Prehistoric art

“ It is curious, indeed, and noteworthy, to find how entirely every trace of imitative art is absent in the British Archaic relics, for it is by no means an invariable characteristic of the primitive arts of Allophylian nations. ”

“ He may even indulge the fancy that in the large, unshapely flint implements recovered from ossiferous caves and alluvial deposits, alongside of remains of the extinct fauna of a palæolithic period so dissimilar to any historical era, he has traced his way back to the first crude efforts of human art, if not to the evolutionary dawn of a semi-rational artificer. It is a significant fact that no such clumsy unshapeliness characterises the stone implements of the most degraded savage races. ”

“ The stage in European history we are thus called upon to inspect is known by the name Neolithic Age, so-called because a new and improved mechanical principle then came into general use, viz. the art of polishing stone implements by rubbing them with some hard material, so as to give them a sharper cutting edge than was possible by the old process of chipping. How far we have travelled in time to reach this phase of culture we cannot say in so many years, or centuries, or even millenniums. ”

“ Their works, found in great abundance in the graves, especially of the Bronze and Iron periods, but a detailed account of which belongs to the province of archaeology, interest us in many ways. The painted earthenware vases and incised metal-ware of all kinds enable the student to follow the progress of the arts of design and ornamentation in their upward development from the first tentative efforts of the prehistoric artist at pleasing effects. Human and animal figures, though rarely depicted, occasionally afford a curious insight into the customs and fashions of the times. ”

“ Some antiquaries, indeed, have been inclined to class those, as well as so many other evidences of native skill, either among the direct products of Roman art, or as the fruits of the civilizing influence resulting from intercourse with the Roman colonists; but if previous evidences of the priority of the early native eras are of the slightest value, the circumstances under which many jet and shale ornaments and relics have been found leave no room to doubt that they are the products of unaided native ingenuity and mechanical skill. ”

“ It is with tender memories of a dearly valued friend that I render the response, that such sculptured cups do exist upon the stones and rocks of America, and amply justify the reference of those of the Old World to Europe’s neolithic age, when the men of its polished Stone Period were grinding and working into perfected form the most prized relics of their laborious art. ”

“ They all belong to one phase of art which appears to have been practised for a long time. Although there are indications that the dawn of painting dates as far back as the Aurignacien Age, there can be no doubt that polychrome painting was the last phase in the evolution of Palæolithic art. ”

“ The sensational discoveries at Crete provide a wholly new standpoint whence to survey prehistoric civilisation, and they place the evolution of human art and appliances in the last Quaternary Period on a higher level than had ever previously been suspected. ”

“ In each, prehistoric man made some rude advance toward better tools and weapons. He even progressed in art to the extent of painting on cave walls. Then the ice came down again, and for thousands of years man lost nearly all the gain he had made. ”

“ There is much, however, in the art of living tribes, especially of those least influenced by the whites, capable of throwing light upon the obscure passages of precolumbian art. By supplementing the study of the prehistoric by that of historic art, which is still in many cases in its incipient stages, we may hope to penetrate deeply into the secrets of the past. ”

“ The group of phenomena with which it attempts to grapple occupies a sort of neutral territory or borderland between geology and history proper, from both of which, however, it receives large nutrient offshoots. The essential element which characterises the science of prehistoric archæology is an inductive process which depends on the clearness and precision with which the most primitive remains of human art and industries can be identified. ”

“ They were skilled in the ceramic art, and in the manufacture of cloth by spinning and weaving wool and fibrous textures. In hunting the forest fauna they used, in addition to spears, lances and daggers, the bow and arrow. They built houses both for the dead and the living—thus showing that religion had become a governing principle in their social economy. But of the artistic taste of their Palæolithic predecessors they possessed not a vestige, and whatever they did by way of ornament consisted of a few incised scratches arranged in simple geometrical patterns. ”

“ These layers enclose, in addition to human bones, a large fauna, and particularly a considerable quantity of carved bones and stones. Nowhere else has so great an accumulation of prehistoric works of art been found. ”

“ Both were discovered upwards of a century before the idea of man’s contemporaneous existence with the mammals of the drift had been mooted; but if such specimens of his art are to be made the sole test of human capacity in that primeval era, they might justify the idea of some lower type even than the wretched Patagonian or Australian. But contemporary cave deposits check our conclusions from such partial evidence; and suggest that in those rudest specimens of palæolithic art we have only the most indestructible relics of an epoch by no means destitute of inventive ingenuity or artistic skill. ”

“ The relations of our historic tribes to the ancient peoples of our continent and to all of the nations, ancient and modern, who built mounds and earthworks, are now generally considered so intimate that no objection can be raised to the utilization of the accounts of early explorers in the elucidation of such features of the art as archeology has failed to record. The first step in this study may consist quite properly of a review of what is recorded of the historic art. ”

“ The first notice in an English scientific journal of the fossil mammals of the American drift furnishes such a counterpart to the Shawnee traditions of extinct giants as might teach a lesson to modern speculators in science; when it is borne in remembrance that the difficulty now is to reconcile with preconceived beliefs the discovery of works of human art alongside of their remains. ”

“ In western Europe, at least, the period saw the beginning of several kinds of art work. It is handy to break the art down into two great groups: the movable art, and the cave paintings and sculpture. The movable art group includes the scratchings, engravings, and modeling which decorate tools and weapons. Knives, stroppers, spear-throwers, harpoons, and sometimes just plain fragments of bone or antler are often carved. ”

