Archaeological science, like all science, is a function of the past and present. Past ideas and present concerns. Since the 1950’s it has undergone numerous shifts in perspective, veering from skepticism to active politicisation. I want to examine archaeology today with two values in mind, the two I believe vie with one another for the throne of importance - Truth and Democracy. Truth feels somewhat of an obvious choice for an academic discipline - but democracy? - since when has this been the supreme value outside of politics? In a sense the two are connected, but we must first look to the past to understand why.

Impious Renaissance

Chancing upon physical objects which clearly belonged to an older era is one of the confusing pleasures of being a thinking ape, one which can mentally project some time and place which is not the current moment. Fossils, animal bones, stone tools, pottery sherds, even entire ruins or buildings, all have been found and used in some way. A common reaction is to leave these places alone, lest evil spirits or misfortunes attached to them become hostile - even today we feel glimmers of this sentiment with tropes like ‘the abandoned insane asylum’ or old burial ground at night. Nascent antiquarian stirrings began in the most developed old civilisations - the Sumerians, Egyptians, Chinese, Greek - all of which sought magico-religious power through manipulating old artefacts, or even resurrecting forgotten temples. Both the Chinese and the Greeks recognised a progression in change through the materials: older forms of pottery, bronze, iron, and so on. They also recognised cultural continuity. Later peoples would explain the existence of flint arrowheads and axes as the work of natural forces, thunderstones, or as proof of fairies, elves or other small beings.

It wasn’t until the Renaissance that we saw the genuine creation of a self-conscious concept of antiquity, which stands apart in all its glory as a separate and distinct epoch of human civilisation, one with continuity in the form of the Roman church, but also in law. Unearthing the pagan world changed the medieval world, the rediscovery of artworks, architecture, medicine, philosophy, military history, languages, poetry, literature… a searing vitality which coursed through Europe and altered its destiny. Antiquarianism nurtured a seed of disinterested scholarly research, overturning older approaches to written history. For example, when the Italian Renaissance humanist Polydore Vergil was invited by England’s Henry VII to write a history of his nation, Vergil began by demolishing all the chronicles - the Arthurian mythology, the imaginations of monks and the unverifiable royal pedigrees stemming from Athens and Egypt.

Men of antiquarian taste rushed to fill the historical gaps, supported by governmental initiatives to protect monuments and build collections of artefacts. 17th century Sweden, Denmark and England, amongst others, rebuilt their national stories through secular and progressively objective pursuits. With the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and European contact with non-literate peoples all over the world, antiquarianism had to move from a study of antiquity to the study of pre-history. Evolutionary thought provided a much clearer non-Biblical model for explaining the riddle of how some cultures were still using stone tools when European ships appeared on the horizon. Science was tied to progress, which was itself born of a vision of European Man, astride the globe, improving and driving it forwards. Archaeology was midwived into existence in response to the growing problem of ancient human remains and artefacts - stone tools in France, ancient skulls in Germany.

The early functions of archaeology

I would suggest that archaeology-proper in the 19th century had two main functions:

• To determine the age and chronology of mankind and its stages

• To understand the evolutionary forces which led to social and cultural change/progress

The development of a self-contained, systematic study of prehistory, as distinguished from the antiquarianism of earlier times, occurred as two distinct movements, the first of which began in the early nineteenth century and the second in the 1850s. The first originated in Scandinavia with the invention of a technique for distinguishing and dating archaeological finds that made possible the comprehensive study of prehistory. This development marked the beginning of prehistoric archaeology, which soon was able to take its place alongside classical and other text-based archaeologies as a significant component in the study of human development using material culture. The second wave, which began in France and England, pioneered the study of the Palaeolithic period and added vast, hitherto unimagined, time depth to human history.

-A History of Archaeological Thought (2006) Bruce Trigger

The concept of different ages was not new: Hesiod, Plato, Ovid, Virgil, Lucretius, Michele Mercati, Bernard de Montfaucon, Nicolas Mahudel and many others had developed models of the ‘ages of man’ - often linked to physical materials such as gold, bronze, iron, stone.

It took however, the diligence and hard work of a Danish scholar - Christian Jurgensen Thomsen (1788–1865) - to properly ground the three-stage model in reality. Thomsen was fortunate and canny enough to realise that Danish archaeologists had kept records of what artefacts were found on what site and what excavation/hoard/tomb. Knowing this he could carefully assemble a chronology of artefacts and demonstrate that they did indeed appear to process from stone to bronze to iron - a system we still teach children today. Thomsen’s work was made more difficult by the realisation that stone and bronze tools were still made during the iron age, so he patiently classified each type of object, noting when certain bronze tools appeared with iron ones, and which did not. His relative dating system was revolutionary.

Almost immediately the debate became a question of evolution vs introduction. Did these new technologies develop in Scandinavia, or were they brought there through waves of migration? The Scandinavians were unequivocal - change is a result of outside interference. This question has never been satisfactorily solved, and it likely never will. The evolutionist looks at the two forces of change - independent invention and diffusion - and adds migration, borrowing and parallel invention. Did two identical forms of kinship systems separated by oceans reflect a common ancestor or independent innovation? These were the types of arguments that have raged ever since.

