Chapter 1 Annotations

Pre-historic Art

Pages 1 - 4

● Prehistory includes all of human existence before the emergence of writing

● For art historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists prehistoric art provides clues to

understanding early humans life and culture.

● The cognitive capability to create and recognize symbols and imagery that sets us as

modern humans apart from all of our predecessors and from all of our contemporary

animal relatives.

● We are defined as a species by our abilities to make and understand art

● Tools were made before art

● Neanderthals evolutioned to be able to think symbolically, to create representational

analogies and remember them. This development marks the evolutionary origin of art.

● The world’s earliest pieces of art come from South Africa

● Architecture: enclosure of spaces with at least some aesthetic intent- building a shelter is

considered architecture, because it requires a degree of imagination and planning.

Page 6

● Our ideas of art can be affected by their names.

● Our ability to understand and interpret works of art creativity is easy compromised by

distracting labels

● Names encourage you to think about the artifact in different perspectives

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 ● Art in Europe entered a rich and sophisticated phase after 30,000 BCE

● No one knew of the existence of prehistoric cave paintings until 1879- they were

accepted as authentic until 1902

● Art has a social function and aesthetics are culturally relative

● The best known cave paintings are those found in 1940 at Lascaux, Southe France

● The cave paintings at Altamira, near Snatander, where the first to be discovered and

attributed to the Upper Paelolithic period.

● Caves were sometimes adorned with relief sculpture as well as paintings.

● Other reliefs were created by modeling or shaping, the damp clay of the caves floor

● An aesthetic sense and the ability to express it in a variety of ways are among the

characteristics of homo sapiens sapiens.

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● Style of architecture defines the times when they were built

● Skilled “engineers” devised methods for shaping, transporting, and aligning stones.

● Many megalithic structures relate to death, the role of death and burial are fundamental

● Death and its rituals are viewed as theater

● Stonehenge is not the largest such circle from the Neolithic period

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● By 4000 BCE Egyptians developed the potter's wheel, it appeared in the ancient Near

East about 3250 BCE and China about 3000 BCE

● Introduction of bronze changed the european people's lives in fundamental ways

● Trade increased because of bronze

● Representational and abstract art had symbolic importance for prehistoric people
● Art and architecture connected the worlds of the living and of the spirits

● The art was made for fundamental elements of our development as humans.