Paul G. Bahn

In this paper, we examine the lunar calendar interpretation to evaluate whether it is a viable explanation for the production of Upper Palaeolithic parietal art. We consider in detail the history of this approach, focusing on recently published variations on this interpretation. We then discuss the scientific method and whether these recent studies...

p> “It’s tempting to think that we can learn little from people who ate and drank, laughed and cried, between 40 and 12,000 years ago, but I think we should – because these remarkable people not only lived but survived through a period of unimaginable change on our planet.” – from the foreword by Chris Packham Living in the Ice Age takes you on a...

p>The decorated Ice Age caves are some of mankind’s greatest artistic achievements, and there is no substitute for seeing the caves themselves. There you can see the art – paintings, engravings, bas-reliefs, or drawings – in its original, natural setting, and stand where the artists did 30,000–10,000 years ago. For speleologists and holidaymakers...

Este artículo presenta una breve panorámica de las evidencias -tanto en imágenes como en restos arqueológicos- de la explotación de mamíferos marinos y peces durante la última Edad de Hielo en Europa Occidental.

RESUMEN: En los últimos años han proliferado intentos de reexaminar la vida de las mujeres durante el último periodo glacial. Durante demasiado tiempo, la visión del "hombre cazador" y la mujer como "recolectora, cocinera y niñera" ha sido una hipótesis indiscutida y, sin duda, esta imagen simplista de las prácticas de división del trabajo entre lo...

Una gran estatuilla de marfil de mamut, el llamado "Hombre León" de Hohlenstein-Stadel, se ha convertido en una de las imágenes más famosas de la última Edad de Hielo, y se considera especialmente significativa porque representa una combinación de cabeza de felino y cuerpo humano, y algunos investigadores la consideran la primera representación rel...

In recent decades there have been a number of endeavours to re-examine women’s lives during the last Ice Age. For far too long, the view of ‘man-the-hunter’ and woman as ‘gatherer, cook and child minder’ was an unchallenged hypothesis, and without doubt, this simplistic view of early hunter-gatherer’s division-of-labour practices was ripe for revis...

The authors examine the arguments and validity of the conclusions of a recent statistical study of the chronology of human activity in Chauvet Cave. At first sight the study seems to present a considerable advance in the understanding of the cave's art, and, in particular, a validation of the arguments for an early (presumed Aurignacian) age for it...

The decorated cave of Coliboaia in Romania has been claimed to date to the Aurignacian period, and to supply support for the Aurignacian attribution of France's Chauvet cave. In this paper, we examine the evidence and show that neither the radiocarbon dates obtained at Coliboaia nor the style and content of its cave art correspond to the Aurignacia...

Courtney Nimura . Prehistoric rock art in Scandinavia. 2015. xii+141 pages, numerous colour and b&w illustrations. Oxford & Havertown (PA): Oxbow; 978-1-78570-119-1 paperback £25. - Volume 91 Issue 356 - Paul G. Bahn

The corpus of Easter Island rock art, comprising several thousand designs (Lee 1992: 4), is one of the most impressive in Oceania. A wide array of motifs were executed on a large variety of carving surfaces - cave entrances and ceilings, house entrances, the inner side of paenga slabs delimiting houses, stones in the vicinity of water sources, moai...

The article deals with the history of the discovery and recognition of Paleolithic "cave art outside the caves". Not all open-air rock images claimed to be Paleolithic, e.g. in Siberia, can be attributed to the Ice Age. Nonetheless, many of the petroglyphs discovered in Western Europe, beginning in the 1990s, have been recognized as Paleolithic by...

Hunting for clues in the Palaeolithic - Sidéra Isabelle with Vila Emmanuelle & Erikson Phillippe (ed.) La chasse: pratiques sociales et symboliques (Colloques de la Maison René-Ginouvès). xiv+266 pages, 87 illustrations. 2006. Paris: De Boccard; 2-7018-0192-3 paperback. de Beaune Sophie A. (ed.) Chasseurs-cueilleurs: Comment vivaient nos ancêtres d...

Floss Harald & Rouquerol Nathalie (ed.). Les chemins de l'art aurignacien en Europe/Das Aurignacien und die Anfänge der Kunst in Europa: Colloque international/Internationale Fachtagung, Aurignac 16-18 septembre 2005. 476 pages, numerous colour & b&w illustrations, 7 tables. 2007. Aurignac: Musée-forum d'Aurignac; 978-2-9527-444-2-3 hardback €59. -...

