For the early researchers in the 1860's who were finding portable art objects in Upper Paleolithic sites, the only motivation required was an esthetic one, coupled with enough leisure time to devote to "the arts." Part of the problem with this explanation was an extremely naive but prevailing definition of the term "esthetic." This old definition focused on beauty and pleasure. Anthropologists are now fully aware that, in all societies, including our own, esthetics are always imbedded with social, political, economic or religious meaning and motivation.
By the turn of the 20th century, when cave paintings were first accepted as authentic, a new realization had emerged, largely because anthropologists were learning more about the context of art in non-Western societies. The notion of totemism, or a special, even magical relationship between animals and humans, was being developed in ethnology. This concept led Salomon Reinach (1903) and later Bégouën (1929) and Breuil (1952) to argue that the "art" of the Upper Paleolithic reflected a set of magical beliefs embodied in the notion of "sympathetic magic". Through the art, Reinach proposed, Upper Paleolithic people sought to increase the numbers of game animals and to ensure hunting success.
According to Breuil's scenario Upper Paleolithic people had penetrated deep underground to perform increase and hunting rituals. Thus, they exercised ritual control over predators and prey. These ceremonies were one of the contexts in which adolescents were initiated into adulthood. Animals were ritually killed by drawing spears or wounds on their sides. Certain abstract forms were interpreted as traps and nets drawn to ritually capture the painted animals.
There is still considerable support for at least a general version of this view; however serious questions have been raised. About 15% of painted and engraved animals bear markings that can be interpreted as spears or wounds. However, they can equally well be seen as signs and symbols whose meaning remains unintelligible. Moreover, Delporte (1990) points out, that it is surprising that an art that supposedly served as hunting magic bears little relationship in its species make-up to the animals that people were eating!
The meaning of the signs in the wall and portable art has been the subject of much debate. Leroi-Gourhan rejected the earlier notion that they represented traps and spears and instead attributed sexual significance to them. He suggested that the Upper Paleolithic cosmology was one that divided the world into entities that exhibited maleness and things that exhibited femaleness. Male signs and animals were always paired with female signs and animals in a kind of complementary opposition. Other scholars have continued to grapple with the problem of the meaning of abstract signs in artistic representation (Sauvet 1990; Chollot-Varagnac 1980; Marshack 1979), which is one of the toughest in all archeology.
Recently, John Pfeiffer (1983), a science journalist, has proposed another way of understanding the deep cave art that may complement Leroi-Gourhan's structuralist approach. Pfeiffer concentrates on the effect that the cave environment has on the senses and on the psyche. In modern times, when we visit one of these painted caves, we do so with electric lamps and the security of knowing that many people have been there before us. Pfeiffer suggests that the experience was much different for Upper Paleolithic people, who had only the unsteady and flickering light of burning torches and lamps. Pfeiffer's prediction is that with this kind of light, the animals will appear to move and breathe. In a situation of, at one and the same time, sensory deprivation and heightened sensory awareness the impact of life-size bison emerging from the darkness must have been awe inspiring and dramatic. Pfeiffer observes that in contexts of sensory deprivation people are open to suggestion. He proposes that this would have created a perfect context for imparting cultural knowledge to young initiates (see also Mithen 1988).
Most recently, David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson (1988) have generated a thought-provoking hypothesis, based on ethnoarcheological studies of South African rock paintings. They have shown that the rock paintings of the Southern San peoples was frequently done in a state of self-induced trance. A substantial body of psychological research indicates that in such altered states induced by trance, ingestion of hallucinogens and long periods of sensory deprivation the human brain and eye work together to produce a limited repertoire of geometric images known as entoptic images. Lewis-Williams claims that these entoptic images are present in southern San rock art, and most importantly for the present discussion, similar images exist at Lascaux. This implies that Lascaux was created and or visited in an altered state of consciousness; or at least some of its images were inspired by those experienced while in such a state.
The function of certain pieces of portable art has been the subject of investigations by Alexander Marshack (1972). Marshack contends that certain incised objects, dated to as early as 32,000 years ago, served as a means of tracking time by the recording of lunar cycles and thus the creation of a kind of lunar calendar. This hypothesis, attractive for its simplicity, has come under fire recently in the light of research that questions some of Marshack's basic assumptions (White 1982; D'Errico 1989; Lewin 1989).
In seeking to understand the motives for Upper Paleolithic art, a most important point has been made by Ucko and Rosenfeld (1967) who maintain that we must steer away from a tendency toward monocausal explanations.After all, these were complicated humans like us, perfectly capable of integrating a number of cosmological, magical, or functional goals within the same image.