Indeed, Lowie's highest accolades are reserved for Tylor's "serene willingness to weigh evidence" for and against diffusion in the following cases: Pan-European paleolithic tools; the piston bellows of Madagascar and Indonesia; North American and Old World pottery; the Old and New World bow and arrow; the Australian, African, and American theory that disease is caused by an intrusive stone or bone; the game of parcheesi as played in Mexico and India; and various myths found in both the Old and New Worlds.

-The Rise of Anthropological Theory (1968) Harris

Another question lurking in the background here was psychic unity. Did all of Mankind share the same mental and psychological substrate? If so, then we can expect to see convergences of objects, social organisation and motivations.

By co-operating with geologists and paleontologists, early archaeologists developed and built models of prehistory which came into sharp conflict with the orthodox Biblical timeframe. Deep time was unsettling and exciting, prompting serious questions about how Man had developed from a lowly rude stone-wielding savage into the contemporary European middle class (to flatter archaeology’s main audience of the day). These questions have never been resolved - dating stuff, understanding the linear sequence of events and explaining how and why things changed?

Race, Nationalism and Culture - archaeology’s next function

The Napoleonic era helped provoke a backlash against Enlightenment values. The rise of romanticism and ethnic nationalism followed from French ambitions to rule Europe, each small province in previously multiethnic and multilingual regions began clamouring for independence. Alongside this the scientific community began to pay credence to the idea that Mankind was not all the same. Religious teachings about the Fall and split of Man were steadily replaced with competing theories about whether the different races were different species, whether all men had sprung from the same stock, or whether God had designed some other system of origins. European contact with the entire world by the beginning of the 19th century meant that, for the first time, anthropologists and doctors were looking at the total diversity of humanity - from Inuit to Mapuche, Maori to Ainu, Khoisan to Amerindian - and struggling to make sense of it. Darwinism provided a perfect framework for overlaying previous ideas of cultural evolution with biological ones. Biology and culture went hand-in-hand, and culminated in European man - the ladder of civilisation also mirrored the development of the body.

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Some of the oldest pieces of circumsta…

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the body was central to the visual culture of ancient Greece, reflecting an obsession with physical beauty, integrity, dynamism, and power​

-Art, Desire, and the Body in Ancient Greece (1997) A. Stewart

One could argue that the Greeks invented the human body. A civilisational moment in the human story where the body becomes idealised, trained, refined, sculpted and moulded - reaching for the divine - as opposed to the attitudes typical of elsewhere such as casual nudeness for men and women of all ages, or a shameful seclusion of the body in clothes. Debates over whether Greek art represents something real or imaginary have raged since the time of the Romans, and it is hard to point to another style and period of art which has had more cultural impact.

Personally I think the Greeks were well aware that their statues did not represent most people, nor did they want them to. These images were a tightrope, between man and the gods, between the human form broken under the weight of the world and the human form embodying the values of youthful, violent, freedom.

Why the body? What did it look like?

It was not until Egypt that art broke its enslavement to nature…

In Egypt is forged the formalistic Apollonian line that will end in modern cinema, master genre of our century. Egypt invented glamour, beauty as power and power as beauty. Egyptian aristocrats were the first Beautiful People. Hierarchy and eroticism fused in Egypt, making a pagan unity the west has never thrown off…

This masculine hardness is an abolition of female interiority. There are no warm womb-spaces in aristocratic Egyptian art. The body is a shaft of frozen Apollonian will. The flatness of Egyptian wall-painting and relief serves the same function, obliterating woman’s inner darkness. Every angle of the body is crisp, clean, and sunlit. Sagging maternal breasts of the Willendorf kind usually appear, oddly enough, only on male fertility gods like Hapi, the Nile god. Egypt is the first to glamourize small breasts. The breast as vernal adornment rather than rubbery milk sac, outline rather than volume: Apollonian Egypt made the first shift of value from femaleness to femininity, an advanced erotic art form.

- Sexual Personae (1990) C. Paglia

Camille Paglia describes in the second chapter of her magnum opus Sexual Personae, how the ancient Egyptians gave birth to the ‘western eye’, which was an Apollonian fixation with lines, surfaces, symmetry and hardness. The earliest Greek artworks which depict the human form are clearly influenced by this style, in what art historian Ernst Gombrich describes as ‘a Great Awakening’ and ‘the Greek Revolution’. The freestanding kouroi statues (male youths) show us a vision of the young male form, part way idealised, part following the rules of Egyptian sculpture. Diamonds sweep outwards from the central omphalos, and the body is proportioned unnaturally, with large staring eyes. In the hands of the Greeks it takes several centuries for this to become more natural. Between the 7th and 5th centuries BC the kouroi are swallowed up by the Greek expressive imagination and become life-like, even moving towards an uneven posture with remarkable skill.

One striking feature that should be highlighted though, is that the kouroi were virtually always naked - unlike their Egyptian counterparts - which tells us that Greek priorities when depicting human bodies emphasised nudity from the outset.

The Greeks discovered in the nude two embodiments of energy, which lived on throughout European art almost until our own day. They are the athlete and the hero; and from the beginning they were closely connected with one another.

