06 Moro 2006 Art Crafts and Paleolithic Art

Copyright 2006 SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)ISSN 1469-6053 Vol 6(1): 119141 DOI: 10.1177/1469605306060571

Journal of Social Archaeology A R T I C L E

119

Art, crafts and Paleolithic art

OSCAR MORO ABADA

cole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France, and Instituto Internacional deInvestigaciones Prehistricas de Cantabria (Becario Fundacin Marcelino Botn),Spain

ABSTRACTThis article initially examines the foundations of our modern under-standing of Paleolithic art. Taking the period 18601905 into account,I show that the depiction of Paleolithic art elaborated by Westernarchaeologists at that time was largely based on the projection ofcategories used to characterize craft at the end of the nineteenthcentury with prehistoric art. As I depict in the final section of thearticle, the weakening of evolutionism and the recognition of thecomplexity of primitive societies at the turn of the century provokeda new definition of Paleolithic art, which included cave paintings.

KEY WORDScraft fine arts Paleolithic art progress upper-middle class

THE INVENTION OF PRIMITIVE SOCIET Y

When we try to go back in time so far from us, how may difficulties stop us!Most of the monuments (remains) have disappeared, and even those thatremain have been damaged, defiled by the prejudices of following ages.

120 Journal of Social Archaeology 6(1)

Unable to explain the origins of society, but refusing to ignore it, we haverepresented ancient barbarism with reference to modern civilization.(Michelet, 1827: 173; emphasis added).

In this extract from the introduction to the first French edition of VicosScienza nouva, Jules Michelet anticipated two fashionable ideas from theend of the twentieth century. First, Michelet suggested that primitive societyis a European representation or, in Adam Kupers words, a Western inven-tion (Kuper, 1988). In recent years, several anthropological and prehistori-cal works have suggested that primitive society is not an inert fact of nature,but rather is a historical representation constructed by archaeologists andanthropologists (Clifford, 1986, 1988; Errington, 1998; Fardon, 1990; Hodderet al., 1995; Kuper, 1988; Nederveen Pieterse, 1992; Stoczkowski, 1994;Torgovnik, 1990). Second, Michelet proposed that ancient civilization hadbeen imagined with reference to modern civilization. Certainly, the idea ofprimitive society was profoundly modified by the irruption of modernity. Todefine human antiquity, North Americans and Europeans conceived theirorigins as an inverted image in the mirror of modern societies: To counter-pose to an enlightened Europe we produced an African heart of darkness;to our rational, controlled west corresponded an irrational and sensuousOrient; . . . our maturity might be contrasted with the childhood of a darkerhumanity, but our youth and vigour distinguished us from the aged civiliza-tions of the east whose splendour was past (Fardon, 1990: 6). This modernprimitive society, which emerged between 1850 and 1900, was constructedby the confluence of several processes: a faith in science which reigned inWestern societies, the consolidation of progress as a meta-narrative and thedevelopment of archaeology and anthropology.

In light of these considerations, this article suggests several criticalpropositions regarding the representation of primitive art. Taking theperiod 18601905 into account, I examine the foundations of the Westerndefinitions of Paleolithic art. I suggest this process was related to twocentral questions: first, the emergence of progress as a meta-narrative ofWestern societies during the nineteenth century. The belief in progress asa rational advancement through increments of perpetual improvement hasits origins in the Enlightenment thought of the eighteenth century.However, it was only in the first half of the nineteenth century that the ideaof progress provided a general model in most Western disciplines ofknowledge (history, anthropology, archaeology, etc.). In this context, thediscovery of Paleolithic art in 1860 produced an important dilemma in therigid framework of evolutionism: How was it possible that such anadvanced activity as art existed in such primitive times? This paradox isrelated to the second process which I seek to analyze. In order to overcomethe seeming contradiction between art and primitive, Western societiespromoted a definition of Paleolithic art largely based on the projection of

121Moro Abada Arts, crafts and Paleolithic art

the concepts which structure our modern system of art (Shiner, 2001: 3)to the past. As Larry Shiner summarizes, in the eighteenth century . . . theconcept of art was split apart generating the new category fine arts . . . asopposed to crafts and popular arts (p. 5). Between 1860 and 1900, Westernarchaeologists took this dichotomy as a given and defined Paleolithic artbased upon categories generally used to characterize crafts. The first artisticobjects associated with prehistoric human implements were depicted asproducts of societies preserved in time, reflecting primitive impulses ofleisure common to all people. These works of art reflected the lowest stagein the development of civilized art. The final section of the article considershow the weakening of evolutionism and the recognition of the complexityof modern primitive societies at the beginning of the twentieth centuryprovoked a new definition of Paleolithic art, which included some prehis-toric artistic phenomena, such as cave paintings, similar to present-dayconceptions of fine art.

