Reading IDS 3336- Assignment #1

THE BIRTH OFTHE

IMAGINATION

DAY IN THE ACTUMN OF 1879 a Spanish nobleman and his daughter set Out on a

little ad\·enture. They were going to explore a cave not far from the family estate at

Puente San Miguel, in the Cantabria region of northern Spain. The nobleman's name

was Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, and his daughter -- not yet in her teens -- was called

Maria. Together they made for the hillside of Altamira, which had lately been reported

as a site of prehistoric occupation. To use the language of the time, Altamira was the sort

of place where troglodytes or 'people before Adam' were thought to have sheltered.

As a keen amateur archaeologist, de Sautuola had high hopes of what he might find

at Altamira. The bones of strange animals might be scattered around; perhaps traces of

fires kindled long ago. With any luck, and close investigation of the cave floor, some

rudimentary tools or implements might also be retrieved.

De Sautuola was not merely hunting for curiosities. When it came to publishing

his discoveries at Altamira, he gra\·ely noted that his ultimate motive for making the

expedition with Maria was to 'tear away the thick veil that separates us from the origins

and customs of the ancient inhabitants of these mountains'. Once he and Maria were

inside the cave, he crouched dO\Yn and began to examine the ground by lantern light.

It was cool and damp in the caYe, but spacious too. While her father was poking and

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6 t, t'ct.ail ofthe <:ctv'e: p.iirittngs at Al'-..amira, Spain. c. i1,000 oc, whicn M?ria .a."ld J"f-.at(el ,10 de Sautuola diS<c,:,ered by , tiar\:e.

at the floor, Maria wandered off to do some exploring of her own. Ir was nut

long before the darKnesb of :\.ltamira echoed with a '-hild's wondrous cry.

"Luok, Papa -- pamtings ,,f 0xcn!'

So a young girl was the first modern human to set eyes upon the ·gallery' of

prehistonc pamrmg, tur which Altamira would bec,,me ren mmed (Fig. 61.

Being small, !vlana had a bener \'iew 0f the caYe\ low ceiling than her father.

Ho\\ever, her re~ogniti,in ufthe animals whose image~ were ranged over Altarnira\

natural vaulr was not quite accurate. These were aur0chs -- a rype of bison that had been

extinct for thousand~ 0f years. Herds of them were depicted -- standing, grazing, running,

sleeping .• -\nd ar,Jund these aurochs there were otht.:r fuur-legged - beasts: horses, ibexes,

boar. Gazing up at what his Jaughter had found, de Sautuola was almost ~peel·hless

with excitement. He i<.nc:w instin..:nvely that this art was \'ery old indeed; but 1t was more

than instinct th;,,t told him so. The cn•e was littLn:d with debris belonging lo what would

bu:ome known as che Stone Age -- or, in an:hae,1logical parlance, the Upper Palac,1lith1.:

period ( 1 'i,000-1 - 0,000 years ago) . .½orec'l\'er, dt' Sautunla l.. llUld see sirnuarities between

the bisc,n depicted here at Altamira and some heme ..:an-ings of animals lately discl1n:red

in ca,·es in France.

The gentlc:nan-scholar - lost no time in communicating rhe ne,Ys. It created a

sensation, understandable even to chis day, although, for reasons of presef\'ation, visitors

.ire now ·1dmittcJ only to a replica of the can:. Gazing on:r Altamira 's rocky ~urfacc:b-

the vie\\'er soon Jpprcciarc, that the word 'painting' 1s inadequate here. The unev~n

contours c,f the rnck ha\'e been ingeni<:'usly inwrporat.:d w give the animals a bulky,

almoc;t three-dimem1onal - presence. Big bo\'ine shoulders L.J0m up in the half-light: - and,

while the cxaLt ~pcc1es l,f bison depicted is no longer to be seen, we cannot fail to he

struck by the quality ,,t dose observation on display. How the animals stood while ar

pasrure, how thev coll,1psed when recumhent or wounded -- the Altamira depictions are,

as we should say, convincing. The colours, too, are memorable: predominantly red and

black, hur \\'ith s:1adings 0f form also picked out in brown, purple, yellow, pink and white.

