Introduction
"What does it mean?" This is at one and the same time the most frequently asked and the most naively conceived question asked of Upper Paleolithic representations. No art historian trained in the past two decades would ask this question of a Van Gogh or a Picasso. Why then have generations of prehistorians treated entire corpuses of Paleolithic representations as if a single meaning and motivation lay behind them? Examples are numerous: female sculptures as fertility figures; painted and engraved animals as instruments of hunting magic; geometric signs as markers of ethnic identity and/or as the painted equivalents of gendered articles of speech.
The worst and most pervasive misconception is not even formulated as a question but as an assumption embedded in the very term "Paleolithic art." Conkey and I have loudly and frequently decried the use of the concept "art," because of its status as an historical artifact of the later stages of the so-called Western tradition. Indeed, 20th century usage of the term "art" bears almost no relation to the latin concept of "ars," which integrated the domains that we distinguish as "art" and "savoir-faire."
Any thorough treatment of the anthropological literature on cultural esthetics makes clear the wide diversity of cosmologies, philosophies and social contexts that underpin what we generalize as "art." I prefer the term "representation," which has a wide and theoretically complex usage in anthropology. Thus representations can take many forms, can have widely differing underlying logics, can be diversely motivated; and, importantly, many representational media do not even operate in the visual/formal channel.
This understood and accepted, we can forsake a focus on the origins of "art" or "the arts," which have enormous, but highly ethnocentric, cultural value. Rather we can redefine what occurs at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic as the invention of material forms of representation (White 1992). Such an approach has the additional advantage of allowing us to expand outward from graphic imagery to include, for example, the representational domain of personal adornment, a critical area of study in anthropological analyses of meaning, value and social identity.
It is my position here that by asking, "What does it mean?" or even the somewhat less anthropologically objectionable, "What purpose does it serve?," and by conceiving Upper Paleolithic representations as "art" in our sense, we have prevented a serious treatment of meaning(s). How then do we re-conceptualize our subject matter, our notion of meaning and, more importantly, how do we operationalize these new conceptions in real archaeological research? My answer to this latter question is to focus, literally, on how meaningful representations are/were constructed, what I have described in the title of this paper as "substantial acts".