“ Within the enclosures thus laboriously executed, many of the most interesting relics of ancient art have been dug up, including several coiled serpents of carved stone, carefully enveloped in sheet mica and copper; pottery, fragments of carved ivory, discoidal stones, and numerous fine sculptures.
It is obvious that the population capable of furnishing the requisite labour for works of so extensive a nature must have been numerous, and its resources for the maintenance of such a phalanx of workers proportionally abundant. ”

“ Man is also represented by about a dozen incomplete designs, badly drawn, grotesque in character, and altogether inferior in execution to the animal figures. But this peculiarity need not cause surprise, as it is a feature of Palæolithic art, in general; for no human representation hitherto known of this kind, whether engraved or painted, goes beyond the artistic efforts of children. ”

“ But crude as are the arts of that primeval age, it will be seen that they compare favourably with those of uncultured man at any later period. Recent explorations, and especially those of the Dordogne caves of Central France, disclose carvings in bone, and engravings on ivory and slate, hereafter referred to, revealing an imitative skill, and powers of observation in the delineation of characteristic details of form and action, such as have rarely, if ever, been equalled in the art of modern uncultured races. ”

“ The last-named are relics that imply a very considerable degree of art; and if believed to be the work of the people with whose remains they are found, would tend greatly to increase the wonder that the art of sculpture among them was not manifested in other objects and places. The fact that nearly all the finer specimens of workmanship represent birds, or land and marine animals belonging to a different latitude ”

“ Alike in the ivory and bone carvings of the modern Esquimaux, and in the rare but invaluable evidences of primitive art furnished by those of the ancient Cave-Folk of the Dordogne and other oldest human dwellings, it is seen how favourable such easily wrought material was to the development of a mechanical skill and artistic ingenuity such as must have lain dormant had the primitive artificers been wholly limited to flint and stone. ”

“ Others are observed in other countries, and it is probable that if we could lift the veil and peer into the far prehistoric stages of the world's greatest cultures the same condition and order would be revealed. ”

“ Those with the remains of the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros and other extinct species, or with paleolithic man (see Archaeology) , are termed Pleistocene. These are sometimes called Quaternary, under the mistaken idea that they belong to an age succeeding the Tertiary period. (3) Those which contain the remains of the domestic animals in association with the remains of man either in the Neolithic, Bronze or Iron stages of civilization are termed Prehistoric. ”

“ DURING the unlettered youth of the race there were no written records from which the antiquity of man can be read. So the anthropologist on the one hand, and the geologist on the other, have sought to construct an early human history from prehistoric relics, and from the formations in which they are imbedded or the fossils with which they are associated. ”

“ The investigations carried on in mounds and caves and tombs and lake-dwellings, the collection of early stone and bronze implements, and of human skulls and bones found along with those of other animals, have thrown a great deal of new light upon primitive man, his way of life, and his migrations from one region to another. As history proper has been carried back many centuries beyond its former limit, so has our knowledge of prehistoric times been extended centuries above the furthest point to which history can now reach back. ”

“ They lead us only into a new zone of imaginative work, and we are bidden to weave fabrics of design which carry on them the pictures of a lost past, when strange creatures, long extinct, were known to men, themselves extinct, when a strange epoch was placing its landmarks over a world, upon which the dawn of Mind had opened, when the Prehistoric somehow extricated from an inheritance of claws and hair and carnivorous ferocity, felt the mystery of the earth, looked with question upon the unrolled skies, and began the long drama of human love and hate. ”

“ Our historical horizon has been pushed back very considerably, and every year adds new knowledge concerning the Palæolithic and Neolithic races, and the first users of bronze and iron tools and weapons. We have learnt to prize what they have left, to recognize the immense archæological value of these remains, and of their inestimable prehistoric interest. ”

“ Our knowledge of prehistoric man is based naturally upon the study of certain parts of the human skeleton preserved in a fossil state. In addition to these materials, other evidence is available in the form of certain products of human industry. These include such objects as implements of various kinds, owing their preservation to the almost indestructible nature of their material, or again artistic representations, whether pictorial or glyptic. ”

“ The evidence of man's antiquity revealed by his discoveries consisted of flint implements and remains of human skeletons, associated with bones of the hyæna, cave-bear, cave-lion, rhinoceros, mammoth and reindeer. ”

“ Nevertheless some of the elements already referred to tend to mark with a character of their own the investigations alike of the archæologist and the geologist into the earliest traces of human art in what we have learned habitually to speak of as a New World. In Europe the antiquary, familiar already with ancient historic remains, had passed by a natural transition to the study of ruder examples of primitive art in stone and bronze, as well as to the physical characteristics of races which appeared to have preceeded the earliest historic nations. ”

“ In the modern alliance between archæology and geology, and the novel views which have resulted as to the antiquity of man, the characteristic disclosures of primitive art, alike among ancient and modern races, have given a significance to familiar phases of savage life undreamt of till very recently. ”

“ And, except possibly a flint axe-head or a rude ornament found deep in some ancient gravel-bed, these megalithic monuments are amongst the most convincing evidence we have of the wide diffusion of the human race in prehistoric times. ”

“ I could show, if this were a fitting place, that Archaeology is not at all divorced from life, nor even devoid of emotion as subtle and strange, as swift and moving, as that experienced by those who love and follow Art. She, Archaeology, is, for those who know her, full of such emotion; garbed in an imperishable glamour, she is raised far above the turmoil of the present on the wings of Imagination. ”