Prehistoric moving picture show

The Cave Beneath The Sea - Chauvet Cave

December 20, 1996

Recent interest in prehistory has been fuelled at least in part by the exciting discoveries in the recently explored sites in southern France to which these two books are devoted. The Cosquer cave near Marseilles was discovered in 1991, having been protected from human intrusion for thousands of years by the rise in the level of the Mediterranean, which concealed the entrance at the end of the last ice age. The Chauvet cave in the Ard che was unknown until 1994. The earliest application of pigment from either site so far dated (at Chauvet) gives a radiocarbon reading which puts it at about 31,000 years ago, far earlier than anything at Lascaux.

Revelations of this nature exert increasing pressure on those whose job it is to interpret it all. Both sites are and always were deep underground. What is to be seen can only - and could only - be seen by artificial illumination of some kind. This already poses an interesting conundrum, unless we are prepared to believe that our ancestors could see in the dark. Why conceal what speaks to the eye in places where it will for most of the time be invisible? But this is only one facet of a broader question which, to those of us who are neither archaeologists nor professional prehistorians, takes priority over everything else: what did all the marks and configurations left in these caves mean to those who made them?

One has to say "marks", "configurations" and "mean" because those are terms as neutral as the English language allows us if we do not wish to prejudge the status and function of this early human handiwork. Bringing out for inspection what has so long lain hidden took a great deal of courage, conspicuously so in the case of Henri Cosquer, who risked his life in the initial underwater exploration. But what has been brought out tells us less about the Cro-Magnon mind than about the conceptual difficulties that hamper modern efforts to understand it.

Neither site has been fully explored and firm conclusions - the experts tell us - would be premature. Nevertheless they make it quite clear what kinds of conclusion to expect.

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The linchpin to the experts' interpretation of the caves is, unfortunately, the inherently problematic concept of aesthetic endeavour. The subtitle of one of the books announces "the discovery of the world's oldest paintings". Both books repeatedly refer to the makers as "artists". We read of "panels" and "frescoes" and even of "artistic licence". Descriptions of what is visible make free use of evaluative terms that might not be out of place in criticising exhibits in a modern gallery. So before you can say "Jack Paleo-Robinson", these unprecedented finds are already inscribed in an academic discourse about "the history of art".

That was perhaps inevitable. For the discourse in question has a pedigree, going back to the beginnings of anthropology in the last century, when "art" was a European category imposed willy-nilly on all other cultures. There is doubtless a case to be made out for this; but it is not made out very well - if at all - by prehistorians. Rather, they take it for granted. The caves are in effect treated as studios. Schools, traditions and conventions are detected. Details of execution are rationalised on this basis. Thus a double or triple outline is read as the cave artist's attempt to portray a herd, while extra limbs are seen as a rendering of movement.

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Now it is not in dispute that what the caves offer to a modern eye can often be seen as "representations" of recognisable animals: horses, bison, deer, etc. But if we now go on to ask why that makes it all right to call it "prehistoric art" (in the absence of any further information about the makers or the making of it), we uncover a presupposition of roughly the following form. Art reveals itself, because it is universal: representing the fauna and flora of the natural world is one of the archetypal functions of the artist. So whenever we come across what looks to us fairly obviously - or even rather remotely - like a picture of a horse, bison, deer, etc we must be dealing with some kind of artistic undertaking.

This basic assumption leads immediately to others. What kind of art is this, deliberately hidden away from the external world, in spaces not evidently used for domestic habitation? The experts have a pigeonhole answer ready for that too: it must be some kind of religious art. That is to say, the pictures must be related to magical practices or superstitions, the exact nature of which is unknown. (Shamans are often conjured up at this point.) So the initial supposition about art joins forces with an assumption about the rudimentary beliefs of our ancestors: together they lead directly to a theory about the function of the site. Clottes and Courtin repeatedly refer to the Cosquer cave as a "sanctuary", although there is no evidence that it was, once we set aside the question-begging assumption that it is full of ancient works of art.

The point is not whether the hypothesis is tenable, or plausible, but what is revealed about its underpinnings. The question of whether the hunters of long ago were ever on the wavelength of what the 20th century calls "art" is simply bypassed. They must have been artists, whether they knew it or not. Only on that basis can we do the decent thing and fit them in belatedly to our modern schemata of human history. Thus, just as in anthropology, "art" functions as a category which justifies classifying remote societies as "primitive".

An interesting case concerns the interpretation of the enigmatic "finger tracings" that abound at Cosquer. These are assumed by Clottes and Courtin to have nothing to do with the art work, which belongs to a subsequent period in the use of the cave (several thousand years later), and is often superimposed on the finger tracings. The explanation proposed is that these earlier marks were made by people who felt a need to establish "taking possession" of the cave. ("It's ours: so let's scratch it all over!") But the underlying reasoning goes something like this. These marks are not art because they have, say the authors quite firmly, no "aesthetic value". The implication is that they must be traces of less exalted pursuits.

An even more interesting case is that of the human "hand" forms present at both sites. These fall, as it were, on the borderline between art and non-art. Some, at Chauvet, seem to have been made by pressing a hand dipped in pigment against a surface ("prints"). Others look like the result of spraying pigment around the outline left by a hand ("stencils"). With one possible exception, only hand stencils occur at Cosquer, and belong to the early phase of activity in the cave, long before the animal figures appear: they cannot be considered, Clottes and Courtin tell us, "'art' in the strict sense". (What the strict sense is they do not say, but for "strict" we can presumably read "modern".) Often the prehistoric "hand" seems to have fingers missing. Clottes and Courtin reject the usual hypotheses of deliberate mutilation, frostbite and disease. They opt for another theory: the deformed hands are coded gestures. (The maker bent down certain fingers in order to produce a silhouette of a certain shape.) So this is not quite art, but symbolic communication of some kind nevertheless.

