Prehistoric Graffiti?
By: Remy Dean
Tags: Prehistoric, Art History, Caves, History, Art

In both caves, the drawings overlap and are painted on the walls without any defined boundaries. At Lascaux, the pigment is perhaps stronger and the style a little more stylised. The forms are more ‘coloured-in’, yet the style remains fundamentally the same, almost as if done by one artist. However, this style of drawing spans a period of around 5,000 years, so it has actually been executed by many, many generations of artists.

So what can this tell us? This indicates that the cave art, though obviously executed with an aesthetic sense, is formulated in a similar way as a hieroglyphic language. Although the earlier cave paintings of beasts were obviously observed ‘from life’, eventually an accepted prescribed way to draw each of them developed. So, this is not ‘expressive’ art, it is more like a type of picture writing and follows a set of patterns that became meaningful to the culture that produced them.

This propensity to follow set-out methods and perpetuate a ‘template’ approach to visual art, seems to become ingrained in the human psyche and continues through countless generations until challenged by the Pharaoh Akhenaton… about another 15,000 years later (as the chronometer flies).

As with the earliest known carvings of the human form, the so-called ‘Three Venuses’, we don’t know for sure the reasons why those prehistoric people painted on their cave walls. There has been a lot of educated guesswork, sometimes supported by archaeological evidence. It could have been the graffiti of their time, or the equivalent of clip art… We have three main theories to consider:

Theory one: documentary…

One recurring motif in prehistoric cave art is the row of similar-though-slightly-different animals, very much like a type of identification chart. So perhaps one of the functions of the drawings was to document the different species of animals for instruction and education. “Hunt these, run away from those.” Perhaps it was simply a record of what they saw and how they lived. It certainly shows how important animals were to them.

Theory two: storytelling…

The images are painted onto the cave walls in a seemingly random order and some of them are in very dark recesses, and would only ever have been visible by firelight. This implies that the act of going to see them, or having them revealed, was meaningful in some way. Many of the beasts that are portrayed wouldn’t have been food animals, and some may have been seen only during their seasonal migrations. Perhaps the images were used as backdrops that set the scene in terms of seasons and the images were revealed in some sort of narrative order. The stories could have served to entertain, to educate, or both.

Theory three: magic…

In some caves, there are figures that combine human and animal attributes. Some human figures, on closer inspection, have hooves instead of feet. A stag rearing up on its hind legs, on closer inspection, is a human imitating the beast by wearing animal furs and horned headdress. This leads many to believe that the paintings of animals have some symbolic, if not magical significance.

One possible motivation is the practice of sympathetic magic, which is a form of superstition that leads to a belief that a representation of a thing can have an effect upon the real thing. (A current example would be a voodoo doll.) The people may have painted the animals in an attempt to exert some sort of influence over them. A possible scenario would be that the animals are seen, but then disappear. The cave dwellers paint pictures of those animals, and they re-appear. This may lead to a belief that the act of painting the animals caused them to come back. This then becomes self-fulfilling, “If you paint them, they will come.”

We, of course, would understand that the herds migrated away and then passed back through the area as the seasons changed… They would have (almost certainly) returned whether their effigies had been painted onto the cave walls or not. This seasonal theory seems to be supported by patterns of dots associated with some of the paintings, now identified as the earliest star charts, showing recognisable constellations.