The Art and Symbols of Ice Age Man Marshack
READING Before WRITING
Run into the article in its original context from
Apr 6, 1986
,
Section 7 , Page
oneBuy Reprints
TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for dwelling delivery and digital subscribers.
Almost the Archive
This is a digitized version of an commodity from The Times'southward print archive, before the beginning of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.
IN the beginning, it is said, was the ''word.'' But the archeological record of the Old Rock Age or Paleolithic menses is silent. What one finds instead in the soil is the image. And what extraordinary images. The unfleshed, time-cleansed shadow of man: a grinning skull, emptied eyes, some disarticulated skeletal fragments, a few finer basic, some loose teeth, a jaw, a broken hip, the remains of meals, a habitation floor or workplace, the stone-hard tools, and and so, seemingly suddenly in the archeological record of some 32,000 years agone, images fabricated by man - animals, humans (particularly females) and foreign signs and symbols. Information technology is these images that have recently begun to speak.
In the final century a few thousand carved and in-cised images were establish in the ice age homesites of the European hunters of woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, bison, wild horse and reindeer, or carved, painted and engraved on the walls of the limestone caves in the hills and mountains of France and Espana. For some two decades I have turned the incised and carved images found on mammoth ivory, os and stone under a microscope, or studied them in the cool damp and dark of the caves with ul-traviolet and infrared light, trying to go the images to tell something of their meaning and utilise, of the lost thoughts of man thousands of years before the beginning of writing, in that early menses when Homo sapiens had at last go a fully modernistic human being.
In 1868 the first skeletons of ice age man and woman were establish in a small burying cave called Cro-Magnon, a brusk walk from the Vezere River in southwest French republic. Buried with the skeletons were hundreds of seashell beads, though the cavern is a week's walk from the Atlantic. Afterwards the engraved images of a man and woman on a pebble were institute in the cave. The skull of the buried woman had a clean oval hole on one side where, information technology seemed when establish, a spear had been thrust through. The old human's bones, it was discovered, were diseased. Here was ice historic period ''human being,'' or man and woman, a maker of fine art and ornamentation, a long-altitude trader or seeker for the materials of art, a seeming killer of his kind, the respectful burier of his dead and a sufferer of hurting. All this was deduced from the first discovered burial of ice age man, however not a word had been spoken. A
* CENTURY later the discovery of Cro-Magnon, in 1965, I came to France to run into what the water ice age images, carved and engraved on bits and pieces of bone and stone, or painted and incised in the caves, could tell. In the prior century, and through the period in which I worked, dozens of theories concerning the pregnant of the images and the beginnings of man as a species had been published, each offering a different type of early homo. At first, ice age human being was considered to be simply a primitive subsistence hunter and toolmaker whose images referred to fertility and hunting magic. Then followed more than elaborate anthropological, Freudian, Jungian, Marxist, structuralist and neuropsychological theories. The data revolution that began after Globe War 2 helped anthropologists formulate the theory that ice historic period man was a user and purveyor of ''information,'' which had been used to structure the ice age cultures and to distinguish one group from another. In this theory ice age homo was considered to accept been the inventor of ''manner'' in personal decoration and art, a grade of encoded visual information that helped to distinguish one grouping from some other. The concept did not explain the complexity of ice age imagery or the reason that art and symbol had begun, but information technology was an improvement over the old theories based on an assumed ''primitive mind'' and on purely magic and animistic beliefs. Ice age man was beginning to exist accepted as an early, fully modern human being, equally an evolved cultural symbol maker and user. A part of that change in thinking came from the research I had begun, research in which I went not to any modern theories but to the artifacts and the images to see how they were made and used. What I found was not fairly explained past any of these theories.