The authors add immediately that we shall never be able to crack the prehistoric hand "code". However, they conclude that at Cosquer a different code must have been in use from that at Gargas, because the statistics of missing fingers per hand are different in the two cases. How that follows it is difficult to see, unless we knew something about the semantics of the codes, which Clottes and Courtin say is impossible. But then how can we be sure we are dealing with messages in a gesture code in the first place? What is clear, though, is that the hypothesis once again fits the history-of-art framework: one can now trace a chronological progression from primitive visual signs to full-blown depiction. Marks not otherwise identifiable go into the ragbag categories of "signs" and "indeterminate lines", and are interpreted wherever possible as modifications of or comments on "hands" or "pictures".

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The pictures, moreover, are taken to be pictures in the modern sense. They are classified by subject matter, according to what they are taken to depict. Clottes leaves no doubt about this when, in his epilogue to the Chauvet book, he asserts confidently: "These are not stereotyped images that were transcribed to convey the concept 'lion' or 'rhinoceros', but living animals faithfully reproduced." Nor does he hesitate to speak of the artist's "quest for perspective". What purpose a quest for perspective would serve in this context, unless we are already dealing with a frustrated Uccello living many millennia in advance of his time, it is hard to fathom. And how we can with any assurance attribute to this prehistoric Uccello the artistic aim of "faithful reproduction" is even more questionable.

The structure of the explanation, in short, is determined less by archaeological facts than by certain preconceptions about cultural evolution. The explanatory exercise is one in damage limitation, which attempts to reconcile modern ignorance with modern self-esteem. This is why the concept of "art" plays such a crucial role. We can accept the idea that, because of the passage of time, some of the meanings in prehistoric art now escape us. This can be admitted because it is no more problematic than the discovery of an undeciphered script: we can convince ourselves we are looking at texts in a lost language of art, to which we merely lack the key. What is unacceptable is the far more disturbing idea that this is not a lost language of art at all, but a quite different form of activity. For then we lose our grip on the "text" altogether.

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The design of the two books reinforces the message. We are invited to see for ourselves. Both contain detailed photographic records of the cave interiors; at once brilliantly informative and brilliantly deceptive. The camera cannot lie, yet in this case it is lying all the time. For what there is to be seen was never seen thus by the human beings who made these caves what they were. What appears on the walls and ceilings was never viewed in the hard, frozen, unblinking glare that modern photography demands, but only in the flickering, restless light of a flame. That difference cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to understanding what it is we are looking at. It affects the whole visual experience. Furthermore, by imposing its standard rectangle on a carefully selected visual field, the camera is capable of making almost anything look pictorial to the modern eye. And this bears directly on how we "see" the evidence.

Which brings us back to the original puzzle. Why consign your best draughtsmanship to the pitch dark of a cave? The puzzle arises precisely because rock art is assumed to deliver a visual message. There are two possible approaches to the problem, depending on whether we accept this premise or not.

If we do, it must be relevant that the site chosen totally reverses the night-day conditions of vision for human beings. For purely physiological reasons, Homo sapiens is not as well adapted as many creatures to living in the dark. The compensation for this is that only in complete darkness can we have complete control of the light source and hence control of the visual space available at any one time. (This is the biomechanical foundation of the modern cinema. But the modern cinema typically uses it as no more than a technical device to "present again" narrative scenes originally enacted elsewhere.) In the dark, a light source can be moved. Different areas can be brought alive in sequence. Objects of various kinds can be used to project shadows. It becomes possible to create a world of figures and patterns which, unlike the painting or the static photograph, is a world never still. Even fixed surfaces can be made to "move" visually, especially if covered with grooves with a depth of two or three millimetres, as "finger tracings" have. The cave thus provides an optical arena of which the shape and contents can be altered at will and in ways the tyranny of daylight does not permit. That deliberate reversal itself emerges as the most probable basic source of signification, and makes it even less likely that what the cave "pictures" mean depends on how skilfully they recapture in line and colour the visual details of scenes and figures from the daylight world.

The alternative approach involves questioning whether what appears in the caves was meant to be seen at all. There might have been light in the dark only to enable the makers to do their work. One possibility is that the motive was indeed to hide something, with whatever that concealment implies at the level of social rationale (persecuted sects? secret societies?). The other possibility discounts concealment as a motive: which, if correct, would suggest that the marks and configurations are where they are basically because that is where they needed to be. Their visual character then becomes secondary. Their primary source of signification would derive from their location, how they were placed in that location, when, by whom and why. In that case, the "artistic" capabilities of the agents involved again become an irrelevance. We are back in a different era of semiosis, where the notion of mimetic representation as an aesthetic objective is itself an anachronism.

"Scepticism is always healthy," writes Paul Bahn in his introduction to the Chauvet book. But the scepticism prehistorians welcome concerns the authenticity of new finds rather than the validity of old ways of describing them. It is time the conceptual grammar of prehistoric artspeak was revised. In the heroic age of Breuil the artspeak idiom served an essential chronological purpose. With the advent of less subjective methods of dating its accents sound increasingly archaic. Its survival may now be a hindrance rather than a help to understanding the past.

Roy Harris is emeritus professor of general linguistics, University of Oxford, and editor, Language and Communication.

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The Cave Beneath The Sea: Paleolithic Images at Cosquer

Author - Jean Clottes and Jean Courtin
ISBN - 0 8109 4033 7
Publisher - Abrams
Price - £45.00
Pages - 200

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