Images are powerful devices for communicating, understanding, conceptualizing and innovating. Engineers and architects would be lost without their drawings. In fact, one historian of Science (Hindle 1981) has even argued that a prerequisite for the industrial revolution was the exploded drawing, an artistic device for showing the inner workings of a machine. All great inventors have thought, not in words, but in images. The manipulation of images so as to imagine and simulate new possibilities creates a constantly increasing pool of creation and innovation.
The creation of visual imagery also has technological spin-offs that can have unforeseen implications. For example, it is now clear that to obtain just the right color of paint, the people of Lascaux had developed a fire technology that enabled them to heat natural pigments to temperatures of more than 1000 degrees Centigrade (Leroi-Gourhan 1982). At Dolni Vestonice, the first specialized ceramic technology (Vandiver et al. 1989) in the world had nothing to do with making practical containers. Rather, it was dedicated to the manufacture of animal and human figurines.
Images are powerful, but images in object form are doubly so. Imagine the difference in your experience between seeing a projected slide of a 32,000 year old sculpture and holding the original object in your hand. Objects are concrete, they have histories, they are real; they are convincing and authoritative. They are often the embodiment of social authority and legitimacy. They are material metaphors.
We take images for granted because they have been so much a part of our everyday existence since Upper Paleolithic times. Think for a moment, what it must have been like previously, to have lived without images. Chances are you cannot imagine even this possibility without the use of images. From this perspective, it is easy to understand why the first material representations coincided with such an enormous burst of technological, social and mythological innovation that continues to the present day. Such is the adaptive value of visual representation.
BOX: Beads and Social Identity; Abri Blanchard, France.
No known human societies are 100% egalitarian. Even the least hierarchical societies known to anthropologists are subdivided along lines of age, gender, and personal achievement. Within limits, all modern human societies express a person's social position in by such vehicles as jewelry, clothing and displays of wealth. The performance of ceremonies and the offering of goods at the time of a person's death are also important means of expressing the internal divisions of a society. This use of objects to construct and communicate social identities is evident from the very beginning of the Upper Paleolithic in Europe. Nowhere is it better exemplified than in the rich record of body ornaments recovered by Louis Didon and Marcel Castanet from the French site of Anri Blanchard.
Didon and Castanet were quite a research team in 1910-11. At a time when Upper Paleolithic sites were being "looted" without much in the way of stratigraphic control or careful recovery techniques, they proceeded much more systematically. In 1909, Castanet, a local farmer and informed amateur archeologist, found an ivory bead on the ground surface beneath a rock overhang in a small valley adjacent to his farm in France's Vézère Valley. With this find, he piqued the interest of Didon, a distinguished amateur archeologist and hotelier of some considerable means. For the next two years, Castanet and Didon would excavate this site, known as the Abri Blanchard, and would bring to light some of the earliest known art objects and body ornaments. These precious objects came from two different stratigraphic levels of the Aurignacian culture, the lowermost level dating to about 34-32,000 years ago. The uppermost level can be no more recent than about 30-28,000 years ago.
Castanet was passionate about prehistory. To him, even the seemingly most insignificant artifacts were precious, and so he decided, far ahead of his time, that it would be a good idea to pass all of Abri Blanchard's sediments through a fine sieve. By doing so, he recovered more than 200 ivory and stone beads, many of them as small as the sequins on a formal gown. There were also decorated pendants, animal teeth with drilled holes and pierced seashells. This was incontrovertible evidence of bodily adornment from the very beginning of the Upper Paleolithic. But it took several decades for archeologists to begin to believe that body ornaments such as these were anything more than mere trinkets. In the meantime, the artifacts from Abri Blanchard languished in dusty museum drawers.
In the 1980's, with increased interest in social archeology, it became clear that ornamental objects were crucial to communicating, even constructing human social identities. Imagine if you will our own or any other contemporary society without material objects that signal status, role, gender and wealth. As if to underline the social value of personal ornaments, recent analysis of the beads from Abri Blanchard (White 1989a,b,c) indicates that each of them required nearly an hour to produce. Equally important, many of the ornaments are made from raw materials (shell, exotic stone) whose natural points of occurrence lie hundreds of kilometers from Abri Blanchard. We must imagine that these were objects endowed with great value, obtained either by long treks or by trade with other groups. In all probability, the energy and time that went into Early Upper Paleolithic body ornaments from Abri Blanchard and dozens of other sites from France to Australia reflect the emergence of, or increased emphasis upon, the marking of internal social distinctions as a feature of the organization of human society.
BOX: Michel Lorblanchet and the horses of Pech-Merle Michel Lorblanchet has spent his career with one foot in France and the other in Australia. He is a specialist in prehistoric rock painting of which there is an abundance in both countries. The difference is that, while the cultures responsible for European Upper Paleolithic rock paintings are long-dead, the paintings of Australian Aborigines are still being executed. As a result, Lorblanchet has learned much about rock painting techniques from people who still paint. He has used this body of knowledge from Australia to attempt to experimentally reconstruct the procedures involved in the production of French Paleolithic cave art.
The most revealing example was his attempt to replicate a complex scene of back-to-back horses from the French cave of Pech-Merle. Lorblanchet (1980) was able to show that the painters of Pech-Merle (ca. 18,000 years old) had used their mouths to spray liquified pigment on the wall. Using their arms and fingers the way that a house painter uses masking tape, they were able to create sharply defined lines, such as those forming the horses necks and backs. While previous cave art researchers had imagined the need for some kind of tube through which the paint could be blown, Lorblanchet's Australian informants taught him how to spray the paint directly from his mouth, a technique he used successfully in reconstructing the Pech-Merle paintings. He used powdered red ochre and black manganese dioxide mixed with water, the same pigments used by the Paleolithic painters. Oh yes....Lorblanchet learned one other frightening thing. Half way through the experiments, he was told by a medical specialist that if ingested, manganese dioxide can cause serious damage to the central nervous system. He was not harmed, but we wonder how many Paleolithic painters might have been stricken!