Interpreting Cave Art
Mindless Doodling?
The first explanation for cave paintings was the most simple: they were merely the mindless doodling of Paleolithic men and women with too much time on their hands – the ancient equivalent of the same graffiti that covers modern towns and cities today.
This theory didn’t last long. Patterns and themes began to become apparent at different sites from different periods, which suggested that certain common beliefs, urges or systems of thought were influencing individual artists. Additionally, it became increasingly clear that the images were not always applied to the most obviously accessible surfaces – some could be crammed into tight nooks and crannies, others could be on the upper reaches of cave walls, or even on the ceilings.
It’s hard to imagine that Paleolithic cave artists at Lascaux, France would have gone so far as to erect a scaffold to complete their work (as holes in the walls would seem to suggest they did) out of sheer boredom, or that the ancient people responsible for theAstuvansalmi rock paintings above lake Saimaa, Finland would have boarded a boat every day in order to create their paintings simply because they didn’t have anything better to do. Surely something more complex must have motivated them?
Animal Magic
Was there an inextricable link between hunting and religious ritual in ancient cave art such as this scene from Lascaux Cave in France? Or was it just Paleolithic graffitti?
Linking practically every example of cave and rock art discovered to date is the representation of animals – all from bulls and aurochs to deer, horses, lions, bison, fish and birds. Were ancient artists documenting the wonders of nature out of sheer fascination, like ancient David Attenboroughs? Or – as hunter gatherer societies – were they perhaps drawing with their appetites?
Ice Age Australian aborigines were said to perform ceremonies in order to multiply the numbers of animals living around them, and for this purpose they painted likenesses of these species on rocks. This idea inspired European academics in the early 20th century to compare these primitive users of stone tools with Europeans at the end of the Ice Age, and postulate that the same purpose lay behind the art of both cultures.
Another popular theory linked this idea specifically to a belief in fertility magic – the hope that, by drawing pictures of animals, humans could somehow cause better reproduction among animals and thus enjoy a steadier source of food. Some scholars have suggested that cave art was created in a ritual of renewal and that redrawing a picture each year, sometimes directly on top of an old drawing, was intended to ensure the return of that species each spring. Some paintings at Altamira are thought to have been added to and refreshed over a span of no less than 20,000 years.
“Ritual Breakage”
Spears and other hunting weapons were occasionally superimposed over or near animals, and some clay sculptures seem to have been the physical target of sharp objects. This has given rise to a theory called “ritual breakage” – the idea that the cave artists would paint representations of their prey and then attack them in the hope of somehow provoking better fortunes in their hunting.
A weakness in this idea is the fact that the type of bones found scattered around cave floors often did not always come from the same animals depicted in cave paintings. Additionally, this idea doesn’t explain why Paleolithic artists painted predators like lions and bears, such as at Chauvet in particular. Clearly these fierce beasts weren’t a source of food to Paleolithic man (quite the reverse in fact).
Humans
Drawings of humans were fairly rare in cave art. If they were shown, it was usually in a more schematic fashion than the more naturalistic animal subjects, and often in hunting scenes. One explanation for this is that realistically painting the human form was forbidden by powerful religious taboos.
An exception to the rule is the paintings of the ancient San Bushmen in the Drakensburg Mountains, South Africa. Human figures are much more common in African than in European rock art. As well as hunting scenes, many of the rock scenes would depict – in quite complex detail – the rituals and hallucinations of shamans (who still dominate the San culture today). Evocative images include those believed to represent shamans deep in trance: an antelope-headed man surrounded by imaginary beasts, for instance, or an insect-like humanoid covered with wild decorations.
African cave art - such as this picture from Brandenburg in South Africa - much more commonly depicted humans than European examples.
David Lewis-Williams, a South African scholar, has developed a theory broadly based on ethnographic studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies which posits that many cave paintings were actually made by shamans themselves.
A shaman is an individual who acts as a link between the real world and the spirit world, a task usually performed by means of dances and symbolic trances. Animals in cave art might therefore be “spirit animals,” rather than more literal representations of the real things. The idea is that the shaman would retreat into the darkness of the caves, enter into a trance state and then paint images of their visions, perhaps with some notion of extracting power from the cave walls themselves.
This idea would seem to fit with the Astuvansalmi rock paintings in Finland, since they could have a link to the Siberian and North European shamanistic tradition, where the sun was thought to be a deer or elk running through the sky. The theory may also go some way to explaining the remoteness and weird location of some paintings, and the fact that only rarely does it seem that people actually lived in the caves where they created their art.
“Casual and Earthy Themes”
R. Dale Guthrie, a paleobiologist from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, makes a rather less fantastical reading of cave art. By studying not only the most artistic and publicised paintings but also a variety of lower quality art and figurines, he identifies a wide range of skill and ages among the artists, and points out that “all ages and both sexes were making art, not just senior male shamans.”
His adds that cave paintings don’t always bear the “obvious imprint of ritual and magic but,” but more often “express more casual and earthy themes.” Prevalent among these “casual and earthy themes” were powerful beasts, risky hunting scenes and erotic representations of women – in other words, creations of the over-active and over-sexed imaginations of adolescent males, who comprised a big part of the human population in the Paleolithic period.
Young men killing time and indulging their fantasies in casual art? Maybe some cave painting was just ancient graffiti after all.
Lascaux cave painting (top) by Aadava; Brandenburg cave painting (bottom) by Mark H Turner. All rights reserved.
