[Archport] The Nature of Palaeolithic Art

["Fernando Augusto Coimbra" <coimbra.fernando2000@hotmail.com>]

Caros (as) archportianos (as)

 

 

The Nature of Palaeolithic Art (2006) é o título de um livro da autoria do paleobiólogo norte-americano Russel Dale Guthrie. Não tive ainda oportunidade de o ler, mas uma entrevista ao autor publicada na revista Super Interessante, nº 111 deixa transparecer declarações que são no mínimo muito discutíveis. Guthrie que é apresentado como "um dos maiores especialistas de arte rupestre" (na realidade não é, mas isso é falta de informação do jornalista), apresenta ideias extremamente generalistas sobre a arte rupestre paleolítica, para além de ignorar completamente a noção de contexto arqueológico, entre outros erros de carácter metodológico relativamente ao tema estudado. 

 

Mas o melhor, para quem tiver interesse, é ver a magistral crítica ao referido livro efectuada pelo Prof. Randall White, que transcrevo do site American Scientist e "colo" após a presente mensagem.

 

Numa época em que a ignorância, o erro, a falta de rigor e a mediocridade têm sido "alimentados" pelos Media (e não só) é da obrigação de todos denunciar publicações na área da arqueologia que "atropelem" alguns dos conceitos mais básicos desta disciplina. 

 

 

 

Boa tarde a todos,

 

 

Fernando Augusto Coimbra

 

Doutor em Pré-história e Arqueologia (Universidade de Salamanca).

 

Membro Permanente do Comité Científico do Centro Helénico de Arte Rupestre (Philippi, Grécia).

 

 

 

Segue-se a crítica: 

 

Looking for Biological Meaning in Cave Art

Randall White

The Nature of Paleolithic Art. R. Dale Guthrie. xii + 507 pp. University of Chicago Press, 2005. $45.

I suppose it had to happen that someone would eventually write a book that took Paleolithic imagery to be "an immensely valuable archive for natural history." As theoretically questionable as this approach is, at least the culprit?R. Dale Guthrie, an emeritus professor of arctic biology at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks?is someone who knows his animals, both anatomically and ethologically. This fact is the saving grace of his book, The Nature of Paleolithic Art, which provides plenty of small gems of interpretation of animal behaviors and postures, some of them missed by previous generations of researchers.

If Guthrie had simply sought to expose nature in (and not the nature of) Paleolithic imagery, the book could have opened up some new windows and shed light on some old questions. Instead, however, he reacts with great energy against "the persistent sense that the really important questions to ask are connected with uncovering or detecting the meaning of images." According to him, "the traditional approach" has (mistakenly) sought clues to the "symbolism and ritual meaning hidden in the images." Researchers shouldn't be digging so hard for hidden significance, he insists, because "the art seems more focused on complicated earth-bound subjects, diverse everyday interests and wonders."

Archaeologists have long recognized that simply identifying the animals and animal behavior that are depicted on cave walls or objects is merely a point of departure for asking and answering more profound questions about ancient human culture. For example, these days no specialist in prehistoric art seriously believes, as Guthrie apparently does, that the problem of the meaning and motivation behind the painted ceiling of Altamira Cave (which dates to about 12,000 years ago) is resolved by identifying the species represented and their species-specific postures.

In some ways, this book returns us to an earlier era, when pioneers of the field argued that Paleolithic art was primarily a hunter's art. Abbé Henri Breuil (1877-1961), in particular, provided renderings of cave art that ignored most of the associated markings except those that resembled wounds, weapons or traps. In modern research, it is these long-ignored signs and markings that often provide insight into context and meaning. The hand silhouettes made about 27,000 years ago at Cosquer Cave (which is now partially submerged in the Mediterranean near Marseilles) are interesting?physiologically?as hands, and even as indicators of sex, age and handedness; but their symbolic significance is unmistakable when one recognizes that they were systematically overmarked and defaced by later Paleolithic painters. Hands, like animals, are the raw material of culturally embedded systems of meaning.

Today's researchers have consistently demonstrated that the animals most often represented in Paleolithic caves are among the ones least frequently consumed as food. The people who lived under the ceiling and in the cave entry at Altamira ate almost no bison, dining primarily on the meat of red deer (Cervus elaphus). Likewise, at Lascaux images of horses, bovids and red deer dominate, whereas reindeer, the primary dietary item in the food debris, aren't depicted at all.

In looking for answers to such questions as Why bison at Altamira? Why horses at Lascaux? and Why mammoths at Rouffignac?, researchers are propelled immediately into more profound matters of cosmology, belief and the relation of culture-bearing humans to the living world of which they are a part and to the mysterious world of the underground. As anthropologist Marshall Sahlins demonstrated 30 years ago in Culture and Practical Reason, the way we think about and represent animals speaks to questions that go far beyond their acquisition for food. This is as true of modern game hunters and traditional Inuit as it was of Paleolithic peoples.

Of course, the problem is how to explain why any of this animal world was graphically depicted, why our ancestors would have chosen to create images hundreds or even thousands of meters back from the cave entrances, why various subjects were arranged the way they were underground, why they are associated with particular acoustic qualities of caves, why some caves are chosen over others, why pictures engraved on portable objects are different from those on cave walls, and so on.

It is not clear whether Guthrie viewed all of the original images and objects that he sketched, but I got the impression that foreign-language sources were mined for drawable images without due attention to the analyses in the accompanying text, which are sometimes identical to Guthrie's. He has redrawn all images in his own style without providing cultural attribution, without directing the reader to the original and without noting in the legend the actual size of the Paleolithic representation. He ignores context to such an extent that he does not inform the reader whether a given sketch he has made represents an engraving, a three-dimensional sculpture, a cave painting or a bas-relief.

Decontextualization permits Guthrie to pretend that Paleolithic representations ranging in length from one centimeter to more than five meters were, over a span of 30,000 years, stable, unchanging and unmodified by cultural changes, and that portable images from sites where people lived are the equivalent of paintings made deep in caves. Surely the fact that Gravettian female figurines (dating to between 28,000 and 22,000 years ago) are often buried in ritualized pits trumps their interpretation as universal examples of sexual presentation behavior. Guthrie's natural-history approach to women has been little softened by criticism of his 1984 paper "Ethological Observations from Paleolithic Art," in which he likened female figurines to the images in Playboy. Of course, that comparison underestimates the cultural context of both the figurines and the Playboy photographs.

The study of Paleolithic art has struggled over the years to become the rigorous and meticulous field that it is today. There is considerable food for thought and ecological insight in Guthrie's approach, and for that reason alone I am happy to have this book on my shelf. Unfortunately, its extreme ecological determinism, its lack of cultural and contextual sensibility and its failure to include images faithful to the original works make for a flawed enterprise.

 

Reviewer Information

Randall White is a professor in the Center for the Study of Human Origins in the Department of Anthropology at New York University. A specialist in Paleolithic art and ornamentation, he is the author of several books, including Prehistoric Art: The Symbolic Journey of Humankind (Harry N. Abrams, 2003).

    

        

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