Upper Paleolithic minor art

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Venus vom Hohlefels, the oldest undisputed representation of humans worldwide

Upper Paleolithic cabaret is an archaeological collective term for works of art and artistically designed or decorated artifacts from the Upper Paleolithic . The carrier of these works of art is the anatomically modern man , also known synonymously in Europe as the Cro-Magnon man .

Cabaret is referred to in the archaeological context as mobile art ( French art mobilier "movable art"). This is an opposite term to the mostly large-format rock paintings in caves and abrises , which are collectively referred to as parietal art ( French art pariétal "wall art", from Latin paries "wall").

Emergence

Pierced shells of sea snails from Blombos Cave

In the Qafzeh -Höhle in Israel existed before 92,000 years, a non-purposeful use of shells of a then popular on the coast dog cockle ( Glycymeris Insubrica ) and the mineral dye ocher . There are pierced snail shells ( Nassarius gibbosulus ) dating back 82,000 years from the Grotto des Pigeons ( Oujda region , Morocco ) and - around 40,000 years old - from the Üçağızlı cave in Turkey .

The largest concentration of early artistic expressions of Homo sapiens comes from sites of the Middle Stone Age in South Africa . The associated tool cultures are referred to as Pre-Still Bay , Still Bay and Howieson's Poort Industrie and dated to the period between about 75,000 to 50,000 years. The works of art are also mostly jewelry made of pierced sea snails or shells, but here in connection with geometrically decorated objects. A large number of pierced snail shells colored with red chalk come from the Blombos Cave (South Africa). These are up to 75,000 years old, while the oldest pieces of ocher in the lower cave layers are up to 100,000 years old. Ocher colors were apparently already produced in large quantities in the Middle Stone Age , as 58,000-year-old layers in the Abri Sibudu ( KwaZulu-Natal Province , South Africa) show. Various pieces of red chalk (red ocher ) with geometrical incisions that are at least 75,000 years old have also been found in the Blombos cave . Convincing evidence of geometrically ornamented objects was also published with engraved ostrich egg shells from the Diepkloof Cave ( Western Cape Province , South Africa) up to 60,000 years old . The ornate ostrich eggs were likely used as water containers.

The development of simple ornamented objects in Africa to small figurative works of art of the European Aurignacia , which are only documented here about 40,000 years ago, is very likely a continuous process in the sense of a tradition. In Europe, in the time horizon of the transition from the Middle Paleolithic to the Upper Paleolithic, there are a number of ornamented objects that can be both innovations of later Neanderthals ( Châtelperronia ) and interactions with the immigrant Homo sapiens . Incised ornaments play a major role in works of art by the Cro-Magnon man , where they decorate the ivory cabaret (cf. Venus vom Hohlen Fels ) or were applied as petroglyphs to rock walls.

The use of jewelry and decorative ornamentation was until recently attributed exclusively to Homo sapiens and considered part of "modern behavior". In 2010, about 50,000-year-old, pierced and ocher-painted mussel shells from the Spanish limestone caves Cueva de los Aviones and Cueva Antón are known, which are older than the earliest evidence of the Cro-Magnon man and are therefore considered to be pieces of jewelry made by Neanderthals .

A figurative old Paleolithic small art has not yet been clearly documented. Two so-called proto-figurines from ancient Paleolithic contexts, the Venus of Berekhat Ram (Israel) and the Venus of Tan-Tan (Morocco), are controversially discussed. While some scientists assume that they are pure nature games (geofacts), others assume that they are real artifacts. The American paleo art expert Alexander Marshack ( Harvard University ) examined the figurines of Berekhat Ram microscopically and describes a deliberate resemblance of form through human processing, which has strengthened the natural form. Some archaeologists confirm the human treatment, but dispute the interpretation as a sculpture.

Genres of Upper Palaeolithic minor art

Wild horse made of mammoth ivory ( Vogelherd cave ), Collection of the Older Prehistory, Museum of the University of Tübingen MUT

Figurative cabaret in Europe begins with the Aurignacien . The oldest works include small ivory works of art from the Swabian Alb , such as Venus from Hohlefels and the Lion Man from Hohlenstein . Overall, for the Upper Paleolithic , engravings, often on perforated rods made of reindeer antler , bone, stone or gagat , quantitatively constitute the largest group of mobile small art; here there are only depictions of animals, v. a. of deer species, ibex and wild horses. Engraved signs and symbols can be found on bullet tips , harpoons , the “baguettes demi-rondes” or on smaller perforated rods .