THE AGE OF PROGRESS: BET WEEN 1800 AND 1880

Though it may be inaccurate to imagine the nineteenth century as a wonder-ful century, as Alfred Wallace deemed it in 1898 (for it was also an agemarked by revolution, political instability, conflicts of social values, etc.), thehistory of Europe between 1800 and 1880 saw an unprecedented increase inmaterial wealth (Briggs, 1959) associated with the development of industryand science. The impact of this industrialization is responsible for thematerial, social and political changes that transformed Western societies fortwo centuries. Though the traditional position that continental nationsimitated the British model of industrialization has been largely replaced bythe notion that industrial revolution took place simultaneously in severalparts of Europe (Cameron, 1985; OBrien, 1986; Pollard, 1973), it is clearthat industrialization provoked a deep change in European life with widerimplications. New sources of energy (first coal and steam; later electricity)replaced human and animal energy, resulting in a shift in the organizationof human labour. Steam power, along with improvements in road construc-tion and boating, produced (or introduced) the mechanization of transport(Whiting Fox, 1991: 7680). Furthermore, during the nineteenth centurymost important European cities were connected by roads and railways,which were developed for the coal trade. These changes in transportationmade it possible to increase markets far beyond the border of ones owncountry.

This growing material prosperity of nineteenth century Western societieswas associated with a demographic revolution (Heywood, 1995: 198).Indeed, between 1750 and 1850, the population in Europe doubled from


146 million to 288 million (De Vries, 1984: 36). As a result of this demo-graphic increment, the European landscape was profoundly modified. Circa1800, most Europeans lived in rural towns and the majority worked the landas peasants. There were fewer than ten capitals with more than one hundredthousand people. Yet, by the end of the century, the population of Europehad doubled and more than half lived in cities. The main consequence ofthis urbanization was the burgeoning of a new industrial middle class (lesbourgeois) and a new working class.

These industrial and demographic revolutions coincided with the rise ofmodern science and the development of the scientific community. Duringthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Western societies largely assumedthat human reason was capable of discovering the natural laws thatgoverned the universe. Newtons work, for instance, demonstrated thatnature was governed by basic rules that could be identified using the scien-tific method. The period also saw a spectacular development in all branchesof scientific knowledge. In physics, it was a golden age for electricity andmagnetism: Alessandro Volta invented the voltaic pile in 1799; Christianrsted discovered electromagnetism in 1820; Michael Faraday conceivedthe first generator of electricity in 1831; Samuel F.B. Morse developed histelegraph in 1837; Alexander Graham Bell made his first successful tele-phone experiment in 1876; Guglielmo Marconi sent the first tentativewireless transmissions in 1895; in chemistry, John Dalton developed themodern atomic theory (1803), and the Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleyevdrew up his periodic table of the elements (1869). Similarity, in the lifesciences, Louis Pasteurs vaccine against rabies revolutionized medicine inthe 1880s; Gregor Mendel laid the foundations of genetics, and the publi-cation of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin in 1859 marked amilestone for biological thought.

This unprecedented scientific growth can be associated with an equallyunprecedented economic development, which in turn induced a mood ofeuphoric superiority of the modern world in the upper and middle classes:

Our mail, our road, our printing have made almost all European citizens ofthe same country. A new idea, an interesting discovery . . . was it born inLondon or Paris? A few weeks later it reaches a peasant on the Danube, aninhabitant of Rome, a subject in St. Petersburg, a slave in Constantinople . . .Nowadays, a trip to Russia, to Germany, to Italy, to France, to England, oreven, should I say, around the world, is something that can be done in a fewweeks, a few months, a few years calculated to the nearest minute . . . Itwould be impossible to calculate the heights which society can obtain, atpresent let nothing be lost, let there be no way it is lost: this sends us out intothe infinite. (Chateaubriand, 1797: 256)

Even if the nineteenth century was not a happy time marked by a faith in improvement (there was suspicion of material and technological


development; Briggs, 1959: 1; Wiener, 1981: 57), the period between 1800and 1870 can be defined as the age of progress (Bowler, 1989; Briggs, 1959;Collins, 1964). Despite a minority of skeptics on progress such as CharlesDickens, Matthew Arnold or Thomas Carlyle, the increase in materialwealth, the challenge to the aristocratic monopoly, and the rise of Westernpower in the world provoked a widespread optimism among the Europeanupper-middle classes. For most of the upper-middle classes, it was enoughto open their eyes and to see the improvement all around . . . cities increas-ing, cultivation extending, marts too small for the crowd of buyers andsellers, harbours insufficient to contain the shipping, artificial rivers joiningthe chief inland seats of industry to the chief seaports, streets better lighted,houses better furnished, richer wares exposed to sale in statelier shops,swifter carriages rolling along smoother roads (Macaulay, 184855 V: 2284).Most important French and English historians of the time portray similarhymns of progress (Buckle, 1885: 309; Cousin, 1828: 279; Guizot, 1828: 77;Macaulay, 1830: 222; Michelet, 1829: 90).

