Paleolithic Art, pt. 1

December 8, 2006

Teaching religion ultimately means a commitment to thinking about how human beings create meaning in this world. Ideally, it should also involve a certain level of fascination with that process. One perk in studying religion is in the possibility of a wide-angle view of human beings and their interaction with the world. That is to say, I can read a book like The Nature of Paleolithic Art and feel like I am still reasonably within my academic discipline.

The subject for the book is the sizeable number of prehistoric drawings and carvings that have come down to us.. such as the paintings in the cave of Lascaux in France. Here is an image of what I am talking about:

How do we relate to such images? My first response is to throw up my hands.. these people are so far removed from my world and experience that the images, though striking, are impenetrable. Reading through Guthrie's book, I see that several generations of interpreters have more or less encouraged that view.

Essential to Guthrie's argument is the unity of human experience:

There is a human nature, and the main contours of that nature emerged in the Pleistocene. I'll make the case that this nature, which we still exhibit, formed as a result of adaptations to a fundamental human ecological niche, that Paleolithic people experienced their lives and earth similarly enough to the way you and I do that we can make numerous assumptions about their behavior based on cross-cultural studies of modern peoples and careful consideration if the evolutionary themes of our behavior as a human animal. [12]

He then goes on to note that it is difficult to imagine existence as a warrior ant or brooding raven, "but sit at any human's campfire and you are with your own" (12). That fundamental faith that human beings share important traits and needs underlies many of the conclusions in this work. It also happens to be inspiring to come across the traces of art made 10,000 to 40,000 years ago.. and then to see that this could be me! This is similar to how I might have responded.

Guthrie proposes what at first seems a rather stripped down and de-mystified view of these images. They emphatically do not carry ritualistic or shamanistic meanings. These beautiful images are not keyed to some lost otherworldly viewpoint, but generated by the landscape and ecological demands of these early human beings. Instead of seeing the images from the viewpoint of art history or religion, he interprets them as virtual fossils.. evidence of a past way of life and evidence for the a natural landscape—the "Mammoth Steppe"—that is now largely gone.

I am going to blog about this book some more, but let me end by noting that this book is a model for the kind of life-work scholarship I most admire. There is an obvious intersection between Guthrie the human and Guthrie the scholar.. his commentary on these images stemming from deep knowledge of animals and ecologies. Then there are the hundreds and hundreds of his own drawings throughout the work, which testify to his skill as an artist as well as a writer. This multi-dimensionality is sadly rare. Then there is the distinct sense that this is a book that came from scholarly obsession, and not something cooked up to get a publication out there. This book gets toward the zone in which scholarship becomes something that will not be lapped by the next generation, but will become a lasting testimony to a life spent in pursuit of knowing what it means to be human.. a work of literature.