X-ray style

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Representation of a kangaroo in the X-ray style of the Australian Aborigines . Anbangbang Rock Shelter, Kakadu National Park , Australia
Moose from Åskollen

In the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic rock art and sculpture, the X-ray style is understood to be the representation of engraved or painted animals, more rarely people in a kind of technical sectional drawing with internal organs such as heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, stomach, intestines and anus, but especially bones . The reason for this type of representation, which occurs worldwide in several cultures that are far apart in time and space, is controversial.

distribution

The style is particularly widespread in " hunter-gatherer " cultures all over the world and is found in its oldest forms in the Mesolithic rock art of Scandinavia, but especially among the Aborigines in Australia, neolithic in the line ceramic culture (5800-4500 BC). BC), in China and Inner Mongolia as well as in the art of the Indians of North America, in Siberia , western New Guinea , New Ireland , India and Malaysia, in southern France and northern Spain. The chronological classification and dating is, as always in the case of rock art, extremely difficult.

  • The X-ray style is best known for the rock art and the bark pictures of the Aborigines of Australia, in which there are large, multi-colored X-ray representations of kangaroos, emus, turtles and fish. They come mainly from western Arnhem Land and have emerged over the last three millennia against the background of a still paleolithic culture. The representations are up to two and a half meters tall and polychrome . There are pictures in which only the skeleton and body outline are shown, but the entire internal organ system is symbolized by a line of life, which runs as a straight line from the animal's mouth to a point that is the heart or stomach. The X-ray style is even the most common form of representation for bark images.
  • In East Timor , for example, there are x-ray-style fish images in Lene Hara's cave .
  • In Scandinavia, x-ray images are occasionally found, the oldest examples being scratches on bones. Most famous is the representation of an elk with its internal organs in Buskerud, Norway (4500-3000 BC), which is interpreted as a rebirth rite.
  • In the case of the linear band ceramists, skeletons were even indicated in the X-ray style on clay human figures, such as shoulder bones, spine and ribs and the foot bones on the sole of a leg.
  • In the rock art of China animals are depicted with their bones, in Inner Mongolia there is even a two- to three-thousand-year-old depiction of animals in Wulata, in which the shape of the animal is only represented by its bones.
  • There is no clear evidence of the X-ray style in Africa.
  • He is also not represented in the French Cantabrian cave art .

Explanations

There are three explanations for this, albeit speculative:

  1. The internal organs and bones shown are primarily to be understood as practical instructions for dismantling.
  2. The body structures were used to instruct the youth, to prepare them for the hunt, for example to mark the deadly meeting points. Above all in the Franco-Cantabrian cave painting there are also numerous depictions of animals without X-ray aspects, which have bullet marks or even arrows and spears are drawn in. The X-ray style could have been a kind of didactic extension.
  3. Aspects of hunting magic: Especially in the shamanism of the hunters and gatherers there was the belief that the prey was a gift from the master or mistress of the animals. The bones of the hunted game had to be returned to them so that they could create new animals from them. However, this does not explain the appearance of the internal organs.

However, it is entirely possible that all three explanations apply, albeit in different ways as well as historically and culturally variable. This multiple explanatory approach is often the most useful, especially with rock art and the meaning behind it, especially since a strict categorical separation corresponds to a modern monocausal way of thinking anyway, which is used to neatly separate this world and the hereafter, mystically and real, a thought pattern that hardly affects the world of prehistoric cultures with their very different living conditions and models of explanation of the world, as the case of the Aborigines that can still be observed today with their concept of the dream time , in which everything real also has mystical references.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On the life-size image of a moose on the Åskollen farm near Drammen in southern Norway, the drawing shows the inside of the animal's body: the heart, lungs, liver and kidneys are shown schematically, but also abomasum, leaf stomach, rumen, the intestines in spirals and the Nach.
  2. ↑ Hoffmann, p. 323; Britannica, Vol. 12, pp. 792 f.
  3. ↑ Vialou, p. 402, Brockhaus, Vol. 18, p. 549.
  4. ↑ Christopher D. Standish, Marcos García-Diez, Sue O'Connor, Nuno Vasco Oliveira: Hand stencil discoveries at Lene Hara Cave hint at Pleistocene age for the earliest painted art in Timor-Leste , Archaeological Research in Asia, March 18, 2020 .
  5. ↑ Evers, p. 53.
  6. ↑ Chen Zhao Fu, p. 191.
  7. ↑ See Striedter.
  8. ↑ Hoffmann, p. 323.
  9. ↑ Eliade: History of Religious Ideas , Vol. 1, p. 19; Müller, pp. 17f, 116; Hoppal, p. 45.