Paleolithic Art, pt. 2

December 18, 2006

The second chapter of R. Dale Guthrie's The Nature of Paleolithic Art enquires into the ability of these people to depict the world around them. Were they naturalists? The chapter then extends into numerous small natural details that were depicted. Guthrie even claims: "These hunter-artists of Eurasia documented mammalian behaviors that were not studied and illustrated so well again until the twentieth century..." (53).

I caught myself wondering why Guthrie pushed all this material to the very front of his book.. but I think it has to do with his intent to right away knock some holes in the prevailing idea that this ancient art is full of elusive symbols.. and therefore unknowable. As it becomes evident that detailed natural observations from everyday life are making their way into the representations, the harder it becomes to claim that these images represent something too esoteric to understand. Along with this comes the point that much paleolithic art is amateurish.. bad drawers making the same mistakes that bad drawers today would. By the end of the chapter the conclusion seems clear enough: these were average people drawing what they saw around them.. sometimes beautifully but sometimes badly.

Average people? No.. that was not quite right. These were highly skilled professionals. Life was keyed to the natural world and survival meant honing a set of specialized skills. These were people with all the mental skills of you and I, but who expended their energies on figuring out the animals on which they depended. Guthrie eloquently writes:

Year after year, lifetime after lifetime, lore of animals accumulated. Animals were the Pleistocene libraries, newspapers, comics and videos, classrooms, shop floors, soccer matches, and churches. One mastered reindeer and horses the way a surgeon or diamond cutter learns a craft. When hunters closed their eyes, we know that they could see muscle and tendon in their proper positions and articulations. Yet such an inner vision was no instant gift but was accumulated and honed by observation and experience, and the spoor of that learning is visible in Paleolithic art. [91]

For me that is a new way of thinking about these ancient human beings.. as professionals of the natural world.

How then can one understand these people and their artistic remnants? If we wanted to understand, say, the fragmentary journal of an 18th century navigator. what would we do? We would try to understand everything about the profession of navigator. and the physical context of the job. After assembling all those details, elements in the journal would start to make sense. Guthrie's point is that to get inside the head of these earlier people, one has to figure out their world.. which was dominated by the hunting of large mammals. The problem is that so few people have real familiarity with the world as it existed on the Mammoth Steppe.

This second chapter serves the added purpose of giving Guthrie the chance to show how sharp his own natural observations can be.. going some way toward convincing us that he can get inside the head of these people. Which is actually an important principle for hunters, pointed out by Guthrie in a sidebar entitled "living inside the animals you are drawing" (92). And although this is used to illumine the practices of lifetime hunters, it also seems to point to Guthrie's own intellectual goal: learning to think the thoughts of these paleolithic people.