Institute For Ice Age Studies

This article originally appeared in French in Archéologue-Nouvelle Archéologie, 1996

The shockingly ancient dates recently obtained for the paintings of the Grotte Chauvet have focused new attention on the often ignored cultural developments of early Upper Paleolithic, the 20,000 or so years between the first traces of symbolic representation (ca. 40,000 years ago) and the painting of Lascaux (ca. 17,000 years ago). This long stretch of cultural evolution, comprised of two archaeological cultures, the Aurignacian (40-28,000 years ago) and the Gravettian (28-22,000 years ago), has yielded an abundance of representational objects and images.

The Early Upper Paleolithic, which also saw significant innovation and change in stone tool technology and weapon systems, is the work of early members, of our species, generally known in Europe as the Cro-Magnons. The associated body of representational objects consists of dozens of sculpted ivory animal and human figurines, molded and fired clay statuettes, hundreds of engraved/painted images on limestone blocks and cave walls, and thousands of carefully crafted, often decorated personal ornaments of ivory, shell, soapstone and animal teeth.

Since all living or historically recorded cultures create such material forms of symbolic representation, it is crucial to acquaint ourselves with the earliest representational objects and to understand the evolutionary conditions and processes that brought about this new or "culturally modern" form of hominid behavior. The European predecessors to the Cro-Magnons were the physically robust Neandertals. They successfully occupied western Eurasia from about 200,000 years ago until they were superceded by the Cro-Magnons sometime around 40,000 years ago. Their culture, known as the Mousterian, shows mere glimmerings of symbolic representation. Particular forms, designs and qualities were collected (e.g., fossils, minerals) but apparently never transferred to new contexts.

Then,sometime after 40,000 years ago, at a time when the remaining Neandertals shared the European landscape with the first Cro-Magnons, there was a relative explosion of personal ornaments and graphic imagery that requires explanation. If Neanderthals were mentally capable of representation, why did material forms of representation not become fixed as an enduring part of their adaptation when they have such obvious selective advantage? The answer may lie in the emergence around 40,000 years ago of new kinds of social systems that rendered both possible and useful the sharing and reproduction through time of complex ideas, representational forms, and hence complex systems of meaning and social action.

Perhaps the most striking clue to this social change lies in the rapid emergence of personal ornaments among the earliest Cro-Magnons. For all modern humans personal adornment is one of the most powerful and pervasive forms by which they represent beliefs, values and social identity. According to anthropologist Andrew Strathern,

What people wear, and what they do to and with their bodies in general, forms an important part of the flow of information -- establishing, modifying, and commenting on major social categories, such as age, sex and status, which are also defined in speech and in actions. Whatever the precise origins of clothing, then, they can be sought only within the general context of the development of social communication and of society itself.

Another clue that social factors were a key component of the cultural changes of the early Upper Paleolithic is that significant technological innovations seem to have been developed not so much to improve hunting/gathering techniques as to achieve esthetic goals. For example, during the Aurignacian cultural period, (ca. 40-28,000 years ago) a complex set of techniques for working ivory was developed. Among these techniques was the preparation and use of metallic abrasives (notably powdered hematite) for polishing ivory. However, ivory was used by the Aurignacians not for the manufacture of weapons and tools, but almost solely for the creation of beads, pendants and animal/human sculptures.

The raw materials employed in the earliest representational objects include various mineral and animal substances including limestone, schist, talc, steatite, mammalian teeth, bone, antler and ivory, fossil and contemporary species of marine and freshwater shells, fossil coral, fossil belemnite, jet, lignite, hematite, pyrite. However, this relatively extensive list should not be taken to suggest a kind of random use of materials encountered in the environment. A number of pronounced choices were made. Personal ornaments were frequently manufactured of materials from sources hundreds of kilometers distant. Even then, from among the thousands of shell species available on the Atlantic and Mediterranean shores only a dozen or so were chosen for personal ornaments. Likewise, only the teeth of certain animals were transformed into ornaments. Indeed, there are several examples of ivory and soapstone facsimiles of these same marine shells and animal teeth. Presumably, these choices were made in light of deeply held beliefs and values.

Techniques for producing Aurignacian ivory and stone beads vary from one European region to the next. In France, the most common form, represented by more than 1000 specimens and dated to between 33- and 32,000 years ago, is "basket-shaped." They were created from pencil-like rods of ivory or soapstone that were then circuminscribed and snapped into cylindrical blanks from one to two centimeters in length. These were then bilaterally thinned at one end to form a sort of stem. A perforation was then created at the junction of the stem and the unaltered end. This was done by gouging from each side, rather than by rotational drilling. These rough-outs were then ground and polished into their final basket-shaped form using hematite as an abrasive.

