Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Chapter 1: Prehistoric Art in Europe

-Prehistory includes all of human existence before the emergence of writing
-Everything about prehistory is based on writings
-First people to explore painted caves of France & Spain entered an unimaginable ancient world
-Chauvet cave in France, images of horses, deer, mammoths, aurochs and other 30,000 year old animals covered the walls
-Three-dimensional figures to two dimensional figures
-Using only formal language of line & color, shading and contour we know what they were thinking and meant
-Archaeologists and anthropologists study every aspect of material culture, while art historians usually focus on those things that 21st century eyes seem superior in craft and beauty.
-30,000 we were not making, what is known as art
-chauvet cave was often painted in areas far from the cave entrance, without access to natural daylight and were visited many years ago
-Walls were not flat canvasses but irregular natural rock forms
-What we perceive as "art" may been just to make images for reference
-Art provides clues to our past
-We can never find clues as to why these art forms were created in the first place
-The sculpture, paintings, and structures that survive are only a tiny fracture of what must have been created over a very long span of time.
-How and when modern humans evolved is the subject of ongoing lively debate, but anthropologists now agree that the species called Homo sapiens appeared about 200,000 years ago, and that the subspecies to which we belong, Homo sapiens, sapiens evolved about 120,000 - 100,000 years ago.
-Current evidence suggests that the vast movement of people took place between 1000,000 and 35,000 years ago
-Nineteenth century archaeologists struct by the wealth of stone tools, weapons and figures found at ancient sites named the whole period of early human development the Stone Age.

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