These strong, rgamc pigments, deri,·ed from ,·arious uxides and carhons, play their

part in gi,·ing the work a p iwerfully earthy depth anJ ,ub,rnnce. All in all, it m ight be

concluded that the pamtings here arc to(, good w be true.

Sadly for de Sautuola, many of his comemrnraries thought just that. After an

initial acc()]ade from the press, ro~al visits tn the cave and so on, douhts regarding rhe

BIRTH OF THE IMAGINATION

authenticity of the art at Altamira hegan co he voiced, Nothing comparahle to their scale

and piccorial delicacy had heen found at prehistoric sites then known ro archaeolog1cal

connoisseurs. One premature explanation of Altamira suggested that the paintings

had been done during the Roman occupation of the Iberian peninsula. Within a year of

de Sautuola 's announcement of the find, however, more poisonous rumours were

circulating. An artist was seen going into the cave (de Sautuola had commissioned him

to make copies of the ceiling): word went round that he was the one who had painted

1t in the first place. At home and ahroad, de Sautuola found himself mocked as a dupe,

nr suspected of perpetrating a hoax. He died in 1888. a deeply disappointed and widely

disbelieved man. His friends said he was brokenhearted by the whole affair.

Young Maria would live to see her father's honour thoroughly redeemed. But before

,ve lament the scepticism that brought misery to a pioneer explorer of prehistoric art,

let us admit our own primary reaction to what we see at AJtamira, and at other great

underground sites subsequently revealed in Spain and southern France -- most notably

the cave~ of Lascaux and Cham·et. 'Amazing'; 'incredible'; 'astonishing': we reach for

1he cliched language of admiration, and for once it denotes a genuine mystery. No

s.imple of early human handiwork is more perplexing than rhe large-scale - cave paintings

of Palaeolithic Eurnpe.\Vhat follows here is an attempt to make sense of what the images

might mean, and why they were painted on subterranean walls. A particular cheory is

pursued, and other theories rejected -- but they are theories all the same. In the end,

amazement may remain the proper respon~e. What we can establish for certain, however,

is that these paintings are not localized miracles. Altamira belongs to a wider process of

human development, and it is all the more exciting for that.

THE CREATIVE EXPLOSION

Radiocarhon dating of the pigments used in the Altamira paintings has established that

rhe cave investigated by Maria and Marcelino de Sautuola was decorated between

13.300 and 14,900 years ago. This more or less confirms the notional antiquity assigned

to the images by de Sautuola hack in 1879. Rut beyond the element of forgirnhle

surprise, why w~1·e the karned comemporaries of de Sautuc1la so reluccant to believe himJ

The answer is that Altamira simply did not fit with prevailing scientific and popular

\·iews about the origin and development of the human species. Charles Darwin may have

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BIRTH OF THE IMAGINATION

caused theological controversy in Victorian Britain with his theory of evolution by

natural selection -- a process often summarized as 'the surviYal of the finest', though

Darwin himself did not coin that phrase -- but so far as it confirmed stereotypical

Western attitudes to the prehistoric past, Darwin's model was widely accepted. If

evolution favoured the sur\'ival of the fittest, and humankind was set on an upward

curve of progress in adapting to understand and control the world, then those humans

left behind -- especially those left behind many thousands of years ago -- must be

congenitally backward, ignorant and clumsy.

Already in 1651 , the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes had fastidiously

described the 'ill condition' of humans living in a pre-civilized - 'state of nature'. It was

a situation, he declared, of'continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of

man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short'. At the time when the paintings at Altamira

were found, most people \Vould have imagined the typical 'ca\'eman' as some shaggy,

low-browed - creature, his ground-scraping - knuckles clamped to a knotty club. This savage

might have chased bison to fill his belly, but to represent the animal in delicate profile,

with careful, sensitive hues -- such fine aesthetic capacity was surely beyond belief?