Beads differ substantially in both technique and in form from one European region to the next. At the 36,000 year-old site of Kostenki 17 in the Don Valley of Russia, some ornaments were constructed of marine fossils, notably fossil coral and the fossilized spines of a kind of fossil squid known as belemnites. The latter are spectacularly beautiful in color and translucence, and are easily mistakable for amber. Their final form is the result of a production sequence that began with the natural cylindrical form of the belemnites. These natural cylinders were subdivided into segments that were then split down the center, each half being semi-cylindrical in section. This splitting-and-segmenting approach is similar in principle to the technique used to make ivory beads at contemporaneous sites in Central and Western Europe.

About 28,000 years ago, the residents of the Russian site of Sungir produced thousands of personal ornaments and a number of ivory carvings in geometric and animal forms. Sungir is one of the oldest known cases in which ornaments are actually found on human skeletons. While inhabiting Sungir, at least nine of the site's occupants perished. According to Russian physical anthropologists the best preserved of these consisted of a 60 year-old man, a 7 to 9 year-old girl, a 13 year-old boy, an unsexed (male?), headless adult and an adult female skull. From my reading of the evidence, the adult burial is clearly an older male. The sex of the adolescents remains ambiguous.

In total, the three most intact burials were lavishly decorated with more than 13,000 painstakingly prepared ivory beads arranged in dozens of strands, perhaps basted to their clothing. Although it is almost certain that the three individuals buried intact at Sungir were members of the same social group, there are remarkable differences among them in details of body decoration and grave offerings. For example, the man's forearms and biceps were each decorated with a series of polished mammoth-ivory bracelets (25 in all), some showing traces of black paint. Around his neck, he wore a small, flat schist pendant painted red, but with a small black dot on one side.

The technology of the dominant form of bead production at Sungir was clearly a variation on the Aurignacian assembly-line approach to ivory bead manufacture discussed earlier. However, at Sungir the blanks were scored across the width of each face before the hole was drilled. This caused the beads to fall into a visually impressive interlocking pattern when strung. In other words, the desired esthetic effect was deeply embedded in even the earliest stages of production.

Experiments reveal that each of the ivory beads at Sungir took more than an hour to fabricate. Hence, the man's beadwork took more than 3,000 hours, while that of each child took more than 5,000. Considering additional objects placed on and alongside the corpses, it is clear that each of the childrens' burials had substantially more labor invested in it than that of the man. Based on the differences in grave offerings and labor investment revealed among these burials, we might be justified in inferring that the social system represented at Sungir was an internally differentiated one in which social position was inherited rather than achieved; suggesting that complex social systems arose prior to and independent from economic systems based on agricultural production.

These differences provide a fragmentary view of the complex array of social identities that constituted the social fabric within Early Upper Paleolithic northern Russia. On a broader scale, Sungir provides yet another example of inter-regional differences in ornament production techniques and cultural esthetics, supporting the hypothesis of the rapid emergence of a more complex social landscape early in the European Upper Paleolithic.

Graphic images were created by many of the same techniques employed in the production of personal ornaments. In the case of ivory and steatite three-dimensional sculptures, which are themselves often perforated for suspension, a larger mass was reduced by gouging, grinding and polishing, the final stages probably being accomplished through the use of fine metallic abrasives (hematite powder). An experimental reconstruction of the famous Vogelherd horse took archaeologist Joachim Hahn 35-40 hours to accomplish. "Engraved" and painted limestone slabs, not to mention cave walls such as at the Grotte Chauvet, show a different, but no less complicated and labor-intensive set of techniques. Limestone slabs frequently had their surfaces prepared by abrasion. Then, the representations themselves were applied by a remarkable diversity of line-types reflecting processes of engraving, pecking, chiseling, gouging, etc.

There is often a problem of subject recognition in analyzing the several dozen Aurignacian engraved blocks. There is a complex array of punctuations, cup-marks, incisions and notches, few of which form coherent natural images. There is considerable debate over the dominant form of engraved sign, which has traditionally and uncritically been identified as a female vulvae. An alternative interpretation is that these and other arrangements of cup-like marks are representations of animal hoof-prints. This is actually a tantalizing possibility, since the association between an animal and its hoof-print constitutes a kind of natural symbol.

Perhaps the most unexpected representational object that has survived from the Aurignacian is a multi-holed wind instrument, frequently described as a flute, from the early Aurignacian at the site of Isturitz in Southwestern France. This flute, manufactured of bird bone, indicates quite clearly that music was part of the the earliest representational environment that Aurignacian people had created for themselves. At least a dozen more such flutes are known from the succeeding cultural period, the Gravettian (ca. 28-22,000 years ago).

