All,
More journalistic anecdotes on the ongoing development of the Church Hole-Creswell palaeo-art affair. To be fair, the article is quite informative and well complemented by the ‘external links’ mentioned below).
Britain's first nude?
Telegraph.co.uk -Filed: 28/07/2004)
A stunning haul of ice-age art found in a limestone cave has shed new light on how our prehistoric ancestors lived 13,000 years ago. David Derbyshire reports on some clever academic detective work
To the untrained eye, it most closely resembles a sock, a boomerang or maybe, after a long, hard stare, the head of a long-billed bird.
Schematic women? Drawings found in Creswell Crags
But according to some of the UK's leading experts on ice-age art, this highly stylised image, carefully engraved in a Derbyshire limestone cave 13,000 years ago, may be the earliest nude in the history of British art.
The drawing is part of a stunning haul of animals discovered last year in the Creswell Crags. Until the engravings came to light, Britain had no ice-age cave art.
Almost all of Europe's late stone-age cave art comes from France, Iberia and Italy. Some archaeologists have claimed that the early northern Europeans were either prehistoric philistines or Britain's climate eroded any traces of their art.
The Creswell Crags has changed that and become, along with the discovery of a 500,000-year-old Boxgrove Man in the mid 1990s, one of the most important finds in UK archaeology.
The story of the find began at an Oxford University dinner in late 2002 where two experts were debating the mystery of Britain's missing Palaeolithic cave art.
At the table were Dr Paul Pettitt, a former Oxford research fellow in human evolution now based at Sheffield University, and Dr Paul Bahn, the independent archaeologist regarded as Britain's top cave art expert.
Bahn had long puzzled over the missing art. During the ice age, Britain was connected to the rest of Europe and was periodically occupied by hunter gatherers. But while they left bones, tools and some portable art, they left no cave engravings or paintings.
Elsewhere, our Magdalenian ancestors were busy. Paintings of stampeding bulls and horses were found at Lascaux and Chauvet in France in 1940 and 1994, other paintings were found in caves at Altamira, Spain, in 1879.
"There has always been a dogma that cave art is restricted to northern Spain and southern France and was possibly not undertaken by ice-age societies elsewhere in the upper Palaeolithic," says Pettitt.
"When we think of cave art, we think of paintings, But over 90 per cent of cave art is shallow engraving – less impressive visually and particularly difficult to see with untrained eyes."
Paul Bahn had already discussed the British lack of cave art with Spanish expert Dr Sergio Ripoll. During the meal, a plan to solve the riddle was drawn up. Pettitt would provide the local knowledge of likely sites, Bahn and Ripoll would provide their experience and their eyes.
Pettitt drew up the list of sites and the three met in Sheffield in April 2003.The candidates were the: Creswell Crags, Cheddar Gorge, the Gower peninsula and Kent's Cavern in Torquay.
Creswell was occupied about 13,000 years ago by sophisticated hunter-gatherers who hunted horse, red deer, bison, wild cattle and reindeer. The three began work in Church Hole, a north-facing cave.
"Within 20 minutes Sergio had found the first image. He came out with a torrent of Spanish expletives," recalls Pettitt.
Within a dark tunnel, they found engravings of two birds. Then, as they returned to the cave's mouth, Ripoll spotted what looked like a goat. Later, they changed the interpretation to a red deer.
They were not the first to spot the carving. The wall was covered with 20th-century graffiti. A more recent cave artist had added a beard to the deer alongside the initials PM.
"We don't know when it was done, but someone had discovered the first ever cave art in Britain and instead of publishing it, they vandalised it," say Bahn.
The team were convinced they had found their grail – the drawings were eroded and pocked with dirt. The style and content was typical of late stone-age drawings at least 13,000-years-old and should soon be verified by uranium series dating.
They returned in June with scaffolding and made new finds, including more figures – triangles representing female genitalia, more birds and more animals. The findings were published in the journal Antiquity and the cave was heralded as the most important British stone age find in decades, and yet the story was still not complete.
Earlier this year, in preparation for a major conference, the team returned to the caves and made a momentous discovery. Lit by the bright, early morning sun rather than flashlights, the ceiling turned out to be covered with engravings.
Their creators had used a technique called bas relief, where tools were used to rub away parts of the limestone. The images were often based on the rock's own topography.
"We had missed them the year before," said Bahn. "They were high up and we were not expecting to find anything on the ceiling. In archaeology you usually find what you are looking for.
"We also found you can see a lot more in natural light than in artificial light. We did see many things on the ceiling last year, but we'd assumed the bumps were natural erosion or fossils. There are very few decorated ceilings in cave art and only two bas relief in ceilings found before. You also do not know what direction they are supposed to be seen from."
Bahn and Ripoll believe they may have up to 90 separate images, including a stunning long-billed bird. Pettitt thinks it may be at least several dozen.
"To me, the more interesting ones are highly stylised depictions of naked females," he says. "We find these boomerang shapes which represented women bent-kneed, thrusting out their bottoms. I interpret at least two of those long-necked birds as women – possibly some ritual dance undertaken by females, and possibly in the cave itself."
Pettitt says there are similarities with other schematic women found in German prehistoric art which show buttocks and breasts more clearly. The Creswell nudes are a simpler form, but, like the German nudes, have no heads or legs below the knee.
Bahn is not convinced. "This is not an exact science. Paul sees resemblances with schematic women, but the rest of us do not agree. I think four are birds, but one may be a woman."
Caves play an important role in all societies – often as a spiritual place where the material world meets other worlds – a place for witches, hermits and demons. The animals are tucked away in inaccessible parts of the cave.
Pettitt says: "You get the feeling these are meant to be secret. The West has a very fixed concept of art as something that is decorative and that stands alone. But this isn't how it functions in small-scale societies, especially prehistoric ones. Art is far more embedded in society and tends to fulfil a number of roles – communicating messages about how society is organised, how individuals react with society and about cosmology."
The future of the caves is unclear. The public can visit them, but only a few times a year on guided tours.
Bahn added: "This is an extraordinary cave. We only have a tiny part available for us to examine – just 14 square metres of ceiling and more than 50 figures. There are more beautiful ones, but this is a rich and interesting cave of international significance."
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004
If you are interested in the two pictures (including an interesting, downloadable montage,
CLICK HERE. Also, do not hesitate to click on the three ‘external links’ that can be found to the right of the article’s title.
Jacques Cinq-Mars
