|
|
A large number of Magdalenian bone blades
exhibit very rich decorations which were obtained by grouping motifs of
this origin: ellipses, zigzags, chevrons and fleurons. Among the figures
there are representations of fish and animal heads and also of inanimate
objects various implements and even huts. Many of the designs were engraved
or painted on cave walls.
But decorative art had still other sources. In the course of removing
the meat from big game, man accidentally traced parallel lines on the
bones by steady, successive blows with a flint. From the later Mousterian
onwards, both at La Quina and at La Ferrassie, there have been occasional
finds of bones incised with careful parallel lines which are evidence
no longer of a chance result of butchery but of intentional work which
transposed a fortuitous line into decoration.
When the working of bone, ivory and reindeer-horn developed widely in
the Aurignacian and then in the Solutrean and Magdalenian, its technique
became more accurate and to the accidental traces of dismemberment were
added those caused by cutting up these raw materials to make narrow, elongated
tools out of them.
Certain objects such as spears were meant to be fixed to a stave. This
produced other elements by which decoration profited: transverse incisions
or flanges to ensure the firmness of the fastenings; incisions or grooves
on the surfaces in contact with the shaft to make the adhesive substance
stick more firmly. The habit of seeing a binding round a stick also resulted
on various occasions in its being copied in a carved representation.
One of the most certain origins of the geometrical decoration of many
Neolithic vases in both worlds comes from the first pots, (eg. Jomon Culture
ceramics, the earliest form of Japanese
Art) often supported in baskets which were destroyed by the firing
and whose weaving left its trace on the belly. When the basket was superseded,
the zig-zags of its imprints were imitated by hand out of sheer force
of habit. (See also Chinese
Pottery).
Thus decorative art was born of the ornamental transposition of elements
of technical origin; it was enriched with the residues of other elements,
also technical but fallen into disuse and ornamentalised - or from the
decorative imitation of neighbouring techniques; it made use of primitive
diagrams by amalgamating and separating them; it reached its apogee by
altering for its own enhancement elements borrowed from great art - mutilating,
debasing, re-grouping and dissociating them.
Post-Paleolithic Art
What was the fate of art after the great Magdalenian phase? The years
between the epoch when Upper Paleolithic man hunted the last herds of
reindeer in south-western Europe and the age when semi-civilised invaders
ploughed the first furrows there and put the first flocks out to pasture,
make up the Mesolithic and the Neolithic.
It must be admitted, however, that there were already pastoral and agricultural
Neolithic men in Africa and Asia Minor at a time when Europe's Upper Paleolithic
was at its zenith.
The so-called Neolithic peoples were in reality the issue of Upper Paleolithic
tribes which had migrated. Their migration was related to the improved
climate in what were previously glacial regions. Also, the progressive
drying-up of vast regions now deserted but where there once had been abundant
rainfall forced the tribes which had formed at the end of the Quaternary
and were already pastoral or agricultural to seek new lands for their
flocks and crops.
In the classical regions of the Upper Paleolithic, such as south-western
France and north-western Spain, several successive cultural waves have
been recorded, differing widely from one another from the point of view
of the evolution of art: the Azilian culture affords an instructive contribution.
In the cave of Mas d' Azil (Ariege), superimposed on a layer of late Magdalenian
material there appears a category of characteristic objects, consisting
of pebbles which are either painted or engraved, or both. They are also
found at the same level in other caves in the French Pyrenees and in Perigord;
and others, possibly of an even earlier date, have been found in several
caves in the north. It is quite possible that further careful research
might disclose them at any level of the European Upper Paleolithic, for
the painted caves have on their walls groups of dots or bars and signs
similar to those on the pebbles.
The caves of Castillo and Niaux enable us to observe that at an earlier
epoch certain artists already possessed a large repertory of conventional
signs from which the Azilian figures were derived. The origin of these
painted pebbles, then, goes far back into the Upper Paleolithic, especially
into that of the Mediterranean region, where tribes lived along the littoral,
existing mainly by collecting shellfish, a labour requiring little effort.
The painted motifs are most frequently dots or bars in different groupings:
crosses with one or two arms, barred circles, fern-leaves, rectangles
with two diagonals, circles with a central dot, and a few rare alphabetiform
signs: E, F, etc. The painted pebbles mark a first stage in stylised art.
