Ice Age Art at the British Museum

A direct link with the past?

 

 

 

The British Museum's exhibition of objects discovered in Europe or Eurasia dating from 10,000 to 40,000 years ago was fascinating on a number of levels. These objects had never been brought together before (and probably will not be again), so there was a unique opportunity to compare items from a wide geographical and time framework. All the objects shown were made of bone or stone, but there would undoubtedly have been similar objects of wood or fibre which have not survived, and of course there is a strong element of chance in what has been discovered and found its way to museums. Perhaps not surprisingly, these caveats were not mentioned at the exhibition but they have to be borne in mind before leaping to any conclusions.

All the same, enough was presented to feel the curators were justified grouping some items, such as the naked (often obese) female figures, as being representative of some kind of common outlook. I hadn't considered until the exhibition pointed it out that being unclothed would not be a usual state in the bitter cold of the period in which they were produced. It was suggested they may have been made by women for women in connection with childbirth.

This latter point raises the issue that the exhibition is called Ice Age Art: arrival of the modern mind. The premise is that as those who made the objects on show had brains which were biologically identical to ours, then their motivations for making them and they way they were regarded by their communities were much the same as for contemporary human beings. Thus the curators link the female figures to supernatural forces around childbirth and fertility, on the assumption that those who made them had a concept of the supernatural. This is probably the most contentious aspect of the show - is it "art" as we think of it? - but the exhibition made a good case for accepting that this work is the direct ancestor of present-day art.

For me, this was because it was possible for me to visualise how they were made for the first time. Some of the three dimensional objects were tiny, such as the decorative beads, and none were more than about a foot long - this is not surprising given the time and effort that went into making them using the stone tools available. Many took hundreds of hours to make; this and the talent and time needed to acquire the necessary skills suggests there were specialist "artists" even then, and that such work and those who carried it out were valued within their community. Conversely, decorated javelin throwers showed less skill (but would have been just as time-consuming), which suggested the decoration was done by their users. This can plausibly be taken to show a general appreciation of decorative work, even if we do not its exact purpose. It does seem unlikely that these people would spend so much time and effort on this work unless they felt it met some kind of non-utilitarian purpose.

Some of the objects confirmed the mastery of animal representation we mainly know about from cave art. (There was very effective reference to cave art in the exhibition in the form of a video projection of a selection of examples in a darkened mock up of a cave, complete with sound effects like dripping water, which gave a very good impression of viewing the work by flickering torchlight.) Animal forms incised on bone were not only accurate and lively representations, but often made wonderful use of the limitations of the surface area. Clearly, those who made them had a prior mental image of what they wanted to convey, and the skill to bring it into being.

My final though was this was an exhibition which must have brought together an unusually large number of disciplines - archaeology, paleontology, art history, human biology - bringing together people who probably do not work together. With any luck, the result was as illuminating for them as it is for us.