Similar non-technological motivations surrounded the emergence in the Gravettian of Central and Eastern Europe of the first fired ceramics about 26,000 years ago. Many thousands of fragments of ceramic figurines, as well as specialized kilns for their production, have now been recovered from sites in Moravia and Russia. Well controlled firing temperatures have even suggested to some archaeologists that the kilns were actually used to ritually "explode" animal and human figures formed from the moistened loess sediment underlying the campsites where they have been found. This invention of fired ceramics preceded by at least 10,000 years the first known ceramic vessels. In other words, symbolic rather than technological necessity was the mother of ceramic invention.

By far the most distinctive representations in the Gravettian are the female statuettes and bas-reliefs. Although Gravettian female figures are found throughout Europe, they show regional differences in form and technique. They are sculpted from a variety of materials, including ivory, limestone, steatite, and calcite, and their surfaces were often poliushed to a high lustre. Certain examples were even modeled in clay and kiln-fired.

The past few decades have seen an enormous increase in the sample of female figures, especially in the USSR. The extraordinary 26,000 year-old site of Avdeevo has yielded to Govozdover and her collaborator Gennadi Grigoriev nearly as many of the figurines as all of the sites of this age in Western Europe combined. Many of the Avdeevo statuettes were purposely buried in pits, sometimes more than one to a pit. Strangely, in some cases different fragments of the same broken statuette were buried in carefully dug pits several meters apart. Gvozdover's careful analysis concludes that most of these statuettes, carefully sculpted from the tusks of 10,000 pound woolly mammoths, depict women in the terminal stages of pregnancy and frequently in birthing postures.

Gravettian sites have also yielded numerous animal engravings, often done in a rather stiff style characterized by unfinished lower limbs and a lack of the use of perspective. Finally, there are the famous Gravettian hand stencils, found both in living sites and in shallow-to-medium depth caves. One French cave, Gargas, had more than 150 hands stencilled on its walls. In the underwater cave of Grotte Cosquer recently discovered near near Marseilles, the charcoal-based paint used to spray the numerous hand stencils has now been radiocarbon dated to about 27,000 years ago.

Given what preceded the painting of Lascaux 17,500 years ago, we should not be particularly surprised to find a complex technological underpinning to the creation of this remarkable site. A wooden scaffold was constructed at Lascaux to provide access to the walls. In addition, recent research by Pamela Vandiver of the Smithsonian Institution reveals that most of the colors used on the walls at Lascaux had been artificially created by heating naturally occurring clay minerals (especially ocher) to temperatures of 1000 degrees Celsius; once again, an example of symbolic necessity being the mother of technological invention.

The commitment of labor and technological innovation and creativity to symbolic ends implies a fundamental adaptive and evolutionary role for early symbolic representation. "Art," far from being merely a spare-time diversion served a number of critical social and technological functions in Cro-Magnon cultures of the last Ice Age. Two- and three-dimensional representation was an invention, and like all inventions it had to be coherent with and useful to its cultural and historical context in order to be adopted. I presume that, on several occasions prior to the Upper Paleolithic, the ability to use lines and materials to represent natural objects was recognized and perhaps even accomplished in isolated instances.

Supposing that Neandertals and their contemporaries outside of Europe had the neurological capacity for symbolic thought, we must admit that what was missing prior to the Upper Paleolithic was a social context in which the invention of material forms of representation would be perceived as advantageous. Around the world today, material forms of representation are frequently deployed to establish political authority and to communicate) social distinctions. Personal ornaments, constructed of the rare, the sacred, the exotic or the labor/skill intensive are universally employed to distinguish people and peoples from each other.

University of Miami archaeologist Heidi Knecht has argued that, in turn, the depiction of concepts through graphic representation has powerful implications for technological innovation. The ability to simulate visually things that do not yet exist is essential to any degree of innovation. Material forms of representation, by conferring the ability to render tangible, to communicate, and to discuss social relations and technological possibilities, would have had powerful implications for the evolutionary fitness of Cro-Magnon populations. Indeed, modern human culture in any of its diverse forms would be unimaginable without the kinds of material symbols that humans first deployed 40,000 years ago.

D'autres ouvrages à consulter:
Clottes, J. 1990. L'Art des objets au Paléolithique. Paris: Ministère de la Culture.
De Beaune, Sophie A. 1995. Les Hommes au temps de Lascaux. Paris: Hachette.
Delporte, H. 1993. L'Image de la femme dans l'art préhistorique. Paris: Picard.
Knecht, H., Pike-Tay, A. et R. White (eds.). 1993. Before Lascaux: the complex record of the early Upper Paleolithic. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
Kozlowski, J. 1992. L'Art de la préhistoire en Europe orientale.Paris: CNRS.
Vialou, Denis. 1991. La Préhistoire. Paris: Gallimard.
White, R. 1992. Beyond Art: toward an understanding of the origins of material representation in Europe. Annual Review of Anthropology 21:537-564.
White, R. 1993. Préhistoire. Bordeaux: Presse Sud-Ouest.