Variation in Early Paintings and Engravings

Abstract

Among western European cave paintings and engravings, variation occurs in the themes and the relationships among them, and in the positioning of images in sites. In western Europe, the associations of the paintings and engravings changed through time and varied through space, such that the spatial configuration at any time also varied. Further variation occurred in the importance of paintings and engravings in different regions, here represented by the contrast between western Europe and the east Mediterranean. These contrasts between regions reflect the emergence of different ideologies which had far-reaching effects on the historical trajectory of peoples in each region. As a result of the history of archaeological research, it is sometimes difficult to escape the impression that the earliest paintings and engravings were made in the Upper Paleolithic caves of western Europe and that this expression of creativity was typical of what should be expected in the rest of the world. Much recent work has established that there are paintings and engravings that are probably contemporary with those in European caves at least in South Africa (Figure 4.1; consider the implications of the recent dating estimates for the art from Apollo 11: Wendt 1976; Miller et al. 1999) and in Australia (e.g., Veth et al. 2011). Moreover, both within Australia and between these three regions, there is substantial variation. Although it is now commonplace to suggest that the production of paintings and engravings is universal, there is some reason to suppose that it has not always been so, with different earliest dates in different regions, and then with considerable differences between regions in what was produced. In addition, there were probably differences between the roles of paintings and engravings in the historical trajectories of behavioral variation. In this chapter, I want to highlight some of the variations within the Upper Paleolithic of western Europe, and contrast the abundant evidence there with the scarcity of evidence over the same time period in the east Mediterranean region (Figure 4.2).