Also to be mentioned is the group of three-dimensional spear thrower hook ends, which mostly depict wild horse heads , musk ox and also stylized fish. Jewelry pendants and amulets were made from animal teeth, small bone parts, ivory, fossil snails, etc. a. created. The small, highly abstract “dancing” female statuettes are a specialty of Magdalenian ; for an older period of time - Gravettia - lush, often faceless depictions of women (" Venus figurines ") are typical, such as B. the Venus of Willendorf . Paleolithic depictions of women have a wide geographical distribution. Many of these sculptures have been found from the Pyrenees to Siberia. A large number comes from Russia ( Venus figurines from Kostenki , Venus figurines from Avdeevo , Venus figurines from Gagarino , Venus figurines from Saraisk ) and Siberia ( Venus figurines from Malta , Venus figurines from Bouret ). There are also known sites in France, Italy and the Czech Republic. The Venus of Dolní Věstonice is the oldest ceramic figure. From some sites, e.g. B. Gönnersdorf , come extensive series of fleeting engravings on slate, on which animals and dancing women are also shown.

For Switzerland, only the last phase of the Upper Palaeolithic - the Magdalenian period (approx. 18,000 to 12,000 BC) - has been reliably documented, as a repopulation of the low mountain ranges was only possible in the late glacial period with rewarming and the resulting disintegration of the Worm Ice Age ice. From the approximately 30 known sites in Switzerland, only finds from the younger Magdalenian are known and belong within the styles outlined according to André Leroi-Gourhan to Art Style IV, which includes incised drawings on slate, bones and antlers, small figurative sculptures as well as amulet and pendant forms . The sites are distributed irregularly along the southern Jura slope and the southern area of ​​the Swabian Alb.

Important sources

Cave lion made of mammoth ivory, found in the Vogelherd cave , today in the collection of the Older Prehistory, Museum of the University of Tübingen MUT
Mammoth made of mammoth ivory (Vogelherd cave), collection of the older prehistory, Museum of the University of Tübingen MUT
France
Switzerland
Germany

exhibition

  • 2013: Ice Age Art. Arrival of the Modern Mind , British Museum ; London, catalog.

