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Art in the Making: Recent Developments in the Study of Pleistocene and Holocene Images

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Abstract

This introduction to the special issue of the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory devoted to Pleistocene and Holocene arts seeks to examine a number of recent developments in the study of deep-time images. We argue that, in a context marked by new technological advances, the study of what was traditionally known as ‘prehistoric art’ has been transformed into a dynamic area of research marked by four main interrelated processes: (A) the inclusion of new corpuses of images beyond traditional conceptualizations of ‘prehistoric’ art, (B) the shift from a ‘contemplative model’ (which treated images and artefacts as ‘already made art’) to a ‘construction model’ that focuses on the processes involved in the making of artwork, (C) the transition from a Eurocentric model to a worldwide paradigm, and (D) the increasing incorporation of Holocene and Indigenous arts into general discussions about ‘prehistoric’ arts.

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Notes

  1. We use the term ‘prehistoric art’ in quotations to indicate its problematic nature. While the term has a long tradition in archaeology, many Indigenous groups from Australia, America and Africa have rightly pointed out that it is grounded in ethnocentric thinking. For instance, in places like Australia, most scholars stopped using the phrase ‘prehistoric’ in the 1980s as Aboriginal people objected to the colonial assumption that this implied that there was no history in Australia before white records.

  2. This idea is compatible with the notion that ‘art’ is not so much a cultural category as a cognitive capacity for symbolic communication and, therefore, a key component in the origins of modern humans and modern cognition. This conceptualization is at the core of a number of ecological, cognitive and evolutionary models (e.g. Mithen 1998, McBrearty & Brooks 2000, Mellars et al. 2007, de Beaune et al. 2009, Renfrew & Morley 2007, 2009). From this perspective, the question at stake is to determine whether ‘art’ is a faculty that is exclusive to anatomically modern humans. Discussions on Neandertals’ ‘personal ornaments’ (e.g. d’Errico et al. 1998, d’Errico 2003, Mellars 2010, Villa & Roebroeks 2014, Radovčić et al. 2015) and cave art (e.g. Hoffmann et al. 2018; Pearce & Bonneau 2018; Slimak et al. 2018, Aubert et al. 2018a; White et al. 2020) can illustrate this point.

  3. It is important to note that the notion of ‘personal ornament’ is problematic itself. In our society in which the individual is central they can certainly be associated with a notion of ‘personhood’ but we can simply not assume this is other contexts (Moro Abadía & Nowell 2015)

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Richard Bradley, Margaret Conkey, Susan Lowish, Jo McDonald, Martin Porr, John Robb, Guillaume Robin and Paul Taçon for reading and commenting previous drafts of this introduction. Any mistakes remain, of course, our own. We would like to thank Charmaine Hilferty, Margaret Beck and, especially, Valentine Roux for their enthusiastic and continuous support with this project. We would also like to thank the contributors for sharing their outstanding research. Finally, our gratitude goes to more than fifty anonymous reviewers who, with their exceptional work, have made possible the publication of this collection.

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  1. Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Canada

    Oscar Moro Abadía

  2. IIIPC Universidad de Cantabria, Santander, Spain

    Manuel R. González Morales

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Moro Abadía, O., González Morales, M.R. Art in the Making: Recent Developments in the Study of Pleistocene and Holocene Images. J Archaeol Method Theory 27, 439–453 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-020-09479-2

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