Prehistoric Iberian Rock Paintings
When we first had the opportunity to study the paintings of the valley
of Batuacas, we noted the striking similarity of the dots or bars aligned
in series to the paintings on stones from the Mas d' Azil. In fact, it
is possible to interpret the Mas d' Azil symbols in the light of the less
stylised Spanish rock figures which generally represent human forms: the
double or triple chevron comes close to the diagram of a seated man; the
single or two-armed cross and the ladder-shaped sign with a single vertical
cutting through the middle of a large number of rungs recall an upright
man. There are too many agreements between the series for their origins
to be separate.
In our existing state of knowledge, prehistoric Iberian art seems to present
the following picture: in Upper Paleolithic times there existed on the
Peninsula an Atlantic province, primarily Cantabrian, but which also spread
into Castile and extended as far as southern Andalusia, to La Pileta,
for example, and the neighbourhood of Malaga and Cadiz; its naturalistic
art was the geographical extension of the Aurignacio-Magdalenian art of
the Upper Paleolithic in the south-west of France.
Altamira is the most famous example. Nevertheless, at an early date it
yielded a profusion of schematic signs which are found again, only in
very small numbers and at a late date, from the Pyrenees to the Dordogne,
and more rarely in the latter. La Pileta is particularly rich in numerous
and varied early signs.
The second artistic region of Paleolithic Iberia was almost exclusively
Mediterranean: it extended from Catalonia to the province of Almeria.
Although, through its splendid animal paintings, this Levantine art is
a particular development of Upper Paleolithic art and especially of Franco-Cantabrian
Perigordian, it is distinguished from it, as we have already mentioned,
by the abundance and the animated nature of equally realistic but summarily
treated human figures - the product of complex figurative scenes of hunts
and battles. It should be noted that certain stylised elements which preceded
the realistic figures in some cases - at Minateda (Albacete) for example
- are found in ever greater numbers towards the end of this art and appear
to arise from a mixture with coastal Mediterranean influences, which become
more and more numerous in relation to the original more northerly element.
The influence of Saharan and even South African paintings seems undeniable,
but, on the other hand, this influence could have come to Africa from
the Mediterranenan coast of Iberia.
The arrival, at the end of this period, of pastoral and agricultural Neolithic
peoples enriched rock art with a number of new conventional elements;
such as the representations of the 'owl-headed' female figures of the
dolmen world and the rectangular and triangular idols of the Iberian Neolithic,
among others. This new tendency was most widespread in Andalusia, the
Sierra Morena and Extremadura, in the south-west.
Schematic art, in the form of coloured drawings on the one hand and rock
engravings on the other, undoubtedly continued down to the beginning of
the Bronze Age. This may have
influenced Iron Age art like
the abstraction of the Celtic Hallstat and La Tene styles.
From Abstract Schematic Art to Writing
It would be interesting to make a coordinative study of the signs and
symbols derived from easily recognisable figures. Then the relative constancy
of the superimpositions would be observed. Detailed comparisons from more
remote places would enable us to follow the progress of schematic, or
stylised, art towards Ireland and Scandinavia, where it rejoined another
branch from central Asia. This last is the probable point of departure
of schematic art, which radiated to the entire circumference of the Old
World before writing came into being, giving the various Neolithic groups
a complete collection of symbols which each group elaborated and adapted
in its own way. Several extracted from these symbols the first elements
of ideographic writing, whereas others, scattered far and wide throughout
the world, continued to make use of these signs in the manner of their
ancestors, who had not yet amalgamated them into phrases to express complexes
of ideas.
Thus art, in its natural passage to a diagrammatic form, prepared the
way for the birth of writing and provided the signs which would be needed.
These signs are still not writing, but they lead up to it. The painted
rocks are even more eloquent in their way than the inscribed tablets of
Easter Island: at the two antipodes of our globe they form the ends of
two chains, which perhaps linked up somewhere near the centre of Asia,
at the foot of the mountains of eastern Siberia. In 1880, rubbings were
taken of many rock engravings - some of which adopted highly simplified
diagrams - to render beings - which were interpreted with great pains.
We can see in them a precursor of one of the human mind's greatest achievements:
the symbol leading to writing. But its development was elsewhere. In the
east, the south and the south-west the ingenuity of the Neolithic tribes
of China, Chaldea, Egypt and north-west India was needed to organise these
graphic signs, scanty at first, to add to them and elaborate them, in
order finally to extract from them first ideographic and later phonetic
script. (See also Calligraphy, the ancient
art of stylized writing)
We have no doubt that this immense discovery was the result of the independent
development by the various colonies dotted around the periphery of the
'Roof of the World' of the small stock of figure-symbols brought from
their countries of origin. Thus did the history
of art and civilization fuse.
But we have reached the time when the early peoples and races were settling
into place; the material conditions of their lives were established. Prehistory
in the strict sense of the word was finished.
|
