AR128.
Copyright © 2007 by Kevin Sharpe and Leslie Van Gelder.
All rights reserved.
An accepted proposal for a paper presentation at the Denton
2008 conference.
The Implicit Religion Underlying
Interpretations of European Prehistoric Art
European appreciation of its Paleolithic cave art – the
famous images of Lascaux, Altamira,
and, more recently, Chauvet – has had a fairly
univocal voice since first recognized as ancient, from the late nineteenth
century until now. One of the first, and probably the most influential voice on
this was that of Abbé Henri Breuil.
It would be natural to think that he and the several other churchmen who helped
pioneer the study should look to religion for their interpretative base. Thus
we have inherited names for parts of the art caves that include ‘sanctuary’ and
‘sacred way,’ and some drawings even have names like ‘the Great Being.’
Alongside the
tendency to see the art in terms of ritual, religion, trance, shamans, and so
on, is an evolutionary mindset. Breuil and his later
followers thought the oldest and most primitive art included hand stencils and lines
that seem to depict nothing, followed by outline drawings of animals, and up
and up to the most recent paintings, the beautifully depicted bison and other
animals in Lascaux. The mindset of
the investigators seems to show both an adoration for the art and artists, they
(‘our ancestors’) having created such fantastic images so long ago, and a
looking down on them as primitive, a sort of longing for the pristine or even
innocent days of ‘our’ yore, and a superiority in that we moderns have
progressed so far from that. It represents a longing for paradise lost and a
repudiation of supposed times of hardship, challenge, and brutality. This
interpretative tendency nowadays flowers in the shamanic hypothesis that sees
the art as the work of shamans depicting the images they saw in their trances.
Further, interpretations of prehistory often rely on
Neolithic or agricultural views of the world, most especially in the belief
that what is above is divine, and below either an unsavory underworld or the
womb of a goddess. The lens through which prehistoric art has been interpreted
comes from the implicit beliefs of agriculturalists, not hunter gatherers, and
thus most ideas about these people and their use of the caves in particular is
laden not only with contemporary religious jargon, but also agricultural
cultural interpretations.
Contemporary investigations, however, bring out the
wrong-headedness of much of this interpretative framework. The dating of Chauvet
Cave shows, for instance,
that some of the most ‘advanced’ art in the Breuilian
paradigm is in fact some of the oldest. Our own archaeological investigations
of Breuil’s ‘enigmatic lines’ (or Clottes’
‘intestines of the underworld’) shows that sometimes they were made at the same
time as the great art and by the same people, that some were made by young
children as well as by adults, that some appear to have a pattern in them
(making them symbolic or notational), and that some may have quite mundane
intentions behind them. Further, the lives of the people who made the art,
while different in technology from ours, were probably relatively comfortable
with considerable leisure, and with life spans that, once past 15, may have
been longer than people who currently live in the US.
Why has Breuil’s
interpretative approach to the cave art continued for over 125 years
largely unchanged? Why did it rise unchallenged to gain such power? Why is it
still so powerful? Why do many writers and thinkers turn to prehistory for
authentication and arguments of spiritual purity? These questions seem to
bespeak implicit religious motifs, stories, and symbols that resonate in the
heart of the western mindset.
Kevin Sharpe and Leslie
Van Gelder