The first bits of bone I put under the microscope were non the mutual images of animals or human being females, but 2 thin, mitt-size oval plaques of bone that had been shaped and then incised with tiny marks. The bones had been found on the floors of habitation sites a short walk from each other in the Vezere valley, not far from the cavern in which the Cro-Magnon skeletons had been found. Archeologists had suggested that these bones, made about 30,000 years agone, were hide softeners and that the marking on them was either ornament or a hunter's tally of animals killed. The microscope showed that the bones were used for retouching stone tools and, by evidence of the manus-wear and percussion breakage, had been used for a considerable menses. During that menstruation they had been incised with tiny marks. These had been accumulated as sets, linearly and sequentially, one set after another, as though in some form of tape keeping. On one of the bones this linear accumulation formed a twisting serpentine epitome, recalling the boustrophedon or ''turning as the ox plows'' form of early writing, known from some of the afterward farming cultures, where the lines were alternately read from right to left and left to right. No hunting tally in the man tape twisted and turned in this manner. A test of the sets and sequence suggested that the marking was a form of annotation, a nonarithmetic record and visualization of the waxing and waning of the moon through its phases. Could there accept been record keeping 25,000 years earlier the get-go of formal writing and nigh twenty,000 years before the beginning of agriculture and the subsequent rise of civilization?
Analyses of these early notations and of other examples found in ice age Europe, some from equally late equally the end of the ice age, about 9000 B.C., have documented the fact that diverse regional forms of notation existed in this menstruum. It was clear that the water ice age notations were not writing. They had no words, and the sets showed no great knowledge of arithmetic or counting. Nevertheless, many of the notations tallied precisely with the lunar phases. If I was right, the notations were merely the simple abstruse frame and construction of observed passing fourth dimension and of certain events and changes occurring in time. Now a cognition of time and continuity and of the changes occurring in time are at the cadre of human culture, of human subsistence activity, of periodic human being ritual and ceremony, and of all stories, narratives, tales and myths. Time is at the roots, also, of all processes in nature and of descriptions of nature's processes.
Research ofttimes proceeds like a detective story, inkling past clue and fact past fact, with an accumulation of information until there is finally a film of the process beingness sought. It was in this manner that the inquiry into the ice age symbol systems progressed during the side by side twenty years. Information technology was clear, for instance, that the notations, though not writing, could be ''read'' past the maker and could therefore exist explained. What could be explained, however, was what was seen and recorded, not the complexity or the reasons for the lunar procedure. At the finish of each month the moon disappears for a few days; it is then ''reborn'' as a thin crescent, grows for some 13 or 14 days to total, and then slowly diminishes until it ''dies.'' This frame has been used by different cultures effectually the world to hang many a regional tale.
The hunting-gathering San bushmen of South Africa celebrate the full moon with dances. Then, co-ordinate to bushman story, the moon begins to die as the meat of his body is cut off by that neat hunter, the sun. At invisibility the moon is almost dead, but he never quite dies. With the commencement crescent he begins to abound once again. A more than complex set of stories, metaphors and images exists among the Tabwa, farmers and fishers of central Africa in Zaire and Zimbabwe most Lake Tanganyika. The prototype and metaphor of lunar process is the isosceles triangle, with the first crescent, which appears above the western horizon at dusk, at bottom left. Its appearance is historic with joy, afterwards 2 or 3 days of invisibility, equally the triumph of light over darkness. The apex of the triangle is the full moon, which appears on the eastern horizon at sunset, and the last crescent, which appears to a higher place the eastern horizon at dawn, is at bottom correct. The triangle, called ''the ascension of the new moon,'' is as well used at a metaphor of Tabwa family unit relations. In Tabwa myth, the male moon is married to two wives, a mutual do amidst the Tabwa: ane married woman is the morn star, or the planet Venus, when information technology appears, later on an absence, as a descending star above the western horizon at dusk, slowly sinking beneath the horizon. The Tabwa say that the ascent morning star is the hard-working first wife, who rises with the dawn and then works hard all day, while the evening star is the more loved second married woman, who descends in the west at evening to bed with her husband, where she spends the dark with him. The triangular image and metaphor extend to other aspects of Tabwa life, conceived of equally a continuous alternation and rest betwixt opposites. FAR more than elaborate lunar mythologies and cosmological scenarios were devised past the early farming civilizations and states, where the moon was now considered to be the inventor of measurement, especially of time measurement, and the creator of gild, besides being an role player in hierarchically organized bureaucratic and administrative dramas of the struggle for ability and authorization. On the basis of the prove, therefore, i can presume that in the ice age the lunar frame was used to structure a tale of relevance to the developing only already circuitous hunting-gathering cultures of Europe.
