Time line of Palaeolithic art

[trehinp]

Dear all,

There are several publications that provide nice pictures illustrating the Time line of Palaeolithic art. These are by and large presenting the major dates of cave art by the name of the caves. However, in most caves there are different art styles: in a single cave naturalistic animal representations are present on the walls simultaneously with purely symbolic signs.

The question I have is: were those two art forms contemporaneous? And if not, as is the case at least in some of the decorated caves, could we reconstruct a time line differentiating various art styles in each caves?

Still on the time line, in several cases the dating of art is extremely difficult, that is the case for example of rock engravings where there is no carbon element to help the datation. I have the greatest difficulties to find African prehistoric art dates. Is there a good source for such datation ? I have in mind a particular example of a giraffe scratching her chin with her back hoof on page 145 of Paul Bahn's excellent book, "The Cambridge Illustrated History of Prehistoric Art". The date says "probably prehistoric" (sic) Does anyone have an idea of a more precise evaluation of the date. By the way I have not found illustrations of that giraffe in any other book, not even in the huge "Sahara Art Rupestre", written byHenri J. Hugot, Maximilien Bruggmann, and published by Les Editions de l'Amateur, 1999.

Could we envision a collective work on this forum to try to build, from the existing bibliography, a more complete, more detailed "time line for prehistoric art?


Yours sincerely.

Paul

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

Dear all,
<snip>
Could we envision a collective work on this forum to try to build, from the existing bibliography, a more complete, more detailed "time line for prehistoric art?

Yours sincerely.

Paul

Paul,

I suppose you could try use the Forum as some sort of a sounding board for some of your ideas on this, but, if I were you, I would not expect to be overwhelmed with feedback!

Jacques

[trehinp]

Thanks Jacques,

I'm afraid that you may be right about the difficulty to get anwers to my proposal of cooperation. No reply so far.

Yet developping a consolidated prehistoric art timeline, as comprehensive as possible given our state of knowledge, cannot be the feat of a single person or even a single laboratory.

I forgit to mention that I will be ready to compile and format the data if I receive inputs from several sources. Of course the end result would be attributed to the people who would have contributed, either by providing data or by reviewing the drafts of this document.

We could have here the occasion to offer to the prehistoric art community a superb tool. By the way I wish it already existed...

Yours very friendly.

Paul

[Daryl Habel]

Thanks Jacques,

I'm afraid that you may be right about the difficulty to get anwers to my proposal of cooperation. No reply so far.

Yet developping a consolidated prehistoric art timeline, as comprehensive as possible given our state of knowledge, cannot be the feat of a single person or even a single laboratory.

I forgit to mention that I will be ready to compile and format the data if I receive inputs from several sources. Of course the end result would be attributed to the people who would have contributed, either by providing data or by reviewing the drafts of this document.

We could have here the occasion to offer to the prehistoric art community a superb tool. By the way I wish it already existed...

Yours very friendly.

Paul

Dear Paul,

I suspect that the greatest difficulty to get answers to your proposal lies with the fact that most of our forum participants (most assuredly, myself) have absolutely no hands-on experience with paleolithic art.  I'm sure many of us have a number of publications which give selected examples (pretty pictures), as well as a simplified "time-line" of paleolithic parietal art (names of selected caves and estimated datings, as you have noted).  However, development of a comprehensive "time-line" of paleolithic art, (quoting you) "differentiating various art styles in each cave" would seem to be a task requiring the recording of each and every depiction of parietal art (from at least 300 caves in Western Europe alone), as well as (at least) a determination of the relative chronological sequence of (for the various "styles") each and every known example in the database.  This type of (chrono-stylistic?) analysis has been attempted in the past with varying degrees of success, most notably in the work of the Abbe Henri Breuil and Andre Leroi-Gourhan, both of whom had first-hand experience working in these decorated caves.  Speaking only for myself, I doubt whether a compilation with a chronology of "style", such as you suggest, can be accomplished solely from the published literature.  Nevertheless, such an endeavor is certainly a worthwhile objective and, like you, I wish one did exist.  

My best, but mostly a "reply" to illustrate both my interest and ignorance in this subject.

Dar  

[trehinp]

  Speaking only for myself, I doubt whether a compilation with a chronology of "style", such as you suggest, can be accomplished solely from the published literature.  Nevertheless, such an endeavor is certainly a worthwhile objective and, like you, I wish one did exist.  

My best, but mostly a "reply" to illustrate both my interest and ignorance in this subject.

Dar  

Thanks Dar,

I understand and don't minimise the difficulties. At this point, a compiled chronology from existing publications would be already a big progress. It might foster the interest for more comprehensive scientific research by universities.

The reason I was proposing cooperation was that I have already a few books which provide each their own "time scale" for prehistoric art. But I can't get so many of the existing publications, for obvious reasons of cost. However I would be ready to dedicate some time to the compilation of such data.

I think that in that respect, chronology is an extremely important element for prehistoric art analysis. Most books on prehistoric art don't seem to pay much attention to the relative dates of the artistic creations.

For example, and just to illustrate the importance of chronology, I have seen no analysis or questionning about the evolution from a complex and elaborated representation system during the upper palaeolithic to a far more schematic mode of representation, albeit far more complex from a semantic point of view.

Just on the drawing techniques, this evolution goes contrary to the ontologic evolution of drawing abilities. I know about all the limits of the concept  "ontogeny reproduces evolution". Yet how do we explain that simpler forms of drawing came much later than very elaborated ones ?  

Isn't this form of schematic art more an evolution from mark-making and geometric figures rather than from the "beautiful pictures" as Robert Bednarik calls the magnificent upper palaeolithic Franco-Cantabrian art ?

That's the reason why I would like to see a detailed timeline, indicating which type of art form was produced and at what time.

Actually, I would already be glad to know if someone ever analysed specifically the evolution of mark-making and geometric figures trough the palaeolithic and Neolithic period.

Yours sincerely.

Paul