What Is Paleolithic Art?: Cave Paintings and the Dawn of Human Creativity

Jean Clottes (Translated by Oliver Y. Martin and Robert D. Martin). University of Chicago Press: 2016.

9780226266633

Subtle, imaginative and brilliantly accomplished, the images of animals and humans found in caves and dated from the end of the last Ice Age, between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago, continue to astonish us. The emotions and motives that inspired them beg to be understood. In What is Paleolithic Art?, Jean Clottes, the renowned cave- and rock-art specialist, suggests some answers.

After 40 years leading research at French sites such as the Chauvet and Cosquer caves and the Volp Caverns, Clottes describes his investigations into why people adorned the walls of caves and open-air rock surfaces with engravings, paintings and sculptures. His approach is challenged by some specialists, who feel that it is futile to attempt to interpret or take the investigation of cave art beyond the collation of facts that, in their view, cannot be explained except in terms of what, when, where and how.

Aboriginal rock paintings at the Nanguluwur shelter in Kakadu National Park, Australia. Credit: Jean Clottes

Clottes is prepared to go further. He wants to test hypotheses developed to parsimoniously explain the majority of observed facts against the premise that the images indicate spiritual behaviours. He goes so far as to call humans Homo spiritualis, owing to our capacity to symbolize ideas beyond words and transcend realities through belief. Instead of viewing these ancient cave and rock artists as apart from us, he makes the case for using historical evidence to “detect convergences in ways of thinking or conceiving of particular aspects of reality”. This is not simplistic analogy, but reasoning “based on the behaviour of analogous societies”.

During the 1990s, Clottes widened his interests from European Palaeolithic sites to the rock art of other continents. At this time, he worked closely with archaeologist and ethnologist David Lewis Williams, an expert on the southern African San people and their paintings. Together, they developed a hypothesis that could account for many attributes of Pleistocene and historical rock and cave art around the world. They realized that for many traditional, non-literate peoples, the landscapes in which they live are considered to be imbued with spiritual powers; particular places, sometimes decorated with images of animals and/or symbols, are reservoirs of supernatural powers, where shamans might perform rituals to contact, appease or exploit the spirits.

Clottes provides an overview of some of the varied beliefs and practices that he has researched, observed or been told about on visits to sites in Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Americas. He sees these “multiple realities” as part of the broad spectrum of spirituality focused in the landscape and nature. He shares his own experiences of fascinating but brief encounters with indigenous guides, such as Clifford, a venerated medicine man of the Native American Ute people. When they visited a rock-art site in Utah, a female bighorn sheep appeared. Clottes describes how Clifford chanted and made tobacco offerings, and how he later said that the sheep was “the spirit of the site” and suggested that the spot would be good for “vision-questing”.

Finally, Clottes shows how such anthropological insights enrich our ability to question the Palaeolithic record and construct interpretations of behaviours, actions and events in the deep past with a better-informed historical imagination. His view is that knowledge of present and historical rock-art practices can be the key to interpreting the past. Older, less rigorous applications of this thinking were rejected for being simplistic. Clottes's approach is more cautious, and he readily admits that the significance of many more-recent rock-art sites may be unknown or reinterpreted by modern aboriginal descendants.

Some readers will wonder whether it is right to view the varied social behaviours that resulted in drawing, painting and sculpture solely through the lens of belief. Others may question a search for universal traits that brings together eclectic cross-cultural similarities in spiritual practice that are fascinating but not necessarily helpful. Above all, Palaeolithic art is the first visible sign of modern human consciousness, of self-awareness, complex language, the use of metaphor and symbol, a sense of beauty, minds powered by brains like our own. Clottes offers little thought on how we might research these aspects of our deep history and what makes us human. But as neuroscience advances, this must surely be the next step.

This is a thought-provoking book about complex societies that endeavoured to understand the world in their own various ways. For anyone interested in Ice Age art, Clottes's enthusiasm cannot fail to energize, inspire and provide caution to their own investigations.