-The Nude : A Study of Ideal Art (1957) K. Clark

The Greeks felt so strongly about nudity that it was thought to have a magical effect (c.f. the apotropaic use of the phallos, gestures against the evil eye, etc.). Their athletes were thought to be protected in some way by their nudity.

-Etruscan Dress (1975) L. Bonfante

The origins of nudity amongst warriors and athletes is contested, even within Greek sources, and they include: Acanthus the Lacedaemonian, Orsippos of Megara and orders by the Athenian archon Hippomenes. One particular niche type of kouroi often found in eastern Greece were depicted with a draped khiton-like garment, around 40 examples exist, but these stand out as exceptions to the rule.

Another famously enigmatic motif within this period of artwork is the ‘Archaic smile’, that aloof, relaxed smile on the faces of all the kouroi. Many theories exist as to the meaning of this facial expression, one which serves to de-individualise each statue, including the notion that it was simply the easiest face to carve on stone at that time. I prefer Richard Neer’s explanation:

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This chapter advances the hypothesis that the Little People myths and leg ends were carried to various islands of the Indo-Pacific as an integral part of the voyagers’ cultural package in the process…

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“Putting human remains on display is unethical, especially when no consent has been given,” she added. “I think removing the display of these items ultimately changes the culture, goes some way to lo…

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-Hohlenstein-Stadel and the Evolution of Human Conceptual Thought (2009) Wynn et al

In the last piece I wrote about Palaeolithic artwork, we looked at the Chauvet cave ‘Panel of Horses’ - a remarkable study of horses painted onto a prepared surface in a limestone cave around 30,000 years ago. The panel is striking for its naturalism and attention to detail, even more so when you consider the artist had to rely on their memory. This time we’ll look at the opposite type of Palaeolithic artwork. Rather than a static painting of natural phenomena, we instead have a portable ivory figurine representing something more ‘unnatural’.

The Löwenmensch or Lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel is amongst the most famous Palaeolithic figurines, made more unusual by the fact that it has been slowly and painstakingly constructed over many decades from pieces of disintegrating and splintered ivory from the same deposition site. The Hohlenstein cave is located in the Swabian Jura mountain range in southern Germany. The area contains multiple limestone caves of incredible archaeological significance which have yielded numerous important artworks, including the Vogelherd horse and the Hohle Fels venus figurine. Hohlenstein itself has layers dating back to the Neanderthals, running through the Neolithic. The Lion-man sculpture was first identified in 1939, after excavations under Robert Wetzel and Otto Völzing. Numerous splintered pieces of ivory were recovered from the same context and then placed into storage. Thankfully their careful preservation meant that archaeologist Joachim Hahn was able to examine them in 1969 and reconstruct them into a figurine, measuring 31cm in height and displaying a curious hybridity between a human and an animal.

Further excavations, restorations and additions have led to the Lion-man being adjusted and further completed: in 1982, 1989 and between 2012-2013. Additional bones were found nearby which dated the layer the figure was found to between 35,000 and 41,000 years ago. This places it within the Aurignacian culture, one of the earliest Homo sapien peoples in Europe, and the first to fully colonise the region whilst the Neanderthals were disappearing. Unlike the Neanderthals, the Aurignacians developed a sophisticated art culture of animal and human figurines, naturalistic cave paintings and symbolic engraved artifacts.

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In 1915 a Danish peat cutter uncovered the body of an adult male, along with a wooden club and some pig bones. No doubt it wasn’t the first ancient thing he had discovered, since the bogs and peat marshes of northwest Europe were, and still are, brimming with archaeological finds. This skeleton was dubbed the Vittrup Man, a moniker to sit comfortably alongside the Tollund Man, the Koelbjerg Man and the Lindow Man. Bog bodies are an unusually popular archaeological artefact, no doubt due to the morbid combination of their leathery faces and typically violent deaths. The Vittrup Man was not considered to be anything special, until a Finnish conservation expert noticed one day that his skull was unusually archaic looking. The resulting flurry of work that came from this observation was published in February this year, under the title - Vittrup Man–The life-history of a genetic foreigner in Neolithic Denmark. 

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Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave (1996) Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel Deschamps, and Christian Hillaire

The three authors of the above quote were the first human beings to enter through the entrance of Chauvet cave, hidden away amongst the Cevennes and Rhone valleys at Vallon Pont-d’Arc, Ardèche, France. Once inside they discovered the most breathtaking of images, retreating away from them in the darkness, covering the walls whilst the bones of cave bears crunched beneath their feet. One of the many beautiful panels of images they found has become known as the Panel of Horses, and stands up with the Ghent Altarpiece and the Last Supper as famous artworks one ought to know about.

But Palaeolithic art does not receive the same kind of treatment as later art, and its study is confined to a handful of specialists in academic research. On the one hand this makes sense, since it may not be accurate to call it ‘art’, with all the connotations of the observer, the artist, the panoply of functions which we ascribe to art. But on the other hand more people should learn about and appreciate these extraordinary images. So here it is, the Panel of Horses from Chauvet Cave, painted circa 30,000 years ago.

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