removed and covered with plaster in order to create very life-like faces, complete with shells inset for eyes and paint to imitate hair and moustaches.
The traditional interpretation of these the skulls has been that they offered a means of preserving and worshiping male ancestors. However, recent research has shown that among the sixty-one plastered skulls that have been found, there is a generous number that come from the bodies of women and children. Perhaps the skulls are not so much religious objects but rather powerful images made to aid in mourning lost loved ones.
Neolithic peoples didn't have written language, so we may never know (the earliest example of writing develops in Sumer in Mesopotamia in the late 4th millennium B.C.E. However, there are scholars that believe that earlier proto-writing developed during the Neolithic period).
Apollo 11 Stones
Great Hall of Bulls
Lascaux ,France. Paints made from plants mixed with animal fat and blood. Bulls, cows, Horses
Camelid sacrum in the shape of a canine
Running horned woman
From Tassili n'Ajjer
Bushel with ibex motifs
Anthropomorphic stele
Jade cong
Chinese, 3000 BCE
Stonehenge
2550-1600 BCE. Neolithic Period. Sarsen and bluestone. Wiltshire, England
-perhaps took a 1000 years to build, gradually redeveloped by each succeeding generation
-post-and-lintel building; lintels grooved in place by the mortise-and-tenon system of construction
-large megaliths in center are over 20 ft tall and form a horseshoe surrounding a central flat stone
-ring of megaliths, originally all united by lintels, surrounds central horseshoe
-some stones over 50 tons
-hundreds of smaller stones of unknown purpose placed around monument
-some stones imported over 200 miles
-generally thought to be oriented toward sunrise on the longest day of the year; may also predict eclipses
-one of the many the henges in southern England; the most recently discovered in July 2009 is called bluehenge
Ambum Stone
Tlatilco female figurine
Terra cotta fragment
Woman or "Venus" of Willendorf
Lascaux Caves
Archaeology
the scientific study of ancient people and cultures principally revealed through excavation
Cromlech
a circle of megaliths
Henge
a Neolithic monument, characterized by a circular ground plan. Used for rituals and marking astronomical events
Megalith
a stone of great size used in the construction of a prehistoric structure
Menhir
a large uncut stone erected as a monument in the prehistoric era
Mortise-and-tenon
a groove cut into stone or wood, called a mortise, that is shaped to receive a tenon, or projection of the same dimensions
Post-and-lintel
a method of construction in which two posts support a horizontal beam, called a lintel