PALEOLITHIC ART AS CRAFT: BET WEEN 1860 AND 1900

To consider the experience of living in a time of an unprecedentedeconomic, social and political growth is key to understanding the notion ofhistory dominant in Western societies during the nineteenth century.Throughout this turbulent period, the history of the world was emphaticallythe history of progress. Indeed, the idea of universal history (Cousin, 1828:280; Quinet, 1827: 191) as a constant and irreversible movement from thedarkness of the first ages of humanity to the splendour of the modern worldappeared in the Enlightenment, during the eighteenth century. VicosScienza Nouva (1744), Voltaires Essai sur les moeurs et lesprit des nations(1756) or Herders Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit(1785) all sought to trace the history of humanity through several differentstages. This unilinear evolutionism was present in most anthropological andarchaeological works from the second half of the nineteenth century. In thefield of anthropological studies, several works illustrated the way up fromsavagery to civilization through the slow accumulations of experimentalknowledge (Morgan, 1877: 3). Among these studies are Maines AncientLaw (1861), Bachofens Das Mutterrecht (1861), McLennans PrimitiveMarriage (1865) and Morgans Ancient Society (1877). Each of theseauthors called for an evolutionary understanding of societies. Unilinearevolutionism had an even stronger impact in archaeology. An early exampleof the influence of the idea of progress is within the work of Christian J.Thomsen. Thomsen was the first to organize the collections of the DanishNational Museum of Copenhagen in a unilinear scheme of technological


change, moving from the stone to bronze artifacts and ultimately to iron.The museum opened to the public in 1819, and Thomsens Three-AgeSystem became quite influential in European archaeology in the nineteenthcentury. In Britain, for instance, Daniel Wilson used this system to arrangethe Societies of Antiquaries of Scotland collections in Edinburgh. Wilsonalso recommended that the British Museum reorganize their collections onthe basis of Thomsens Three-Age System. Similarly, John Lubbockproduced the most influential hymn of praise of progress (Bowler, 1989:81) at the end of the nineteenth century. His Prehistoric Times (Lubbock,1865) suggested that humankind had developed from primitive savagery tomodern civilization through a steady linear progression. In France, thechronology of De Mortillet (1872) defined a strictly unilinear evolutionism.Perhaps the sole author who suggested a dual system based on the evolu-tion of two parallel lines was the Belgian douard Dupont (1874: 145) atheory which was predictably not well received by the scientific community.

In order to understand how Paleolithic art was defined at the end of thenineteenth century, it is important to stress that art was generallyconsidered as a primary characteristic of the most developed societies (i.e.Western societies). In this definitional context, the discovery of manyartistic objects associated with prehistoric human implements by Lartet andChristy produced a contradiction which marked the period: With theknowledge that Paleolithic men were responsible for works of art, it becameessential to explain, somehow, how such an apparently advanced activitycould possibly have existed among such obviously primitive people(Ucko and Rosenfeld, 1967: 117). In short, the authentication of Paleolithicart posed difficulties in the 1860s, for prehistoric humans had been definedas primitive. In 1864, for instance, Hugh Falconer wrote that if primevalman really had made such progress in the conception of art, without havingyet attained the knowledge of metals, it will be as curious an anthropolog-ical phenomenon as are the art objects themselves, which express thatdegree of luxury which ease, leisure, and comfort beget (Falconer, 1864:630). In 1867, John Evans pointed out that in looking at the state of civiliz-ation of these peoples of the reindeer period of the south of France, we arestruck with their skill, at all events in one of the fine arts. We find that theywere capable of producing carvings and drawings such as are rarely to befound, even known, among savage tribes (Evans, 1867: 22). Some yearslater, douard Dupont, a Belgian prehistorian, commented on the contra-diction that exists between the works of art of primitive people and theirlack of metal implements (Dupont, 1872: 94). In 1880, Quiroga and Torres,two Spanish scientists, discussed the same problematic in their report aboutAltamira (Quiroga and Torres, 1880: 266). The examples are innumerable(Cartailhac, 1889: 78; Girod and Massnat, 1900: 87; Lubbock, 1865: 303;Nilsson, 1868: ix; Piette, 1894: 237).

To seek to make compatible the supposedly incompatible (i.e. the art


and the primitive), anthropologists and archaeologists proposed a depictionof Paleolithic art largely based on the projection to the characterization ofcraft at the end of the nineteenth century onto the definition of primitiveart.1 To understand this process necessitates an initial examination of themodern system of art (Kristeller, 1950).

