#upper paleolithic

[ofruinsandmyth]

A 7'000 year old megalithic monument, unveiled following severe drought in Spain.

[lorienn-art]

FR Heyyy Comme je le disais la dernière fois, j'ai décidé de retoucher un peu à l'aquarelle et me revoilà avec de nouvelles illu ! Et punaise, ça fait longtemps qu'elles attendaient leur colo.. A la base, je les ai pensées comme des designs de stickers (d'où les grands espaces vides dans la compo, pour laisser la place à du texte), mais je les aime tellement que je les utiliserai peut-être pour d'autres trucs, genre des bannières ou choses du genre (voire même des prints si vous êtes intéressés). Ce projet de stickers vient en fait de la volonté de refaire des stickers caritatifs (comme je le fais avec le sticker Palestine), mais cette fois-ci, ce serait pour les personnes migrantes (car passer des frontières ne devrait pas être criminalisé) et pour la lutte des artistes contre l'intelligence artificielle générative. Je n'ai pas encore décidé à quels organismes je reverserai l'argent collecté par la vente des stickers, mais j'ai fait quelques prototypes et je les trouve trop styléééés héhéhé Bref, comme d'hab', tout un programme, mais on est déter et c'est ça qui compte ! _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

EN Heyyy As I was saying last time, I decided to go back to watercolour a bit and here I am with new illustrations! And man, they've been waiting to be painted for a while.. At first, I imagined them as sticker designs (hence the big empty spaces, to write texts in it), but I love them so much that I might use them for other stuff, like profile banners and other things like that (even maybe prints if you're interested). This sticker project stems from the will to make more charity stickers (like the Palestine sticker), but this time, it would be for the migrants (because crossing borders should never be criminalised) and for the artists' fight against generative AI. I haven't decided yet which organisations to choose for the donation of the money from the sale of the stickers, but I made some prototypes and they're so siiiiick hehehe Anyway, as always, a big adventure awaits but we're motivated, and that's all that matters!

Alt versions:

[emptyanddark]

The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence – all appear to have been simply assumed among our distant ancestors, even if most people find them barely conceivable today. Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do. If this is so, we can at least refine our initial question: the real puzzle is not when chiefs, or even kings and queens, first appeared, but rather when it was no longer possible simply to laugh them out of court.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow

[numinous-archives]

The ‘Shamanic Interpretations’ of Paleolithic Parietal Art and the Contextualization of their Broader Socio-Cultural Significance

[This is an article I originally wrote for a course on academic writing. I've added a lot of changes]

More Than Just Hunting Magic

The ‘Shamanic Interpretations’ of Paleolithic Parietal Art and the Contextualization of their Broader Socio-Cultural Significance

Deep within the French caves in the Dordogne region, there are several archaeological sites of parietal art (paintings and engravings on cave walls and ceilings) left behind by humans from the upper paleolithic (35k-10k years ago). Alongside parietal art of handprints, human figures, and geometric shapes and patterns, the caves consist of detailed cave paintings and well carved engravings of big-game animals and fierce predators. Though many of the parietal art are fascinating, I (the author of this article, and as a student of religious studies) am mostly interested in the animal depictions and the possible religious significance it could have had for the paleolithic image-makers who created them.

This will be a literature review. Throughout the article, I will be presenting the findings and data collected by archaeologists and researchers. Then, I will discuss the possible religious significance that parietal art may have had, and their possible connection with ritual behavior. To support these interpretations, I will discuss the ideas of religious studies scholars and anthropologists on the topic of ritual behavior.

To specify which caves I will be discussing, I have decided to focus on four caves located in the Dordogne region of France: Lascaux, Font-De-Gaume, Grotte de Cussac and Rouffignac.

1 | The first part of this article will focus on these caves and the parietal art found within them. Within the archaeological community, many have interpreted the parietal art as imitative representations of what the image-makers saw and witnessed in real life — an artistic method also known as Mimesis. This mimetic interpretation would explain the depictions of animals and certain hunting scenes.

2 | Unsurprisingly within religious studies, the artistic depictions of animals and predators within the various caves throughout Europe have also been associated with Hunting Magic. Magic, in the broad sense (and within the context of this article), refers to practices and rituals that aim to alter reality or bring forth physical changes in the world. This also applies to the term ‘Magico-Religious’, which additionally incorporates the belief in supernatural beings. Thus, hunting magic is often understood as rituals and practices that the paleolithic humans may have performed to ensure fortune and avoid misfortunes during hunts. This will be the focus of the second part of the article. Here, I will discuss the idea that the imitative representations of animals and hunting scenes could have been related to mythological thinking, animism, and consequently hunting magic. I present this interpretation to support my claim of hunting magic being related to animistic beliefs. Animism in this article will refer to the belief in inanimate and animate objects (mostly animate objects) possessing intellection and volition of their own free will.

3 | However, it would also be important to note other reasons (other than religious) for such art to be made. As in social and cultural reasonings. This is where my main thesis will arise and develop throughout the article. That the creation of parietal art may have also had socio-cultural factors in addition to religious and spiritual.

4 | For the fourth part, I will discuss the depictions of therianthropes (half man and half animal) and their possible relationship with shamanistic practices. Often such shamanistic practices will depend on a ritual specialist, the shaman, who will enter trance and commune with the spirits on behalf of the community.

