1.1 Cultural Influences on Prehistoric Art

"Prehistoric" means before writing, not before art. The art in this unit spans more than 25,000 years, so it helps to know two broad stages.

The Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) is the long period when people lived by hunting animals and gathering wild plants. Hunter-gatherers moved with the seasons, so most of what they made was small and portable, or painted on rock where they sheltered. The Neolithic (New Stone Age) begins when a community starts farming and herding. That happened at different times in different places: around 10,000 BCE in Southwest Asia, later elsewhere. Farming let people stay in one place, which is called a settled or sedentary society. Settled people could make heavy pottery, large stone monuments and more permanent buildings.

The CED dates are often wide ranges, like 1200–900 BCE, because they come from archaeology rather than written records. Learn each work's date as the CED prints it.

These are small, flat stone slabs painted with animals in charcoal (the CED's medium), found in a rock shelter in the Huns Mountains of southern Namibia. The archaeologist who excavated the cave in 1969 named it Apollo 11 because the dig was going on when the Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the moon. They are among the oldest known figurative paintings in Africa. Figurative means the images show recognizable things, here animals, rather than just patterns.

Each animal is shown in profile, the side view that makes a four-legged animal easiest to recognize. One slab shows a cat-like animal whose back legs look human. Many scholars connect figures that blend human and animal to the beliefs of much later San rock artists in southern Africa, where such figures are linked to spiritual leaders in trance. That link is a theory across a gap of thousands of years, so present it as one interpretation.

Context matters: these are portable slabs left in a living site, not paintings on a cave wall. They show that hunter-gatherers in Africa were making images tens of thousands of years ago, which corrects an older, Europe-centered story that art began in the French and Spanish caves.

This small carving, about 20 cm tall, is made of greywacke, a hard, dark sandstone. It shows an animal-like creature with a large head, a long snout and a rounded body that sits on a wide base. Scholars have suggested it may represent the embryo of a long-beaked echidna (a spiny, egg-laying mammal of New Guinea), but no one knows for sure.

Its shape, with a narrower part you can grip and a heavy base, suggests it may have worked as a pestle for pounding food or other materials. Carving hard stone with stone tools also took great effort, which suggests the object mattered beyond everyday use, so many scholars think it had a ritual role too. Later Enga people who found ancient carved stones like this one treated them as powerful objects linked to ancestors and spirits, used in rituals for fertility and well-being. So the stone tells you two stories: the culture that made it about 3,500 years ago, and the later community that gave it new meaning.

Tlatilco was a farming village in the Valley of Mexico. Archaeologists found hundreds of small clay figurines there, many placed in graves. The required figurine is a standing female figure with wide hips and thighs, a narrow waist and small, simplified arms. Her most striking feature is her face: she has two faces that share three eyes, a kind of doubling seen in other Tlatilco figures.

Because figures like this were buried with the dead, scholars connect them to beliefs about death, fertility and renewal. The doubled face is often read as duality, the idea that the world is made of paired opposites such as life and death, an idea important in later Mesoamerican religion. Some scholars think the figurines show people performing rituals, perhaps in masks. Her emphasis on the hips and thighs fits the view that female figurines celebrated fertility, a central concern in a farming community.

Fired clay itself is a clue to a settled life: pottery is heavy and breakable, so it suits people who stay in one place.