AP® Art History review sheet from Aim for Five (aimforfive.com/art-history/units/1/1-3)
Unit 1 · Topic 1.3
1.3 Theories and Interpretations of Prehistoric Art
Nobody wrote down why the Great Hall of the Bulls at Lascaux was painted or why Stonehenge was built, so every explanation is a theory built from evidence. This topic shows how scholars have read these two works, why some old theories were dropped, and how to write about interpretations on the exam.
Key terms
- interpretation
- twisted perspective
- megalith
- henge
- post-and-lintel
- solstice
How interpretation works without writing
An interpretation is an explanation of what a work meant or did, supported by evidence. For prehistoric art the evidence includes where the work is, what was found near it, how it was made, what it shows and what it leaves out. Some theories also draw on comparisons with later cultures, which is useful but risky, since beliefs change over thousands of years.
Interpretations change when new evidence appears, such as a better date, a newly excavated site or a scientific test. On the exam you are not expected to pick the one true answer. You are expected to describe an interpretation accurately and explain the evidence behind it.
Great Hall of the Bulls, Lascaux
Lascaux is a cave in southwestern France, found in 1940 by teenagers. The CED dates the paintings to 15,000–13,000 BCE (Paleolithic Europe). In the Great Hall of the Bulls, huge aurochs (an extinct wild cattle), horses and deer overlap across the ceiling and walls, some more than 5 meters long. Artists used the bulges of the rock to suggest the animals' bodies.
Painters used mineral pigments: red and yellow ochres and black from charcoal or manganese. They applied them with pads, brushes and by blowing pigment through hollow tubes, and they worked by the light of stone lamps that burned animal fat. Many animals appear in twisted perspective: the head is in profile, but the horns are turned to face you, so you see both clearly.
The cave closed to the public in 1963 because visitors' breath and body heat were encouraging mold and algae on the paintings. People now visit full-scale replicas.
- Hunting magic: painting an animal would help hunters catch it. Weakness: food remains at Lascaux show people mostly ate reindeer, which are almost never painted there.
- Ritual and shamanism: the deep, dark cave was a place for ceremonies, perhaps involving trance. Supported by the hard-to-reach locations and by comparisons with later hunter-gatherer art.
- Storytelling, teaching or marking the identity of a group: the animals may record knowledge about seasons and herds that the community needed.
Stonehenge
Stonehenge stands on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England. The CED dates it to c. 2500–1600 BCE (Neolithic Europe) and lists its material as sandstone. It was built in phases: an earlier circular bank and ditch, called a henge, came first, and the big stones were raised and rearranged over centuries.
It is a megalith, a monument of huge stones. The outer ring was made of large sarsens, a hard local sandstone, joined by horizontal lintels. Inside, five trilithons (two uprights and a lintel) form a horseshoe. This is post-and-lintel construction. The builders used joints borrowed from woodworking: knobs on top of the uprights fit into hollows under the lintels, and the lintels lock end to end. Smaller bluestones were brought from the Preseli Hills in Wales, roughly 240 km (150 miles) away, a huge effort with no wheels or metal tools at the start.
The main axis lines up with the sunrise at the summer solstice and the sunset at the winter solstice. A solstice is the longest or shortest day of the year, which a farming people would have used to track the seasons.
- Druid temple: popular from the 1600s to the 1800s, but wrong. The Druids lived roughly 2,000 years after the stones went up.
- Calendar or observatory: supported by the solstice alignment. Some 1960s claims that it predicted eclipses are not widely accepted.
- Place of the dead or of ancestors: cremation burials were found at Stonehenge, and some archaeologists pair it with a nearby timber circle at Durrington Walls, used by the living.
- Place of healing: another theory suggests people believed the bluestones had healing power, citing burials of people with injuries and illnesses nearby.
Worked examples
Try each one yourself first, then open the solution.
- Example 1
Writing about an interpretation
Describe one interpretation of the paintings in the Great Hall of the Bulls, and explain one piece of evidence that challenges it.
Show the solutionHide the solution
- Step 1: Name the interpretation clearly (hunting magic).
- Step 2: Say what it claims, in one sentence.
- Step 3: Bring in specific evidence against it, not just 'we don't know'. The reindeer bones are the classic example.
- Step 4: Finish by saying what the evidence suggests instead, without claiming certainty.
Answer: Model answer: One older interpretation is hunting magic, the idea that painting aurochs and horses helped hunters catch them. Excavated food remains challenge this: the people who used Lascaux ate mostly reindeer, yet reindeer are almost absent from the paintings. That mismatch suggests the animals were chosen for meaning rather than as a hunting wish list, which is why many scholars now favor ritual or symbolic explanations.
Common mistakes
- Saying Druids built Stonehenge. The Druids came much later; the idea comes from 17th- and 18th-century antiquarians.
- Calling Lascaux's animals 'realistic' without nuance. They are lifelike in pose and detail but often in twisted perspective, which is not how the eye sees an animal.
- Presenting one theory as the answer. Name the theory as a theory, and pair it with evidence.
- Forgetting that Stonehenge was built and rebuilt over centuries, so it may have served different purposes at different times.
On the exam
- Questions on these works often ask what evidence supports a theory or why interpretations change. Name concrete evidence: the reindeer bones, the solstice alignment, the cremation burials.
- Stonehenge and Lascaux are useful choices for essays about ritual, the natural world or architecture and the landscape. Know their identifiers: Lascaux, France, 15,000–13,000 BCE, rock painting; Stonehenge, Wiltshire, UK, c. 2500–1600 BCE, sandstone.
Connected topics
Videos
Check yourself: 1.3 Theories and Interpretations of Prehistoric Art
5 questions on 1.3 Theories and Interpretations of Prehistoric Art. Pick an answer to see if you got it, and why.
Large aurochs (wild cattle), horses and deer are painted in black, red and yellow across the walls and ceiling of an underground chamber. Some animals overlap one another, and several are placed so that natural bulges in the rock suggest the swell of a body.
Many of the animals in the Great Hall of the Bulls are shown with their bodies in profile but their horns turned toward the viewer. This convention is known as
Which of the following best describes how the paintings in the Great Hall of the Bulls were made?
The animals that people at Lascaux most often ate, such as reindeer, appear only rarely in the paintings. This evidence most directly challenges which interpretation of the cave paintings?
Newgrange, in Ireland, is a large circular mound of earth and stone built around 3200 BCE. A long stone-lined passage leads to a chamber roofed by a corbeled vault, where human remains were placed. Above the entrance is a narrow opening called a roof-box. For a few days around the winter solstice, the rising sun shines through the roof-box and down the passage, lighting the chamber floor.
Large stones around the base of the mound are carved with spirals, circles and zigzags.
Description of a work beyond the image set, written for this practice set
Newgrange and Stonehenge are similar in that both
Which difference between Newgrange and Stonehenge is most accurate?
0 of 5 answered