Key to Art History

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Prehistoric Art

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About 50 thousand years ago, long before the discovery of metallurgy (metal making), human beings used stone to make tools and weapons. For this reason, this part of our history is know as the "stone age." The period of time prior to the beginning of agriculture is known as the old stone age, or the Paleolithic period.

During this period, our ancestors lived as hunters and gatherers. They also began making sculptures and pictures. Their pictures were typically of the animals they hunted. The best examples of this art work is found in caves in France, at Lascaux (the first cave to be discovered) and Chauvet (a recently discovered cave that was used to create art for over 10,000 years beginning about 32,000 years ago) and in Spain, at Altamira.

cave_painting_bison.jpg (10567 bytes)

Bison drawing from the Caves at Lascaux

Scientists and Historians who study this period believe that these paintings and objects were religious in nature and represented a desire, on the part of these hunter-gatherers, to connect with the spirits of the animals upon which they depended for life. This belief is supported by anthropological studies of more modern hunter-gatherers, such as Native Americans and aboriginal Australians.

Apparently ancient hunting and gathering societies, contrary to a popular prejudice, led a relatively stable and productive way of life. It was probably not the rough and savage time depicted in our modern misconception of the lives of "cave men." Hunting and gathering certainly provided enough leisure time for the complex religious and social interaction that resulted in the creation of art.

About 10 thousand years ago, perhaps because the population of humans became too dense to allow hunting and gathering to continue, humans began to settle into agricultural villages. Historians refer to this as the "agricultural revolution." It marks the beginning of the Neolithic (new stone age) Period. This was, without a doubt, a challenging time in the evolution of human society. Humans had adapted over millions of years for hunting and gathering, and now had to learn to live in a completely different world. It was during this period that famine and epidemic disease first made an appearance in human history.

Representational art, for all practical purposes, disappeared. Instead, people's efforts were dedicated to the creation of monumental stone constructions, such as Stonehenge in England and the Newgrange in Ireland. The attention paid to the creation of these massive stone works , and the enormous amount of time involved in their construction, indicates how important it was to our ancestors to be able to predict and ritualize significant agricultural events such as planting and harvesting.

Stonehenge

Additional Resources

bullet View a virtual tour of the Lascaux caves .
bullet View art at Chauvet
bullet Read about the caves at Altamira, Spain .
bullet View Prehistoric art from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.
bullet Find out more about Megalithic stone structures .

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