As several authors have suggested, the contemporary Western under-standing of art dates only from the eighteenth century (Becq, 1994;Bourdieu, 1992; Mortensen, 1997; Woodmansee, 1994), when the traditionalconcept of art was split into the categories of fine art and craft (Kristeller,1950; Shiner, 2001). Until that time, the word art had meant any humanskill, whether horse breaking, verse writing, or governing. Yet, during theeighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, a division separated fine art fromcraft and artist from artisan. Why was the traditional concept of art replacedby the modern system of art? Largely because of an interplay amidst insti-tutional and socioeconomic factors. First, the new idea of fine art provideda solution for several conceptual questions raised in previous centuries.Second, the fine arts system was the result of a process of dissolution ofseveral structures of medieval society into distinct spheres of politics,religion, science, and art. Third, the change was related to the rise of themarket economy and the middle classes. As a result of these processes,throughout the eighteenth century, art was thus divided into the newcategories of the fine arts (which included poetry, painting, music, sculpture,and architecture) as opposed to crafts and popular arts (pottery, jewelry,embroidery, etc.). The former was associated with cerebral art (mind overbody), refined pleasure, originality, transcendental spirituality, inspiration,geniality, individual creation, contemplative attitude, and freedom, whilethe latter often referred to art requiring only skill and rules, ordinarypleasure, repetitive imitation of models, mere use or entertainment, calcu-lation, and reproductive imagination (Shiner, 2001: 5, 115).

Many authors writing during the latter half of the nineteenth centurycommented on this split. In 1853, for instance, Victor Cousin (one of themost influential French commentators on art at that time) wrote that:

The arts are considered the fine arts because their sole objective is toproduce a disinterested emotional representation of beauty, without regardfor the utility of the spectator nor of the artist. They are moreoverconsidered as the liberal arts because they are from free men and not slaves,who bear their souls, charm and ennoble existence: from there derives thesense and origin of these expressions of antiquity, artes liberales, artesingenu. There are arts without nobility, where their goal is practical andmaterial; we call these crafts . . . Veritable-real art can join, even shine, butonly in the appendages and in the details. (Cousin, 1853: 191)

One of the best examples characterizing the distinction between fine artand craft during the second half of the nineteenth century was the creation


of the Arts and Crafts Movement, promoted by William Morris (183496)and John Ruskin (18191900). They dedicated themselves to attacking andovercoming the separation of fine art from craft and the denigration of thecrafts and the crafts persons or artisans who made them. The fact that theylabored so hard, developing various organizations, as well as deliveringmany lectures and writing books against the division between fine art andcraft, is the strongest argument that the split was a generally acceptedcultural fact. Several passages from the work of William Morris illustratethis point. In his lecture Art under Plutocracy delivered at OxfordUniversity (11 November 1883), Morris wrote that art must be broadlydivided into two kinds, of which we may call the first Intellectual, and thesecond Decorative Art (Morris, 1883: 759). In his essay The Lesser Arts ofLife, originally published in 1882, Morris speaks of the contrast betweenthe artist and the handicraftsman: The artist came out from the handi-craftsmen, and left them without hope of elevation, while he himself wasleft without the help of intelligent, industrious sympathy (Morris, 1882:753). A very different sort of thinker, the painter Paul Serusier, wrote in aletter to a fellow painter, Maurice Denis, contrasting I. ART a) immutableprinciples b) personality with II. CRAFT a) knowledge b) skill (Serusier,1889: 1021).

Other tangible evidence of the split between fine art and craft is the factthat in Britain, Germany, Austria and France there were separate schoolsand museums for fine art and for the crafts (usually called applied arts ordecorative arts). For instance, the National Gallery in London held fineart works like painting and sculpture and the Victoria and Albert Museum(originally the South Kensington Museum) conserved ceramics, textiles, etc.The South Kensington Museum opened in 1862 and similar museums forapplied art opened in Vienna in 1864, in Paris in 1864 and in Berlin in 1867.

Indeed, as the highly influential work of Clement Greenberg (1939)attests (Greenberg assumes the distinction between serious modernistpainting and art based upon popular culture), the distinction between highart (assimilated to aesthetics) and crafts or popular arts (Carrier, 1996:xviii) was completely consolidated by the beginning of the twentiethcentury: By the time Picasso had re-represented the human figure in LesDemoiselles dAvignon . . . the antagonistic relation of modernism topopular culture was irreversible: it gradually led to almost complete bifur-cation of serious and popular culture (Vargish, 1998: 448). This modernsystem of art, as I shall argue, is the key to understanding the definition ofPaleolithic art at the end of the nineteenth century.

The discovery of several sculptures associated with prehistoric humanimplements in 1864 dealt with the question of the classification of theseobjects. What were the categories used by Western societies to cataloguethese pieces? As Thomas Wilson summarized, the distinction between fine


arts and crafts (or decorative arts) was the basis for the construction of thenew category of Paleolithic art:

Art is susceptible of several divisions. The commonest division is into fine,decorative and industrial . . . Fine art deals with painting, drawing, engraving,sculpture, architecture, music, poetry and the drama . . . Prehistoricdecorative art explains itself. (Wilson, 1898: 350)

In other words, between 1860 and 1900, Paleolithic art was defined througha set of values and ideas generally used to depict craft or popular arts.

