I did a fair amount of reading over break. One of the things I like about train travel is the long uninterrupted periods of time, when you can sit and read. I often complete an entire book on a trip.
The main thing I read this trip was Christine Desdemaines-Hugon's "Stepping-Stones."
This is a description of several of the Paleolithic cave art in several caves in south-central France. Much of the book is description of the art - both "parietal art" (a term I did not previously know - it refers to the wall-paintings and other forms of immovable art) and "portable art" (things like spear-throwers and "batons" and other items that could be picked up and carried).
Desdemaines-Hugon does talk a bit about human evolution (though really, by the time "her" humans - the ones whose art she studies - made the scene, we were pretty much up to Homo sapiens, so the earlier forms were not as relevant to the work.)
Mainly, she is talking about Cro-Magnon man, with some references to the Neanderthals. (At the time the book was written - just earlier this year - it was still believed (and may still largely be believed) that there was no Neanderthal/ modern human crossbreeding. However, there's some recent DNA research that suggests in fact that there was. (The big news-story part of it was "Ozzy Osbourne has Neanderthal DNA!" Uh-huh.)
She points out that rather than being the brutish "cavemen" of legend, early humans were likely thoughtful and playful and they were artistic - they understood perspective and used it in some of their paintings. And they buried their dead rather tenderly, placing the body in a fetal position and often decorating it with beads and even, in some cases, providing food - whether for "the journey" of the deceased person, or as a propitiation to whatever their understanding of the Divine was, we won't ever know. But the fact that they buried their dead in that way suggests to me that they had some concept of the Divine and perhaps of an afterlife.
Desdemaines-Hugon makes a great effort not to ascribe too much motive to anything being described. (I'm not sure the right term for giving inappropriate "overinterpretation" is in anthropology; in ecology, if you attribute human motives to an animal, it's called anthropomorphism). But it's tantalizing to speculate.
A couple of things struck me: she notes that most of the caves do not seem to have been dwelling-places: there is far less "trash" than you would expect (at most, there are the paint-pots left behind, and perhaps a few spear-points, maybe as an offering of sorts). And in the caves that were not disturbed until modern anthropological methods came to the fore, one thing that was noticed was that many of them had relatively few foot-tracks in the sandy or clayey floors. (Yes, some of the caves have thousands-of-years-old foot tracks in them.)
Also, a lot of the paintings and symbols were placed in out-of-the-way areas, places that wouldn't normally be seen by someone just sitting by a fire in the cave. And a lot of the paintings would have taken some effort - lying on a scaffold or squeezed into a tiny area - to do, meaning that they weren't done "just" because they were easy and fun.
(And in some areas, there's evidence of outdoor dwellings - pits with places where stakes may have been placed to make a sort of yurt using animal hides).
Which makes me think that the caves must have had some spiritual significance to the people. That they didn't paint them "just" for art or "just" for fun. I wonder if the caves were seen as some sort of a womb image...there are at least a few "how people got here" stories around the world that involve people coming up from underground through a cave. And maybe the caves were seen as kind of a mother figure or something, and the art was a sign of respect or love or asking or thanking or any of the thousand reasons why people pray today. Maybe the paintings were done and never looked at again, maybe it was even taboo once a cave was "finished" to go back in and examine it again.
The "portable art" is also interesting. It seems to be what the author specialized on for her graduate and current research, and I wish she had spoken more about it. A lot of the objects have symbols on it, or very simplified, codified versions of animals (an eye, an ear, and a mane, to represent a horse, for example). And again, it makes me wonder: could this have been an early stab at some kind of symbolic/written language? I think from what I've read, cuneiform (slightly less than 5000 years ago) is the earliest verified writing, but there's some carving from about 8000 years ago in China that MAY be an earlier form. (Surely written language has multiple origins? It didn't start in one place and then spread?) And I wonder if a symbol-language would even be considered a form of writing.
It's sort of - I think "numinous" is almost but not quite the right word - to contemplate these people, who lived almost unimaginably long ago. 12,000 years ago - actually, towards the end of the time period Desdemaines-Hugon considers - that's even before the end of the last Ice Age. Christ was born some 2000 years ago. Even documents from 500 years ago can be hard to interpret.
Some places in the caves the people who painted them have left "negative handprints" - put their hands up against the side of the wall and blown pigment around them, so the negative space is the shape of their hand. Desdemaines-Hugon notes how tempting it is for a modern explorer to place their hand on the handprint, coming in as close contact as is possible with one of these long-ago people. (You can't, of course: any touching of the walls can lead to oil or perspiration being transferred and that could ultimately damage the paintings. And if one person does it, everyone touring the caves will want to, and the paintings would be worn off). In some places the handprints are of children - apparently in some of the caves, children were brought in to contribute to the paintings. (A community effort?)
It's a fascinating book and made me think about something I hadn't really thought much about before - I had heard of Lascaux and even seen some photographs of the paintings (or of the reconstructed "tourist" cave next door - the "real" Lascaux has been closed to preserve it). But there are lots of caves in France and Spain and even some in Germany and Hungary, where people were, as I said, almost unimaginably long ago (They were there when mammoths were still extant!)
There are a few omissions from the book. There aren't many maps (there's one at the front but it has relatively little detail; I would have liked to have seen something like a topographic section for each cave discussed.) And I would have liked more drawings/photos - there were a lot of things the author referred to but which were not pictured in the book. I don't know if the museum/owner of the object didn't permit it or what, but I would have liked more drawings or photos.
The purpose of the book seems to be, in part, to encourage people to travel to the caves that are still open and tour them, or failing that, go to the museums that have the portable art in them. I doubt that will ever happen for me (The caves especially; as intriguing as seeing the art might be, I'm not sure my claustrophobia would allow me to enter them). She does provide an extensive list (with phone numbers and URLs) of the sites in France that have contact information.
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