The water ice historic period notations, then, were not writing, science, or arithmeticized astronomy. Still, they were incipient to and precursive of developments that would occur subsequently with the ''invention'' of writing, science, arithmetics and astronomy. It was the fundamental human capacity to see procedure and to abstruse it symbolically, whether by tape keeping, by the making of images, or past a apply of language and the making of myths that would be highly elaborated in the advanced civilizations, when there was a growing need for such ''information.''
The water ice historic period caves, more famous than the stones and bones for their animate being art, really have accumulations of images of many types, apparently made at different times by different people. In that location are finger marks dipped in paint, handprints, rows of painted dots, rows of incised lines, anthropomorphic figures or ''spirits,'' accumulations of geometric symbols, signs and motifs, besides equally engraved, carved and painted animals, some of which are masterpieces, others crude. Many of these animals have been diversely overmarked and re-used. An analysis of each of these image types and uses has revealed that they represented different forms of ritual participation, each with its ain credible meaning, comparable perhaps to the diverse forms of ritual participation found in contemporary life. IN a modernistic church or temple, nosotros may engage in the ritual of lighting a candle, praying earlier an image, touching holy water or a sacred icon, bowing or kneeling, covering one'south head, making the sign of the cantankerous or raising one'due south easily to God. These are private acts. Merely in the sanctuary ane may also participate in group ceremonies for a nascence, an initiation, a death, a holiday, a celebration, a crisis. Each ritual deed, though dissimilar, represents forms of ritual participation that be contemporaneously within a single civilization.
Similarly, each image system found in the caves was different, and each represented a variable and periodic employ of the caves. Just not only the sanctuary caves were involved in ritual and its accompanying myth and story. A similar complication of image production and employ was found in the homesite. Animate being and man female images were incised and accumulated on bone and stone, and these, too, were often overmarked equally though in periodic ritual use. Sometimes different classes of prototype or motif were used together on a single surface. A series of dots might be accumulated within and around a horse, a bison, or a mammoth, or a dart might be placed in the animal to ''kill'' it. On the other hand, the animal might be renewed by adding an actress muzzle, eye, ear, back, leg or tail, or a geometric motif might be placed on the beast as though to trap it in a thought. Sometimes all these processes might occur in relation to a single animal epitome and the animal might also be associated with a cumulative notation, suggesting that it was a symbol that persisted through time.
Images and symbols, so, were being used to say and mean a range of things at different times, in dissimilar places and for different purposes. The range and complexity of imagery and of image utilize, if not the meanings, was similar to that found in the mod world. In a book, words may correspond ane arrangement, pictures another, the tables of contents, indexes, footnotes, references, folio numbers and maps and charts withal others. If there are maps and charts, and then numbers, letters, color or graphic coding, quantifying zigzags and curves, every bit well as sentences and words, might all be incorporated. The pregnant and utilize of each visual arrangement has to be learned separately, and their combined utilize constitutes office of the ''literacy'' plant in a technologically advanced lodge. The ice historic period hunters of mammoth and bison were making and reading a similarly circuitous ready of images and signs in the caves, in the homesites and in open-air rituals, since these are depicted in some water ice age compositions. These visual symbol systems were not nonetheless writing, simply they did constitute a highly developed symbolic literacy. When writing did finally develop, it fabricated apply of the already evolved and developed imaging and abstracting capacities used during the ice historic period.