Michel Barbaza . Les Trois Bergers. Du conte perdu au mythe retrouvé. Pour une anthropologie de l’art rupestre saharien. 2015. 270 pages, 206 colour and b&w illustrations. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Midi; 978-2-8107-0335-7 hardback €35. - Volume 89 Issue 347 - Paul G. Bahn

Lorblanchet Michel . Lagrotte ornée de Pergouset (Saint Géry, Lot): un sanctuaire secret paléolithique (Documents d' Archéologie française 85). 192 pages, 157 figures, 7 tables. 2001. Paris: Maison des Sciences de l'homme; 2-7351-1802-3 (ISSN 0769-010X) paperback F200 & € 35.06. - Volume 75 Issue 289 - Paul G. Bahn

Ice Age art: arrival of the modern mind - Cook Jill . Ice Age art: arrival of the modern mind. 288 pages, numerous illustrations. 2013. London: British Museum Press; 978-0-7141-2333-2 hardback £ 25. - Volume 87 Issue 337 - Paul Bahn, Paul Pettitt

The pictograph discovered at Black Dragon Canyon, Utah, in the late 1920s, is a classic example of the Barrier Canyon style, dating probably to AD 1-1100. Creationists, however, have argued, from the incomplete preservation of the motifs, that it depicts a winged monster or pterosaur. A new study using portable X-ray fluorescence refutes this ill-f...

The author draws attention to Gustave Chauvet's belief, 90 years ago, in Magdalenian weaving on the basis of ethnography, interpretation of Palaeolithic tools and motifs in portable art of the period.

Human figures in portable art of the European Upper Palaeolithic - Volume 77 Issue 296 - Paul Bahn

The authors have discovered small oval panel of parallel lines in the famous Ligurian cave of Arene Candide, and show that it must be art of the Epigravettian period, c. 11-10 000bp (uncalibrated).

We are pleased to present here a preliminary account of the first discovery of Palaeolithic cave art in Britain. On 14 April 2003 we made the first discovery of Palaeolithic cave art in Britain. Since portable art of the period has long been known in this country (Sieveking 1972; Campbell 1977: vol. 2, figs 102, 105, 143), it has always seemed prob...

Oliva Martin (ed.). Sídliště mamutího lidu, u Milovic pod Pálavou: otázka strukturs mamutími kostmi/Milovice, site of the mammoth people below the Pavlov hills: the question of mammoth bone structures (Studies in Anthropology, Palaeoethnology and Quaternary Geology 27, ns 19). 338 pages, numerous illustrations & tables, 49 colour plates. 2009. Brno...

It is now 20 years since the discovery of the Grotte Chauvet with its impressive cave art, but controversy continues over the antiquity of the images. Radiocarbon assays have been used to argue that the ‘black series’ charcoal drawings date to the Aurignacian period, more than 20 000 years earlier than traditional stylistic models would suggest. Th...

New discoveries of cave art at Chauvet and elsewhere have produced radiocarbon dates which may seem startlingly early and demand dramatic revision to the traditional stylistic sequence. The authors warn that the radiocarbon dates may themselves need better validation.

Knut Helskog . Communicating with the world of beings. The World Heritage rock art sites in Alta, Arctic Norway. 240 pages, numerous colour and b&w illustrations. 2014 (first published in 2012 in Norwegian). Oxford & Philadelphia (PA): Oxbow; 978-1-78297-411-6 hardback £35. - Volume 89 Issue 343 - Paul G. Bahn

In recent years there has been a refreshing move away from simplistic interpretations of Palaeolithic art: few scholars still adhere to the view of ‘art for art's sake’ or ‘totemism’, although many are reluctant to abandon the formerly dominant theory of ‘hunting magic’. The approach of Laming-Emperaire (1962) and Leroi-Gourhan (1965) is undoubtedl...

Kuper Rudolph (ed.). Wadi Sura: the Cave of Beasts. A rock art site in the Gilf Kebir (SW-Egypt) (Africa Praehistorica 26). 542 pages, numerous colour illustrations, 2 foldouts. 2013. Cologne: Heinrich Barth Institut; 978-3-927688-40-7 hardback €85. - Volume 88 Issue 340 - Paul G. Bahn

At first sight it may seem a pointless exercise to produce a survey of late Pleistocene ‘artistic activity’ around the world, but there are two specific aims involved here: first, to show that human beings in different parts of the world were producing ‘art’ at roughly the same time, i.e. from about 40,000 BC onward, and particularly at the end of...