So went the logic of orthodox opinion. However, even the most tenacious

upholders of this view were forced to reconsider as further painted caves came to light,

especially in France. In 1901 , for example, two major sites near Les Eyzies in the

Perigord region -- Les Combarelles and Fom-de-Gaume - - -- were confirmed as bona fide.

The follm\·ing year, a major shift in attitudes was signalled when Emile Cartailhac, one

of the French experts who had dismissed Altamira as a prank, published a penitential

essay, accepting that his doubts had been in error: the paintings at Altamira, and others

like them, really did belong to 'the dawn of time'. In the summer of 1902, Cartailhac

joined other delegates from a scientific conference at Montauban in making a tour to

inspect the se\'eral painted ca\·es in the area. A consensus was declared: art indeed

existed in prehistory, and the science of understanding it had only ju st begun.

Discoveries of further caves proliferated throughout the twentieth century. France

yielded not only examples of painted surfaces, but also relief figures, such as the 'frieze'

of animals brought to light in 1909 at Cap Blanc, again near Les Eyzies, and the two

bison moulded in clay at the end of the deep ca\'e atTuc d 'Audoubert in the Pyrenees.

lvlost stories of modern discoYery contain a ration of drama. Appropriately,

perhaps, it was ,vhile searching for a lost dog that se,·eral schoolboys came across the

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BIRTH OF THE IMAGINATION

splendid menagerie painted within the cave at Lascaux, near Montignac, in 1940 (Fig. 7).

And while the finding (in 1994) of even more remarkahle animal scenes in France's

Ardeche Gorge came about from deliberate underground exploration, the subsequent

dispute over ownership of rhis site -- named Chauvet Cave after the potholing enthusiast

who first flashed a torch hearn over it -- is something of a legal soap opera.

A pair of rhinoceroses lock horns for a fight; a natural event recorded with swift,

confident brushstrokes. A set of feline profiles o,·erlap, as if casuaJly anticipating the

draughtsman's rules of depth and perspecti\·e by many millennia (Fi~. 8). Astonishing'

Indeed. But not absolutely incredible -- because the paintings of Chauvet Cave, firmly

dated to over 30,000 years ago, pro,·ide merely the most spectacular indicarors to date

of what some archaeologists refer to as a general 'Creative Explosion' occurring in the

Upper Palaeolithic period (c. 40,000-Jn.000 - years ago). The phenomenon is not

confined either to France or to continental Europe. Essentially, it marks the ascendancy

of a particular biological species, Homo sapiem, the 'knowing human' type that has come

to dominate the Earth's surface.

A summary of the background to this arrirnl of anatomically modern humans may

he found in a separate section of this book (see page 14). Here, it is enough to observe

that paintings on cave walls belong to a catalogue of telltale relics left hy the ingenious and

creative Homo sapiens c. 40.000-30,000 - years ago. Among these relics are the following:

1 Flint tools, produced in such a way as to be exquisitely symmetrical. Such

symmetry may have assisted their function (if, for example, axes were thrown

as missiles): otherwise it exists rn invest a functional obJect with aesthetic value.

2 Perforated teeth and shells, collected for the sake of bodily ornament. Items of

jewellery, such as the neck.lace of shells found at Mandu Mandu in Western

Australia, are sure signs of personal embellishment; possibly alsn indicators of

social status.

3 Depositions of food and gifts aking with burial of the dead. Excavated burials

at the Cro-Magnon - shelter near Les Eyzies and at the site of Dolni--Vestonice in

the Czech Republic may not qualify structurally as tombs, but the presence of

grave goods is suggestive of ritual , and some concept of an afterlife.

4 Scratchings on bone and antler that seem intentional and ordered. Several

examples of such markings from the site of Zhoukoudian, near Beijing in China,

7 (top) Detai l of the Salon o!the Bulls' at Lascaux. '1ear Montgnac, France, c.18,000 BC

8 (above) Tre masterfully depicted feline faces 1n the L io n Panel ’of Chauvet Cave, France, c. 32-- 30,000 BC.