It is now articulate, more a century after the first ice historic period images were establish, that they cannot be just categorized as ''art'' or ''magic,'' but must instead be discussed equally functional aspects of an already complex and developed early social club that was using symbol systems of different types. What we see today in the images of then-chosen archaic peoples or vanished civilizations and cultures equally ''art'' is essentially the images of storied and mythologized frames of reference. It is in recognition of this that archeologists in the United States and United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland accept recently begun discussing the idea that the epitome systems of the water ice age were a form of encoded information used to bind society and differentiate groups. The idea comes in part from the costume pieces and decorations plant in the excavations, such as the beads at the Cro-Magnon burial. But the concept is derived, not from a knowledge of the complication of the water ice age materials, but from contemporary information theory and its general endeavour to understand symbols and images. The fact is that a large proportion of the imagery in the caves was not intended to serve as communication between people or groups. It was often underground, hidden in a hard-to-reach recess far from the daylight earth. These secretive images offer united states of america bear witness of private acts of symbolic, ritual participation and production. The communication was between the maker and the concept, the maker and the prototype. The isolation involved in separation from the group was, plain, intentional. This mode of symbol production and utilize is, once more, quite modern and homo. Nosotros meet something of the process in the production of mod art equally an individual expression or in the vision quest of the American Indian seeking a song, a dance or a design, and we meet information technology in the alone and private writing of poetry and fiction. That there may be a later public showing or viewing does not explain the processes of individual creation. In the water ice age, equally in celebrated cultures, the relation of the image maker to the process of image making, and to the image, was often every bit circuitous and meaningful as any of the processes involved in a later public showing.
The presence of dozens of prototype and symbol systems in water ice age Europe suggests the presence of a developed civilization in which the many recognized processes of the hunter's world were noted, marked, symbolized, talked most and mythologized. The images were, in fact, illustrations of and participants in that narrative earth. Nosotros lack the show of language and take none of the stories. Simply the images withal speak - of human thought, of human efforts, strategies, plans and tales, even of human uncertainties and of the many symbolic efforts to intervene and get office of the broad range of periodic and random processes that occur in time.
For all its richness, yet, the analytic data are false. The ice age images seem to say: ''This is how information technology began.'' But symbol and art did non and could not have begun of a sudden in this one region of Europe and at this point in fourth dimension. The set of capacities used by the water ice historic period hunters of Europe existed equally among peoples living in other geographic areas. While I was conducting my research, painted animal images from this same period were found in South Africa, and symbolic motif accumulations dated at approximately 20,000 B.C. were found in a cavern in Australia. Information technology is clear that the images and symbols of ice age Europe, while they document a unique regional development, do not tell the full human story. NEVERTHELESS, in recent years the ice age of Europe has begun to assume the aspects of a new mythic frontier. A number of authors accept published novels on water ice age man and his predecessor, Neanderthal man. The first, by the Finnish paleontologist Bjorn Kurten, a specialist in the written report of ancient and extinct animals, appeared nearly ten years ago as ''Dance of the Tiger.'' Equally I write, the American novelist Jean Auel has published her tertiary novel on the European ice historic period and information technology is, like her others, a national best seller. Two feature films on the supposed culture of early man in Europe have been released, the more recent in a storm of controversy with Mrs. Auel. But archeologists and anthropologists have begun publishing their ain popularizations and more specialized studies and theories, attempting to re-create the water ice age cultures and way of life. These are often as fictional, or theoretical, as the novels. Bjorn Kurten has written, for publication later this year, a charming trivial set of imaginative essays on the ice age called ''How to Deep-Freeze a Mammoth,'' which is part science and part free clan. The efforts by Mr. Kurten and others are largely based on the traditional forms of archeological evidence and on irresolute theories as to the nature of man and the early hunting cultures. Unfortunately, the enormous complexity of the water ice age symbolic traditions is yet non being adequately considered in the models and fictions of that early on human mode of life.
Image making and storytelling, model edifice and narrative attempts at caption and the re-creation of events have belonged to man from an early period. This remarkable capacity, which is clearly nowadays in this essay as well, has evolved in a long and still unexplained trajectory.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/06/books/reading-before-writing.html
0 Response to "The Art and Symbols of Ice Age Man Marshack"
Post a Comment