Where it all began….

Sorry for the long break.  I’ve been away a lot, both business (a couple of visits to Dublin, which only gave a brief taster of the place) and pleasure (the annual visit to Orkney- which included the best weather I’ve see this summer).   I’ve also been having all sorts of issues over Flickr.  I tend to assume that most of my readership here is steered over from Flickr, where I tend to post at least some of the photos I include in my postings.  I really can’t get on with the “new look” Flickr.  I find it clunky and confusing to engage with- and so slow that I’m having to cut back the number of people I can engage with in any depth.   I’ve set up an alternative home on a site called Ipernity, whose look is a lot more like them old Flickr and rather reminds me of the old Yahoo 360 (anybody still alive who recalls that?).  I suspect it was a something of a French Flickr knock-off (if you look closely it’s apparent that the default language was originally French) and I also suspect that it was not the most active of places until a few weeks ago.   There has been something of a migration of girls I know and like from Flickr but (inevitably) there are still a lot of people I don’t want to lose contact with on Flickr who probably have too much invested in time and effort to want to move from there.  Equally it’s not yet clear that Ipernity will get the critical mass necessary to sustain interest (or indeed how the folk who run it will react if they suddenly become the default site for t-girls and their admirers- there is some evidence to suggest that their filtering for rude stuff isn’t all that well developed or robust!).   While Ipernity has a blogging facility I don’t think I’d be able to shift all of this over there.  So the net result is that I guess I’ll have to remain here and double post the photos to both Flickr and Ipernity.   This in itself has been a bit of a discouragement from setting finger to keyboard…..As a result, I’m well behind on writing up the exhibitions that I’ve been to, with the result that some of my comments are going to be very much in the past tense.   

This certainly applies to the British Museum show on Ice Age Art.  This was sub-titled “The Making of the Modern Mind”, which certainly raised a few questions in my (hopefully modern) mind.  Part of the point of the show was to exhibit artefacts from the very distant past (anything up to 40,000 years ago) as works of art rather than simply archaeological finds; to underline the point, a number of 20^th century pieces were slipped into the exhibition.   I don’t have any real problem with this- there is pretty good evidence that Picasso, to take one example, was interested in and influenced by examples of Palaeolithic art which were discovered in France in the 1930’s, like the example below.

I’m a little less than totally convinced by the associated argument that the Ice Age societies in question included what amounted to a group of “professional” artists who underwent lengthy training (argued on the basis of finds made by clearly less skilful hands- interpreted as apprentice works), though it’s certainly clear from attempts to replicate some of the more complex items on display that creating them might take several hundred person hours which couldn’t be spent hunting or gathering.   The assumption that creating sophisticated visual art is constitutive of a “modern” mind, however, jars just a little.   What about cultures which chose other ways to address the issues that the groups covered in the exhibition dealt with in visual terms?   There was glancing reference to music (a flute made from the wing bone of a very large eagle) and even to dance (there is evidence from one of the decorated caves in France that people danced there- but might there have been dancing at sites which had not been modified by human hand?) but nothing about language and oral cultures.   There are societies in the contemporary world which are no great shakes at visual arts but cultivate very complex verbal cultures.  Don’t they have modern minds?   I imagine the concepts and the underpinning brain science are quite a bit more complex than they appeared in the exhibition catalogue, which at times read faintly like an impact report from the Paleolithic Arts Council seeking extra mammoth steaks on behalf of creative artists….

None of this questions the power, beauty and sophistication of many of the pieces in the show.  Ironically the least effective part of the exhibition was the section which sought to display the most famous Ice Age art- the cave paintings of Lascaux and their equivalents (badged up as examples of a “Renaissance” as the ice receded northwards some 20,000 years ago).   Obviously this sort of art can’t travel and the attempt to display it in audio-visual terms in a pseudo-cave really didn’t work that well.  