‘

THE BIRTH OF THE IMAGINATION

remain open to interpretation, while an ingenious case has been made for reading

nolches on the handle of a rool found at Jshango, in central equatorial Africa , as a

notational system of rallie~ that marked time according to phases of the moon.

Certain aspects of this culrural 'lake-off', - such as vocal communication (singing included),

dance, and painting done directly on ro bodies, can never he known. Much small-scale -

or portable art may have vanished. And in many parts of the world there are markings

on rncks that simply cannot be securely dated by archaeokigists. These are reasons why,

in any im·estigation of the origins of art, attention focuses upon the cave-paintings - of

Palaeolithic Europe. Accepting that they are the best-preserved - and most visible signs

of the global creative explosion, how do we ~tart to explain their appeanmce:-

ART FOR ART'S ' SAKE7

Pahlo Picasso, arguably the most illustrious artist of che twentieth century, seems to have

paid a visit to the newly discovered Lascaux cave in 1941. 'We have learnt nothing!' is

reported as his awed, almost indignant comment, implying that che anonymous Stnne

Age draughtsmen of Lascaux had miraculously anticipated the representational aims

and achievements of art within modern, ' civilized' society. Uncannily (as it must have

seemed to him) , the prominent animals at Lascaux were hulls -- favoured subjects nf

Picasso, and indeed, featuring in one of his earliest paintings as a boy. Also, some of the

animals depicted at Lascaux have their form emphasized in thick black outline. This is

also uncannily similar to a pictorial device favoured at one time hy Picasso and his post­-

lmpress1onist contemporaries, some of whom would be nicknamed in 1905 as lesfauves

(the wild ones). It must have unnerved the Spanish painter, to see a stylistic invention

pre-empted - by many thousands of years: 'the shock of the old', we might say. Later, at

a Parisian exhibition in 1953, Picasso re-created - for his own work the flickering, torchlit

experience of viewing a prehistoric cave -- such was his empathy for ancestral comrades.

Picasso·s reaction is one that many of us would share. Identifying the precise species

of bison, ibex or mammoth might be beyond us. But, like young Maria at Altamira, we

have lirtle essenrial difficulty in seeing what these ancient artists were trying to represent.

Instinctively, then, we may \\·ant to 'update' che earliest human artists by assuming

that they painted for the sheer joy of painting.

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THE BIRTH OF THE IMAGINATION

The philosophers of Classical Greece recognized it as a defining trait of humans

to 'delight in works of imitation' -- to enjoy the very act and triumph ofrepresentation.

lfwe were close to a real hon or snake, we should feel frightened. But a well-executed -

picture of a lion or snake will give us pleasure. Why suppose that our Palaeolithic

ancestors were any different?

This simple acceptance of cave-paintings - as art for art's sake has a certain appeal.

To think of I .ascaux as a gallery or salon allows it to be a sort of special viewing place

where the handiwork of accomplished a1'tistes might be displayed. And at Lascaux, the

evident care with which individual animals have been abstracted from any natural

background or landscape makes it tempting to suppose that the painters sought to create,

as it were, 'life tudies' of their subjects Plausibly, daily existence in parts of Palaeolithic

Europe may not have been so hard, with an abundance of ready food, and therefore the

leisure time for art.

The problems with this explanation, however, are various. In the first place, the

proliferation of archaeological discoveries -- and this includes some of the world's

innumerable rock art sites that cannot be dated -- has served ro emphasize a remarkably

limited repertoire of subjects. The images that recur are those of animals; and,

commonly, similar types of animal. Human figures are unusual; and when they do make

an appearance, they are rarely done with the same attention to form accorded to the

animals. If Palaeolithic artists were simply seeking to represent the beauty of the world

around them, would they not have left a far greater range of pictures -- of trees and

flowers, of the sun and the stars?