5 | However, I will also discuss and explore the other aspects as to why the paleolithic image-makers would have decided to create such art. Additionally, I will discuss what broader significance shamanistic practices and rituals might have had for their community and culture. This will be the focus of the fifth part of this article, and essentially the main thesis of my article. That even though the parietal art found in the caves may have held a religious significance and been related to shamanistic ritual behavior, it could also have held a broader socio-cultural significance to the paleolithic community.

Literature List

Aubert, M., Lebe, R., Oktaviana, A.A. et al. (2019, 11 December). Earliest hunting scene in prehistoric art. Nature 576: 442–445 (2019). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1806-y.

Dunbar, R. (2022). How Religion Evolved: And Why it Endures. Penguin Books.

Eliade, M., Trask, W. R., & Doniger, W. (2004, 08 February). Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton University Press.

Gay, I., Plassard, F., Müller, K., & Reiche, I. (2019, 16 December). Relative chronology of Palaeolithic drawings of the Great Ceiling, Rouffignac cave, by chemical, stylistic and superimposition studies. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 29: 102006. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2019.102006.

Kedar, Y., Kedar., G., & Barkai, R. (2021, 31 March). Hypoxia in Paleolithic decorated caves: the use of artificial light in deep caves reduces oxygen concentration and induces altered states of consciousness. Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture, 14(2): 181–216. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/1751696X.2021.1903177.

Ledoux, L., Berillon, G., Fourment, N., Muth, X., & Jaubert, J. (2021). Evidence of the use of soft footwear in the Gravettian cave of Cussac (Dordogne, France). Scientific Reports 11, Article number: 22727. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-02127-z.

Marquet J.-C., Freiesleben T. H., Thomsen K. J., Murray A. S., Calligaro, M., et al. (2023) The earliest unambiguous Neanderthal engravings on cave walls: La Roche-Cotard, Loire Valley, France. PLOS ONE 18(6): e0286568. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0286568

Reiche, I., Coquinot, Y., Trosseau, A., & Maigret, A. (2023). First discovery of charcoal-based prehistoric cave art in Dordogne. Scientific reports, 13(1): 22235. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-47652-1.

Strathern, A. (2019). Unearthly Powers: Religious and Political Change in World History. Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108753371.

Sahlins, M. (2022). The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity. Princeton University Press.

[tyrannoninja]

Firemaker

This Aurignacian woman from the Upper Paleolithic of Europe (43-26,000 years ago) is engaged in the process of making fire by drilling a stick into a pile of tinder. The heat which the friction produces is what will ignite the fire. This is one of a number of techniques that people (and possibly other hominin species) have used throughout time to produce fire for campsites and other purposes (another classic is striking rocks against one another to create sparks).

[inspofromancientworld]

Stone Tools: Sangoan

By José-Manuel Benito Álvarez (España) —> Locutus Borg - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1605720

In sub-Saharan Africa, including the Sahel, the Sangoan lithic style was the dominant style from about 500,000-300,000 years ago and was characterized by picks, core axes, and other heavy-duty tools made of large cobbles or coarse grained stones. These tools have been found in many habitats, ranging from rainforests to savannas. It represents a transition between the Paleolithic and the Mesolithic era.

Most of the sites where tools have been found either don't preserve organic material well, like rainforests, or lack any organic material all together, leaving the tools to be dated by volcanic deposits and may have been disturbed after they were deposited or while they were being deposited. This results in date ranges that fall between 455 ± 103 to 39 ± 2 thousand years ago to being 'established by around 500 ka BP [thousand years before present]' to being in use up to about 182 ± 20 thousand years ago. In some regions, such as the Twin Rivers in Zambia, the Sangoan culture is completely missing from.

Source: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-017-7520-5_8

The tools appear unrefined and robust compared to the Levallois tools, but researchers think this is because the tools were made to be used for digging and processing the plant material extracted from the soil. This has led to some debates as to where the Sangoan should be a distinct classification or if the tools should be considered to be of the Acheulean style. They also are fairly closely related to the Lupemban, which followed it, so creating a division between the two is also complicated, though the Lupemban tends to have tools that were retouched on both sides of the cutting edge and are leaf-shaped, but the Sangoan tend to be less standardized. Sangoan tends to be defined by what it isn't rather than what it is, leaving a lot of ambiguity and inability to describe it, with one researcher noting that '[a]lthough the term Sangoan has been in the literature for over sixty years [as of 1986], no excavated Sangoan assemblages has been formally described'.

Another source of on-going debate is whether these tools reached as far as the Mediterranean and Crete, or whether those tools are part of the Lepemban culture. If so, the tools may have traveled with population movements into the northern Nile Valley between about 243,000-191,000 years ago, during a time of climactic change. Because there is overlap between several tool styles both in chronology and geography, depending on what the hominins who created them needed, these debates likely will remain points of contention, though it is hoped that improvements in chronostratiography, the dating of layers of sediment deposits, will help resolve these questions. The ability to better examine use-wear or any residues that remain on the tools will also help researchers understand whether the Sangoan tools were a specific industry or whether it was just a transitional phase between two industries.

[dobescrusher2]

Little painting study of the Venus of Monruz

[anirobot]

An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-writing System and Phenological Calendar

Image: The Cambridge Archaeological Journal

Now all the people of the Turdaș–Vinča culture and the Sumerians can go to a dung heap and sprinkle ashes on themselves, because Paleolithic hunter-gatherers invented writing... And they didn’t! 😉