Throughout the last third of the nineteenth century, archaeologists andanthropologists approached Paleolithic art with several a priori concep-tions, informed by the theory of evolutionism. In order to adapt theirconception of Paleolithic art to this theory, these prehistorians introducedspeculative sequences, which introduced the theory of a unilinear andprogressive evolution of art. The most popular of these schemes was Pietteschronology, which established a progression from works of art that imitatednature to works of art born from complex mental processes (Piette, 1875:279). Art was imagined as having progressed from simpler forms to morecomplex ones throughout the history of humankind, and could thus suppos-edly be judged according to its degree of proficiency. As a result, Paleolithicart was conceived of as craft in contradistinction to modern art. By the endof the nineteenth century, craft was seen as an inferior art, reflected by thefact that objects crafted . . . within artistic traditions [were] not representedin world art museums until after World War I (Price, 1989: 2). For the middleclasses of the nineteenth century, the beaux-arts of their own times func-tioned as a point of reference, in comparison to which other artistic mani-festations were evaluated. As is well-known, the later half of the nineteenthcentury was the era of the intellectual arts, of easel painting, of the glory ofthe great museums. It was the time of la modernit, which Baudelairedescribed as the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of artwhose other half is the eternal and the immutable (Baudelaire, 1863: 497).Paleolithic art, then, was defined as the inverted image reflected by thedistorting mirror (Kuper, 1988: 5) of modernity. It was thus depicted asornamental art (De Mortillet, 1897: 241; Evans, 1872: 448; Wilson, 1898:3512), as a non-reflexive art that fulfilled a mainly decorative function(Dreyfus, 1888: 225; Dupont, 1872: 155; Lartet and Christy, 1864: 280), as abodily art that displayed a taste for necklaces, amulets and tattoos (DeQuatrefages, 1884: 274; Lubbock, 1870: 58), as a nave art (De Mortillet,1883: 293; Dreyfus, 1888: 224), as a simple pastime (Cartailhac, 1889: 78; DeMortillet, 1883: 287; Lartet and Christy, 1864: 282). This opposition betweencivilization (supposedly best incorporated in the beaux-arts and especiallyin painting) and savagery (which produced decorative objects) occupied afundamental conceptual space within the European imagery. This binary


emerges very clearly in Joseph Conrads novel Heart of Darkness (writtenbetween 1898 and 1899). Conrads fictional character Kurtz can be inter-preted as a representative of Western civilization and, as such, excels in allof the most important achievements of the latter: he is a painter, a writerand, most importantly, an orator (Conrad, 1902: 98). The savages, on theother hand, are depicted as displaying a taste for adornment, decorationand what one may call a bodily art (clearly opposed to the image ofWestern art as cerebral): In front of the first rank, along the river, threemen, plastered with bright red earth from head to foot, strutted to and frorestlessly. When we came abreast again, they faced the river, stamped theirfeet, nodded their horned heads, swayed their scarlet bodies . . . (Conrad,1902: 96).

The utilization of dualistic categories generally used to define crafts inorder to depict Paleolithic art is not rare (Figure 1). This representationreflects a general inability to accept Paleolithic people as real artists. Whilemost anthropologists and archaeologists accepted, with reservations, thatprimitive people had luxury instincts (De Mortillet, 1897: 241; Lartet andChristy, 1864: 280), they did not attribute any aesthetic faculty to Pale-olithic art: The inartistic simplicity inseparable from all infantile arts,[made of ornamental Paleolithic art] only an improvement on the acci-dents of manufacture (Wilson, 1862: 289). Even if there were some excep-tions (Grosse, 1894: 131), most Westerners living in the age of progressbelieved that Paleolithic art was not art in the same sense as modern finearts, that primitive artists were not artists like Raphael or Michelangelo.This refusal characterizes the rejection of the authenticity of Paleolithiccave art before 1900. Indeed, the discovery of paintings on the walls ofprehistoric caves in the 1880s (Altamira, Grotte Chabot) produced asignificant dilemma: their complexity on the level of artistic skill wassupposedly incompatible with the low degree of civilization. Art definedas fine arts was incompatible with the primitive. Contemporaries, such asQuiroga and Torres, therefore expressed their inability to imagine primi-tive people producing paintings that display such an advanced under-standing and knowledge of perspective laws (Quiroga and Torres, 1880:266). Paleolithic paintings contradicted the ideal of progress, which deter-mined the writing of the history of art. The fact that the paintings that werefound in Altamira were more advanced, according to the nineteenthcentury definition of art, than the artistic manifestations of advanced civi-lizations such as, for example, that of ancient Egypt (Quiroga and Torres,1880: 267), posed a great problem. As a result, parietal art could notpossibly be accommodated within the nineteenth century conception ofPaleolithic art, which was restrained to engravings on bone and stone(what we call today mobiliary art): The portable art, the crafts of carving,were more readily accepted, whereas the sometimes polychrome andnaturalistic paintings in cave galleries were unlikely products of


Figure 1 LHomme primitif. (Image from L. Figuier, 1876: 167)


distant beings who had barely been admitted into the human family(Conkey, 1997: 175).