A series of undoubtedly Palaeolithic engraved figures have been recorded for the first time in the United Kingdom in Church Hole Cave, Creswell Crags. The first recorded images were thought initially to be two birds and a large ibex. This paper presents the preliminary results of the first systematic survey of the caves for engravings which identif...

The name ‘Azilian’ is firmly linked to that of Edward Piette, the principal excavator of the site on the left bank of the river Arize in the tunnel-cave of the Mas d'Azil (Ariège), in the French Pyrenees (see Bahn 1979). From 1887 onward this site yielded hundreds of painted and engraved pebbles (Piette 1896, 1903). Their decoration shows little va...

It is part of human nature to be interested in the past. The earliest known ‘archaeologist’ was Nabonidus, a 6th-century bc king of Babylon. The term itself was invented in the 17th century. ‘The origins and development of archaeology’ charts the history of the science and study of archaeology from its earliest origins through to the Roman Empire,...

For a long time, human progress has been seen largely in terms of the technology of the era, as can be seen in the way we divide the past into ‘ages’. Most of what constitutes archaeological records is made up of man-made objects. ‘Technology’ looks at the ‘Palaeolithic’ technology, or ‘Old Stone Age’, which encompasses over 99% of the archaeologic...

How do archaeologists pinpoint chronologies? Until recently there were two ways to do this: relative dating (placing objects, events etc in sequence) and historical dating (using written evidence). ‘Making a date’ examines the processes and methods of dating and looks at how these methods have changed. Until the late 20th century, the only dates av...

Archaeologists ask a lot of ‘why’ questions. The range of approaches available to present-day archaeologists is reflected in the diversity of contemporary archaeological theory. This diversity is a strength and will lead to new discoveries. ‘How and why did things change?’ looks at how archaeology's attempts at explaining changes in the past have v...

Since the 1970s, archaeologists (and anthropologists) have been faced with false accusations of racism, Eurocentrism, neocolonialism, grave-robbing, and male chauvinism. The archaeologist's right to dig was being questioned. The increased political power of native populations over the last few decades has led to their questioning the misdeeds carri...

This article discusses the archaeology of religion and ritual in the Upper Paleolithic, covering burials, portable art, cave art, and cave activities. It argues that one can rarely be sure that any aspect of the material culture of the Upper Palaeolithic is linked to religion or ritual. It is inaccessibility of different kinds which seems to be the...

New discoveries of Paleolithic rock art in Italy: Caverna delle Arene Candide and Grotta Romanelli - A research project was started on Paleolithic parietal art in Italy, where little new work had been done since that of Paolo Graziosi. At Caverna delle Arene Candide (Liguria), small oval panels of parallel lines, enclosed within natural fissures, w...

A scenario blaming rats for the devastation of Easter Island doesn't account for recent results, argues Paul Bahn.

http://www.antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/kaagan330/

Prehistoric rock art is the markings – paintings, engravings, or pecked images – left on rocks or cave walls by ancient peoples. In this book, Paul G. Bahn provides a richly illustrated overview of prehistoric rock art and cave art from around the world. Summarizing the recent advances in our understanding of this extraordinary visual record, he di...

. The legality of the archaeological investigation of ancient burials is currently receiving much attention in many parts of the world, and some areas it has become a politically sensitive issue; but the ethics involved in any archaeological disturbance of the dead rarely attract much discussion. This paper attempts to open the debate as to whether...

In the first of this paper's two sections, Pyrenean evidence for contact between sites and with other regions is presented for each period of the Upper Palaeolithic. the examples include lithic, marine and artistic evidence. the results, presented in schematic maps, demonstrate the basic patterns of contact, and underline the role of the two ‘super...

In a recent paper, one of us (Bahn 1984) made a preliminary sketch of the main issues involved in the question of whether archaeologists have the right to disturb the dead. Since then, a number of important new case studies have featured prominently in the media, and more literature on the subject has started to appear—most notably a collection of...

On 14 April 2003, we made the first discovery of Palaeolithic cave art in Britain. Since portable art of the period had long been known in this country (Sieveking 1972; Campbell 1977: vol. 2, figs. 102, 105, 143), it had always seemed probable that parietal art must also have existed. It was fairly obvious that paintings were unlikely to be discove...

Cave art is a subject of perennial interest among archaeologists. Until recently it was assumed that it was largely restricted to southern France and northern Iberia, although in recent years new discoveries have demonstrated that it originally had a much wider distribution. The discovery in 2003 of the UK's first examples of cave art, in two caves...