bwfleabanner28a.jpg

? All about Eva | Main | Virgin's Tower ?

February 20, 2006

Flintroy was here

My greatest ongoing irritation with archaeology, or rather with archaeologists, is a tendency to state as fact much that is in fact conjecture. It is all too easy to ascribe contemporary motivations to people about whom we know next to nothing and to sound convincing when we do so; particularly when assumptions about said motivations are shared by a non-specialist audience. After all, it should be reasonable to assume archaeologists would not pass off supposition as science.

Take all those Stone Age cave paintings, for example. I cannot remember how many times I have read or listened to credentialed folk invoke shamanic representation, hunting magic and metamorphosis as explanations of the worldview of the artist; often with the caveat that these paintings were never meant to be "art", i.e. largely aesthetic in their intent. The simple fact is we know no such thing. A human mind capable of painting the Lascaux "shaman" is perfectly capable of enjoying it whether or not the image was also connected to a ritual practice rather than being a simple representation of one.

It is in this context I am delighted to learn about R. Dale Guthrie, a paleobiologist and artist who took the trouble to measure some hand-prints.

Using new forensic techniques on fossil handprints of the artists and examining thousands of images, "I found that all ages and both sexes were making art, not just the senior male shamans," Guthrie said. These included hundreds of prints made as ocher, manganese, or clay negatives and a few positive prints made with pigments or mud applied to hands that were then placed on cave surfaces. "The possibility that adolescent giggles and snickers may have echoed in dark cave passages as often as the rhythm of a shaman’s chant demeans neither artists nor art," writes Guthrie.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at February 20, 2006 08:21 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.ghostofaflea.com/cgi-bin/mt/trackback-engine.cgi/5653

Comments

The preface to Guthrie's The Nature of Paleolithic Art is available on the University of Chicago Press website at: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/311260.html

We will also be posting some excerpts from the book on our blog in the near future: http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/

Posted by: Dean [TypeKey Profile Page] at February 21, 2006 08:26 AM

Post a comment

Thanks for signing in. Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)


Remember me?