THE RECOGNITION OF CAVE ART AT THE TURN OF THECENTURY

After the turn of the twentieth century, a more complex image of prehis-toric people developed. Indeed, a significant change occurred in the concep-tion of Paleolithic societies and, subsequently, in the conception ofPaleolithic art. Ucko and Rosenfeld summarize this process as follows:Towards the end of the century, however, a great change took place andthe first analytical reviews of modern primitive life appeared, coincidingwith the first reliable studies and reports on the every-day life of tribeswhich could still be studied by ethnographers (Ucko and Rosenfeld, 1967:119). This great change is based on, or composed of, three important andinterrelated developments: first, the weakening impact of the theory ofevolutionism; second, the gradually growing awareness of the complexityof modern primitive societies through studies conducted within the fieldsof anthropology, ethnography and sociology; third, an increasing awarenessof the complexity of Paleolithic societies through, mainly, the discovery ofPaleolithic funeral rites.

As Peter Bowler observed, the weakening of evolutionism, or, to employhis formulation, the eclipse of Darwinism, occurred during the last yearsof the nineteenth century (Bowler, 1983). This eclipse was correlated withan increasingly widespread rejection of the idea of progress, a rejectionproduced by the disillusionment of European society with its ownsuccesses (Briggs, 1959: 56; Thomson, 1950: 103; Trigger, 1989: 150;Wiener, 1981: 5). As Asa Briggs observed:

The age of improvement, a useful label, derived from contemporarylanguage, for the whole period between 1783 and 1867, was certainly over by1880. The 1880s were difficult years of confusion and conflict, and even when,during the late 1890s, there was a reaction to the so-called late Victorianrevolt and Wilde was in exile there was no return to the liberal mood ofthe 1850s and 1860s. (Briggs, 1985: 245)

As the result of this disillusionment, the unilinear evolutionary conceptionsfound in archaeological studies were interrogated and criticized. Theeclipse of evolutionism, which was particularly pronounced in Englandand France (Trigger, 1989: 146), was propelled by the works of FriedrichRatzel (18441901) and Franz Boas (18581942). Ratzel is considered asthe most important representative of diffusionism. Boas, originally a geog-rapher, also opposed evolutionism, understanding each culture as the


product of a unique sequence of development in which the largely chanceoperation of diffusion played the major role in bringing about change(Trigger, 1989: 152).

Furthermore, the weakening of evolutionism must be considered withinthe context of the new sciences of anthropology, ethnography and sociol-ogy (Ucko and Rosenfeld, 1967). At the turn of the century, studies dealingwith savage societies increased significantly in number: LAnthropologieappeared in 1890 and, the same year, Frazer published the first volume ofhis Golden Bough; in 1895 Durkheim published Les rgles de la mthodesociologique (Durkheim, 1895), followed some years later by Les formeslmentaires de la vie religieuse (Durkheim, 1912); in 1897 Durkheimfounded LAnne sociologique, which was to become an influential journalof that time; two years later, Gillen and Spencer published The Native Tribesof Central Australia (Spencer and Gillen, 1899). Furthermore, the period ofthe turn of the century was marked by the debates regarding the symbol-ism of totemism, instigated by McLennans Primitive Marriage (1865). Thisgrowth within sociological, anthropological and ethnographic studieseventually produced the recognition of the complexity of modern primi-tive peoples. Ethnographic reports from Australia illustrated that savages(Naturvlker), who, as one might conjecture, lived in similar conditions tothose of Paleolithic people, could produce complex paintings (some ofwhich were found in caves). Anthropology and sociology had the greatestinfluence on the interpretations of Paleolithic art (Laming-Emperaire, 1962:71), due to the profound link that existed, and still exists, in Western thoughtbetween the definition of the primitive and the construction of savagery.This link is made explicit in the title of Lubbocks major work: Pre-historicTimes, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs ofModern Savages (1865). Ucko and Rosenfeld noted that there resulted atacit equation in the minds of both archaeologists and ethnographersbetween the primitiveness of hunters and gatherers living in the remotetimes of the Paleolithic and the primitiveness of hunters and gatherers stillliving in the remote corners of their own worlds (Ucko and Rosenfeld,1967: 117). The development of studies about contemporary savagesocieties consequently had a strong influence on the redefinition of prehis-toric Paleolithic art (p. 126).