Gallery of Upper Paleolithic minor art

literature

  • Leif Steguweit (Ed.): People of the Ice Age: Hunters - Craftsmen - Artists. Praehistorika, Fürth 2008, ISBN 978-3-937852-01-0 , ( PDF download )
  • Alexandra Güth: Using 3D Scanning in the investigation of Upper Palaeolithic engravings: first results of a pilot study. In: Journal of Archaeological Science 39, 2012, pp. 3105-3114.
  • Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser , Olaf Jöris: Contextualizing the Female Image - Symbols for Common Ideas and Communal Identity in Upper Palaeolithic Societies. In: F. Wenban-Smith, F. Coward, R. Hosfield, M. Pope (Eds.): Settlement, Society, and Cognition in Human Evolution. Matt Pope. Cambridge University Press.
  • Nicholas Conard , Ernst Seidl: The mammoth from Vogelherd. Tübingen finds of the oldest preserved works of art. MUT, Tübingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-9812736-0-1 .
  • André Leroi-Gourhan : Préhistoire de l'art occidental. Paris 1965.
  • Claus-Stephan Holdermann, Hansjürgen Müller-Beck , Ulrich Simon: Ice Age art in the southern German-Swiss Jura. Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-8062-1674-6 .
  • Urs Leuzinger (Ed.): The first people in the Alpine region from 50,000 to 5000 BC. Exhibition catalog. Walliser Kantonsmuseen, Sitten, Wallis 2002, ISBN 2-88426-049-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ D. Sivan, M. Potasman, A. Almogi-Labin, Bar-Yosef Mayer, DE, Spaniards, E., Boaretto, E .: The Glycymeris query along the coast and shallow shelf of Israel, southeast Mediterranean. In: Palaeogeography Palaeoclimatology Palaeoecology. 233, 2006, pp. 134-148. doi: 10.1016 / j.palaeo.2005.09.018
  2. ^ A b Daniella E. Bar-Yosef Mayer, Bernard Vandermeersch, Ofer Bar-Yosef : Shells and ocher in Middle Paleolithic Qafzeh Cave, Israel - indications for modern behavior. In: Journal of Human Evolution. Oxford 56/3, 2009, pp. 307-314. doi: 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2008.10.005 ISSN  0047-2484
  3. ↑ A. Bouzouggar, N. Barton, M. Vanhaeren, F. d'Errico, S. Collcutt, T. Higham , E. Hodge, S. Parfitt, E. Rhodes, J.-L. Schwenninger, C. Stringer, E. Turner, S. Ward, A. Moutmir, A. Stambouli: 82,000-year-old shell beads from North Africa and implications for the origins of modern human behavior. In: PNAS . 104, 2007, pp. 9964-9969. doi: 10.1073 / pnas.0703877104
  4. ^ Mary C. Stiner et al.: Early Upper Paleolithic shell beads at Üçağızlı Cave I (Turkey): Technology and the socioeconomic context of ornament life-histories. In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 64, No. 5, 2013, pp. 380-398, doi: 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2013.01.008 . Illustrations of the snail shell
  5. ↑ Z. Jacobs et al.: Ages for the Middle Stone Age of Southern Africa: implications for human behavior and dispersal. In: Science. 322, No. 5902, 2008, pp. 733-735. doi: 10.1126 / science.1162219
  6. ^ F. d'Errico, C. Henshilwood , M. Vanhaeren, K. van Niekerk: Nassarius Kraussianus shell beads from Blombos Cave, evidence for symbolic behavior in the Middle Stone Age. In: Journal of Human Evolution. Oxford 48/1, 2005, pp. 3-24. PMID 15656934 ISSN  0047-2484
  7. ↑ M. Balter: Early start for human art? Ocher may revise timeline. In: Science. 323, 2009, p. 569. doi: 10.1126 / science.323.5914.569
  8. ↑ Lyn Wadley: Cemented ash as a receptacle or work surface for ocher powder production at Sibudu, South Africa, 58,000 years ago. In: Journal of Archaeological Science. 2010. doi: 10.1016 / j.jas.2010.04.012
  9. ↑ Christopher S. Henshilwood et al: Emergence of Modern Human Behavior: Middle Stone Age Engravings from South Africa. In: Science . Volume 295, 2002, pp. 1278-1280. doi: 10.1126 / science.1067575
    Christopher S. Henshilwood et al .: Engraved ochres from the Middle Stone Age levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa. In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 57, No. 1, 2009, pp. 27-47. doi: 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2009.01.005
  10. ↑ Pierre-Jean Texier, Guillaume Porraz, John Parkington, Jean-Philippe Rigaud, Cedric Poggenpoel, Christopher Miller, Chantal Tribolo, Caroline Cartwright, Aude Coudenneau, Richard Klein, Teresa Steele, Christine Verna: A Howiesons Poort tradition of engraving ostrich eggshell containers dated to 60,000 years ago at Diepkloof Rock Shelter, South Africa. In: PNAS. March 1, 2010. doi: 10.1073 / pnas.0913047107 ISSN  0027-8424
  11. ↑ S. Mc Brearty, AS Brooks: The revolution did what not. A new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior. In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 39, No. 5, 2000, pp. 453-463. doi: 10.1006 / jhev.2000.0435 ISSN  0047-2484
  12. ↑ CS Henshilwood, CW Marean: The origin of modern human behavior. In: Current Anthropology Volume 44, 2003, pp. 627-651.
  13. ↑ Paul Mellars, Brad Gravina, Christopher Bronk Ramsey: Confirmation of Neanderthal and modern human interstratification at the site Chatelperronian the type. In: PNAS. Volume 104. No. 9, 2007, pp. 3657-3662. ISSN  0027-8424
  14. ^ SL Kuhn, MC Stiner, DS Reese, E. Güleç: Ornaments of the earliest Upper Palaeolithic: new insights from the Levant. In: PNAS. Volume 98, No. 13, 2001, pp. 7641-7646. doi: 10.1073 / pnas.121590798
  15. ^ João Zilhão : The Emergence of Ornaments and Art: An Archaeological Perspective on the Origins of “Behavioral Modernity”. In: Journal of Archaeological Research. Volume 15, No. 1, 2007, pp. 1-54. doi: 10.1007 / s10814-006-9008-1
  16. ↑ João Zilhão et al .: Symbolic use of marine shells and mineral pigments by Iberian Neandertals. In: PNAS. Volume 107, No. 3, 2010, pp. 1023-1028. doi: 10.1073 / pnas.0914088107 ISSN  0027-8424
  17. ↑ Andrew Pelcin: A Geological Explanation for the Berekhat Ram Figurine. Current Anthropology 35 (5), 1994, pp. 674-675.
  18. ^ Noble, W. & Davidson, I .: Human Evolution, Language and Mind: A Psychological and Archaeological Inquiry. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996.
  19. ↑ Alexander Marshack: The Berekhat Ram figurine: a late Acheulian carving from the Middle East. Antiquity, 71 (272), 1997, p. 327. Online as PDF Archived copy ( Memento of the original from July 26, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.utexas.edu
  20. ↑ Francesco d'Errico, April Nowell: A new look at the Berekhat Ram figurine: implications for the origins of symbolism. In: Cambridge Archaeological Journal. Volume 10, 2000, p. 148.
  21. ^ H. Delporte: L'image de la femme dans l'art préhistorique , Ed. Picard (1993) ISBN 2-7084-0440-7 .
  22. ^ Jean-Marie Le Tensorer , Urs Niffeler (ed.): Palaeolithic and Mesolithic. Switzerland from the Paleolithic to the Early Middle Ages. Volume 1, Basel 1993, ISBN 3-908006-50-3 .
  23. ↑ Ingmar M. Braun: The art of the Swiss Upper Palaeolithic (Magdalenian). In: Helvetia Archaeologica. Basel 36, 141/142, 2005, pp. 41-65. ISSN  0018-0173
  24. ^ Ingmar M. Braun: Art mobilier magdalénien en Suisse. In: Préhistoire, Arts et Sociétés. Tome, Tarascon 60, 2005, pp. 25-44. ISSN  1954-5045
  25. ↑ Ice Age. In: FAZ . February 8, 2013, p. 31.

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