On the other hand the show did a very good job of displaying free-standing sculptural artefacts, including images etched into ivory or horn or even stone.   The number of items on display was not huge, which meant that one could actually look at them in the round (though obviously the requirements of modern lighting meant that one had to use some imagination to get a sense of how they might have appeared in the flickering light of fires or torches; from archaeological contexts it appears that some at least were meant to be viewed under those conditions).   They also came from a relatively limited number of sites (presumably to simplify borrowing conditions), though ones spread over a huge geographical area, from Derbyshire to the southern edge of Siberia, and covering an almost unimaginably long time span (something like 30,000 years).

Despite the intention of presenting the exhibits in aesthetic terms as works of art, it was obviously impossible to avoid speculation about function.   I repeatedly found the word “enigmatic” cropping up in my mind when looking at objects.   Take the female figurines (see top).   These massive women with huge breasts and (possibly, sometimes) heavily pregnant are something of an Ice Age cultural constant with versions being found in more or less every major site across the entire period covered.   It’s less clear what they “mean”.   The tendency has been to interpret them as artefacts underpinning a fertility cult, with very grand speculative reconstructions of matriarchal social structures sometimes built on this (curiously a certain brand of feminist-inflicted archaeology doesn’t have any trouble at all with recycling notions of Primitive Matriarchy first dreamed up by a mid- nineteenth century German professor called Bachofen whose works became massively popular with the more occultist type of Nazi).   Even on that basis there are puzzles.  Are these supposed to be idealisations of “ordinary” women (how many enormously fat women would there have been in the average hunter-gatherer band, even granted that such groups are often more sedentary than they appear at first sight)?    Priestess/shaman figures?   Goddesses?   Is it significant that, with the exception of items found at one site, they’re always depicted as nude even though nudity was probably relatively uncommon in Ice Age societies?   Some of the figurines appear to have been quite deliberately smashed and disposed of.   Why?   Punishing the goddess when a pregnancy went wrong?   Shifts in the belief system that we can now only guess at?   Could they even have been children’s toys, broken when their owner reached puberty?

Some of the same issues surround the beautifully observed images and depictions of animals like the bison and the horse shown above.   There are, for instance, disjunctions between the range of animals depicted in art and those which the archaeological record indicates were hunted (or at least consumed- it’s entirely possible that Ice Age people scavenged dead mammoths rather than hunting living ones).  To take an example, only one image of a wolverine has ever been found (it was in the show) even though these giant members of the weasel family were evidently hunted for their fur (and were quite fierce enough to pose a genuine test of skill and courage).   Again the assumption is that animal depictions link in with factors like seeking the aid of Higher Powers for a successful hunt, taking on the spirit of chosen animals at certain times or even totemic symbols of certain groups.  It’s easy to see why one might admire the speed of a horse or the ferocity of a bear and wish to take on something of their spirit -or want to apologise to a bison for killing it so that its spirit doesn’t haunt future hunts or say thanks to a mammoth for feeding the group through the winter.   Quite why a wolverine wasn’t due the same degree of respect is less clear…..  And just possibly there was no religious purpose in any of these images- the exhibition’s own premise of looking at them as works of art opened the door to other possibilities.

I have to admit that I have a slight issue with what seems to be a default archaeological position which interprets any artefact which doesn’t have an immediately obvious utilitarian purpose in spiritual terms.   It was faintly gratifying to find included in the exhibition a group of items- lavishly decorated batons of a rather unusual shape- which had for years been interpreted as non-functional symbols of power and authority but on a recent re-examination were now interpreted as spear throwers- see below for an example.   Sometimes functionality is not obvious but it’s still there.  

There also seems to be a permanent tendency to assume that all Ice Age religion was “shamanist” and interpret finds by heavy reference to the religious practices of contemporary peoples who practice “shamanism” (whatever that means- I’m not sure it’s appropriate to collapse the belief systems of peoples from Papua New Guinea to Central Africa via Amazonia and Siberia into one “ism”, as if they’re all offshoots of one core faith; this sounds uncomfortably like a politically correct 21^st century heir to19^th century attempts to identify a common religion of Humankind).  