Simultaneously, an awareness of the complexity of Paleolithic peoplealso developed in the field of the science of prehistory, which, as afore-mentioned, was due to the discovery of evidence of Paleolithic funeral rites.One of the first references to the existence of religious phenomena duringthe Paleolithic are in a 1864 article by Lartet and Christy, in which theauthors refer to the funeral meals and funeral rites that may have takenplace in the cave of Aurignac (Lartet and Christy, 1864: 268). Their obser-vations initially received little attention from the scientific community. Thefirst serious debate about the existence of funeral rites in Paleolithic times


was instigated by Lartets discoveries of the Cro-Magnon graves in 1868.Already in the title of his article about this discovery, Lartet refers to aspulture (Lartet, 1869). De Mortillet, however, insisted on the recent ageof the graves (Richard, 1993: 63). Only a few years later, in 1873, the exist-ence of funeral rites in the Paleolithic Age was accepted by the majority ofscholars with the exception of De Mortillet and Verneau as a result ofmile Rivires discovery of the spultures de Menton (Richard, 1993: 63).In the same year, Piette wrote on primitive fetishism in relation to somerepresentations in the Grotte de Gourdan (Piette, 1873), and, two decadeslater (in 1896), he elaborated upon the existence of a solar religion in hisdiscussion of les galets colors (Piette, 1896: 400). The most important aspectof this gradual acceptance of the existence of Paleolithic funeral rites wasthe formation of a new conception of primitive societies, which, as becameincreasingly evident, were far more complex than previously assumed. Thisacceptance was a necessary precondition for the eventual recognition ofPaleolithic cave paintings.

Scholars have generally argued that the theory of Paleolithic art asleisure art was rejected in 1902/1903, when it was replaced by a differentinterpretation known as hunting magic (Laming-Emperaire, 1962: 68). Itis commonly held that this shift was caused by the impact of Cartailhacsarticle Mea culpa dun sceptique in which he recounted his conversion tothe authenticity of Paleolithic parietal art, the general acceptance of thegreat antiquity of cave paintings, and of Salomon Reinachs famous articleentitled LArt et la magie (Reinach, 1903). Yet, as I have argued, these land-marks in the history of prehistory must be read within the context of thechanging concept of the savage and correlated developments, and, as such,were the effect rather than the cause of a change of mentality. The weak-ening of evolutionism, the development of ethnographic studies and thedebate about funeral rites produced a recognition of the complexity ofsavage and/or primitive societies and thus had a crucial influence on theredefinition of Paleolithic art at the turn of the century and on the accep-tance of cave paintings as art. In sum, as soon as one admitted the intelli-gence of primitive people, one had to rethink the definition of their artisticcapacity as a nave savoir-faire. The primitive craftsman thus became apainter. What had been invisible to the eyes of a prehistorian in 1880became an object of general analysis at the turn of the century: At the sightof these curious drawings, I had the clear feeling that, my attention notbeing drawn to such works, . . . I would have gone past without suspectinganything, and this had perhaps happened elsewhere to some colleagues andto myself. We would have to revisit all our caves, such was my conclusion(Cartailhac, 1902: 349).


THE FOUNDATIONS OF PALEOLITHIC ART AND ITSINFLUENCE ON TODAYS CONCEPTS

The period between 1860 and 1905 is essential to an understanding of thecontemporary definition of prehistoric art at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As illustrated in section three, in order to evaluate artisticobjects found next to flint instruments and fossilized bones from extinctanimals, Western archaeologists and anthropologists employed thedichotomy of art vs craft during the second half of the nineteenth century.These two categories have structured the modern Western system of art: finearts (painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, music) are associated with therealm of the aesthetic and related to concepts of inspiration and the geniusof the individual, whereas craft is understood in terms of utility and pleasure,occupying either functions of practical use or entertainment. Therefore,between 1860 and 1895, Paleolithic art was understood in terms of the latter,as if it existed for trivial pleasure or entertainment alone. The production ofartistic objects supposedly required only skill, as they were the works of anartisan. In this context, cave art discovered towards 1880 could not beaccepted as Paleolithic art because it was too similar to what wasconsidered as the fine arts and therefore required the existence of an artist.The rejection of unilinear evolution and the discovery of the complexity ofprimitive/savage people eventually resulted in the re-definition of Paleolithicart at the end of the nineteenth century.

To conclude, I question the importance of this historical process inrelation to present-day conceptions of Paleolithic art. Recent well-knowndevelopments in the study of Paleolithic art have led to a loss of innocenceof the field. First, several scholars have pointed out the problems posed bythe use of the term art. For some, the categorization of prehistoric art isnot a legitimate term for what is studied by anthropologists and archaeol-ogists (Conkey, 1983, 1987: 413, 1997: 174; Forge, 1991: 39; Shiner, 1994;Soffer and Conkey, 1997: 23). Second, the Eurocentric model (largelydominant in the field) has traditionally considered European Paleolithic artas representative of Paleolithic art as a whole. Yet, the confirmation thatmost of the Australian Pleistocene art is from Middle Paleolithic contextsand the discovery of new evidence of Pleistocene arts in South America,China, Japan, Siberia and Africa have seriously discredited this long-established interpretation. Third, recent controversies about the Paleolithicage of the pictures of the Chauvet Cave (Pettitt and Bahn, 2003; Zuechner,1996) Cosquer Cave (Clottes et al., 1992) and Foz Ca (Bednarik, 1995;Zilho, 1995) have challenged the traditional stylistic chronology of this art.