I suppose it must be tempting to assume very long continuities in places like Siberia- especially as it’s awfully easy to project Ice Age life styles on to people who still live in very cold conditions there.   “It’s all religious” sounds more impressive than “we don’t really know- it might be religious or it might be something else entirely”.  Nevertheless I do find the rather easy assumption of very long continuities and the associated tendency to make use of contemporary practice (or sometimes practice recorded by anthropologists in the recent past) to interpret archaeological finds 30,000 years old a bit simplistic.   There’s good evidence that the content of Siberian “shamanism” has shifted considerably over time- and that anthropological informants might more or less consciously have shaped their accounts to make the practices of their people “understandable” to observers or to hide the truly key aspects of practice and belief from unsympathetic ears.   To be fair, the exhibition catalogue was a good deal less “shaman-centric” than some accounts of remote antiquity I’ve read and noted problems with some of the arguments for very long continuities, such as the long term impact of Tibetan Buddhist imagery on decorative items worn by modern shamans which provided a much more plausible explanation for the presence of certain motifs than long term survivals from the Palaeolithic suggested by some Soviet era researchers.    The shadow of the shaman did however hover in the background and at times I felt individual items were being over-interpreted to fit this model.

Perhaps the most enigmatic item of all was also one of the oldest.   He can be seen below- the Lion Man of the Hohlenstein Stadel.  He’s about 40,000 years old and pretty amazing.   The story of his discovery is rather complicated (and I suspect the version given in the catalogue glossed over a few awkward points).   The simple version is that he was discovered in pieces during a dig by a couple of professors from the University of Ulm.  The discovery was made in August 1939 just as the dig was being wound down with the outbreak of war and the mobilisation of the diggers.   The finds disappeared into a store and were only looked at again in the late 1980’s, when the Lion Man was revealed in his full glory.  

I’m afraid my nasty historian’s mind starts asking a lot of questions here.   The date of the find sets all sorts of bells ringing in my mind.   The archaeology of very ancient times was a deeply political subject in the Third Reich.  Though Hitler himself wasn’t remotely interested in the distant Stone Age past (an Aryanised version of Classical Antiquity was what got him excited), others were.   Prehistoric archaeology was fought over by competing organisations, one ultimately under the aegis of Alfred Rosenberg (the Party theoretician, who had an ill-defined but at times important role in areas of cultural policy like archaeology) and the other affiliated to Himmler’s SS, the Ahnenerbe.   There wasn’t much ideological difference between Rosenberg and Himmler.  Both dabbled in Nordic neo-paganism and both nourished fantasies about lost Aryan golden ages in the far distant past when everything that mattered in civilisation was invented in the north by a pure master race- the disputes between them were almost entirely an issue of personalities.   Nevertheless the net result was that just about every serious academic archaeologist in Germany ended up affiliated to one or other network and reliant on them for funding and support.   I find it very hard to believe that the Hohlenstein dig wasn’t undertaken under the auspices of one of them- and that the outbreak of war may have done the Lion Man no end of a favour.   If he’d been found and identified a couple of years earlier there’s no doubt at all in my mind that he’d have been hugely instrumentalised as living evidence for the glories of the remote Aryan past.   Outside Germany I suspect he’d have been dismissed as a crude fake cooked up to fit a political agenda and post war would have become so tainted by Nazi associations that no “serious” archaeologist would have risked their career by challenging that interpretation.

I’m glad the Lion Man didn’t suffer that fate.   One can still feel the power he gives off even 40,000 years on and this is one case where I don’t have any difficulty at all in accepting that he must have been part of some religious belief system.   It’s intriguing to find that he isn’t self-standing- he’d have had to be propped up against something or have his feet planted in a soft surface in order to stand tall.  This implies, perhaps, that he moved round with his people, a guide and protector to them.  Perhaps his spirit kept an eye on the British Museum exhibition too……