Even if examples like these highlight how little we know about Paleolithicart, there is one certainty: Since the recognition of the high antiquity ofAltamira in 1902 until the last decades of the twentieth century, most of the


academic analyses of Paleolithic art have been largely based on thecategories of mobiliary art (or portable art) and parietal art (also calledcave art). Although this division has been challenged by recent develop-ments2 and by several critics,3 most archaeologists confirm the mobiliary art parietal art dichotomy. This distinction appears to be objective: the formerclearly refers to Paleolithic works of art which are of a certain size andportable, the latter defines engravings, bas-reliefs and paintings on the wallsof the caves. However, as I have argued in this article, this distinction is aresult of the delay in the recognition of parietal art and of the dichotomy onwhich our understanding of art is based. As we have pointed out in a recentwork (Moro Abada and Gonzlez Morales, 2004), we archaeologists needto remind ourselves that what we now call Paleolithic mobiliary art refersto the same crafted objects that were thought to make up the whole of Pale-olithic art between 1860 and 1900. Paleolithic parietal art, on the otherhand, defines artistic phenomena which were recognized as Paleolithic onlyafter 1902. I suggest that the very meaning of the term mobiliary art istherefore related to the definition of primitive art between 1860 and 1900,whereas the very meaning of cave art is related to the acceptance of the

Figure 2 Group of artists of the Chellen period engaged in chipping flintimplements. (Image from T. Wilson, 1898, plate 18)


complexity of primitive art. Therefore, the seemingly neutral definitions ofboth concepts (which apparently only refer to size and portability of thework of art) mask more complex problems, namely our anachronisticattempts to impose our modern conceptions of art on the Paleolithic times.It has been my objective to demonstrate the importance of our moderncategories (fine art and crafts) in the definition of Paleolithic art.

Acknowledgements

I dedicate this article to Professor Bruce Trigger, who has taught me much aboutthe history of archaeology. I am grateful to Alain Schnapp (Universit de Paris I),Margaret W. Conkey (University of California, Berkeley), Nathan Schlanger(Universit de Paris I), Randall White (University of New York), Iain Davidson(University of New England), Denis Vialou (Musum National dHistoireNaturelle), Andrew Gardner (Institute of Archaeology, London), Vctor M.Fernndez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) and, especially, Larry Shiner(University of Illinois at Springfield) for reading and criticizing the manuscript. I owe a debt of gratitude to Wiktor Stozckowski and Franois Hartog who wel-comed me at the cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris). I want toacknowledge the help given by Elisabeth Gschl (Universitt Wien), Kerstin Oloff(University of Warwick) and, especially, Jennifer Selby (McMaster University) inproof-reading the text. Finally, very special thanks must go to Manuel R. GonzlezMorales (Universidad de Cantabria) for his constant help and encouragement withthis article.

Notes

1 Paleolithic art was generally identified with the commonly accepted term ofprimitive art. The latter (that eventually won out over such phrases as lart detemps premiers, archaic art, or lart des non-civilizs) was used byanthropologists, sociologists, historians and aesthetes to describe the art fromprimitive societies both of ancient and modern times. Indeed, in the mentalityof Western societies of the nineteenth century, both prehistoric men andmodern savages were linked by the notion of primitive. In this context,Paleolithic art was often defined by analogy with art from modern primitives(Du Cleuziou, 1887: 263; Dupont, 1872: 155; Lubbock, 1865: 305).

2 The discovery of open air petroglyph sites in the Ca Valley of northernPortugal (Bednarik, 1995) has shown the existence of cave art without caves(Bahn, 1995: 231). As a result, archaeologists now use the term rock art (orlart des parois in French literature) to describe the distinctive practice ofpainting or carving natural surfaces in the landscape (Bradley, 1997: 5).

3 According to Denis Vialou, for instance, the division between parietal art andmobiliary art is taken for granted by most archaeologists, even if there is not alogical reason to justify this split in the interpretation of Paleolithic art (Vialou,1998: 269). Randall White has criticized the trivialization of bodily adornmentsas decorative art or trinkets (White, 1992: 539). For him, despite dozens ofdemonstrations in modern social anthropology that personal adornment is one


of the most powerful and pervasive forms in which humans construct andrepresent beliefs, values, and social identity, the thousands of body ornamentsknown from the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic have been ignored in thefetishization of art as depiction (White, 1992: 539).

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OSCAR MORO ABADA is a Fellow at the cole des Hautes Etudes enSciences Sociales (Paris). He has been a visiting scholar at the Universitiesof Paris I, University of California, Berkeley, University College London, andMaison de lArchologie et de lEthnologie (Nanterre, Paris X). His mostrecent book is on Nietzsche and Foucaults social history (La PerspectivaGenealgica de la Historia, Universidad de Cantabria, in press).[email: [email protected] and [email protected]]

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