A further question to the theory of art for art's sake is posed by the high incidence

of Palaeolithic images that appear not be imitative of any reality whatsoever. These are

geometrical shapes or patterns consisting of dots or lines. Such marks may be found

isolated or repeated over a particular surface, but also scattered across more recognizable

forms. A good example of this may he seen in the geologically spectacular grotto of Pech

l\1\erle, in the Lot region of France (Fig. 9). Here we encounter some favourite animals

from the Palaeolithic repertoire -- a pair of stout--bellied horses. But O\'er and around the

horses' outlines are multiple dark spots, daubed in disregard for the otherwise naturalistic

representation of the animals.What does such patterning imitate?

There is also the factor of location. The ca\'erns of Altamira and Lascaux might

conceiYably qualify as underground galleries, but many other paintings have been found

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9 The ''Spotted Horses· ’ 1n the caves of Pech Merle, France. c. 20.000 BC, wrth the 1ntrigu1ng patterns of dark spots around the horses' ' outl•nes. The hand stencils may be later touches.

THE BIRTH OF THE IMAGINATION

in recesses totally unsuitable for any kind of viewing -- ught nooks and crannies that must

have been a\\'kward even for the artists to penetrate, let alone for anyone else wannng

to see the art. For example, a painted cave adjoining Pech Merle, called Le Combe!, can

only be reached by squeezing through a narrow cleft in the rock and crawling along on

one's stomach; there was never any room to admire the handiwork in comfort.

Finally, we may doubt the notion that the Upper Palaeolithic wa, a Garden of Eden

in which food came readily, leaYing humans ample time to amuse themselves with art.

For Europe it was still the Ice Age. An estimate of the basic level of sustenance then

necessary for indiYidual human survival has been judged at 2200 calories per day. This

consideration, combined with the stark iconographic emphasis upon animals in the cave

art, has persuaded some archaeologists that the primary m otive behind Palaeolithic

images must lie with the primary acth·ity of Palaeolithic people -- hunting.

ART AND HUNTING

Hunting is a skill. Tracking, stalking, chasing and killing the prey are difficult, sometimes

dangerous activities. What if the process could be made easier -- by art?

In the early decades of the twentieth century, an influential French archaeologist,

Abbe Henri Breuil ( 1877-1961 - ), made this suggestion the basis for his theory that

the cave-paintings - were all about 'sympathetic magic'. The reason why Palaeolithic artists

so often depicted animals was that the business of hunting animals preoccupied them

and their contemporaries. And the artists striYed diligently to make their animal images

evocative and realistic because they were attempting to ·capture the spirit' of their prey.

As Breuil stressed, these debutant human artists clearly did not draw like children.

What could have prompted their studious attention to making such naturalistic,

recognizable images? For Breuil, it had to come from some extraordinary helief about

the power of images. If a hunter were able to make a true likeness of some animal, then

that animal was virtually trapped. Images, therefore, had the magical capacity to confer

success or luck in the hunt.

As with the interpretation of cave-paintings - as art for art's sake, there is a general

element to the theory of hunting magic that is immediately attractive. After all, anyone

who has ever kissed a photograph knows that images can serve the purpose of wishful

thinking. Mam· instances are known of societies in which images arc honoured as

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BIRTH OF THE IMAGINATION

potential surrogates of reality. Voodoo-type - superstitions, for instance, rely on the belief

that sticking pins in a wax effigy of someone will make that person feel pain. An thereby

hecomes a medium for magic. And while we might accept that the image of a lion or

a snake does not terrify us like the real thing, it is also well documented that we are quire

capable of responding to an image as if it were real. Being a Catholic priest, Rrcuil knew

well enough that many people of his rime could stand before a picture or ~tatue of the

Virgin Mary with all the respect due to an animate presence.

Breuil could point to further specific features of the ca,·e-paintings - chat favoured

his approach. In numerous images, an animal was shown apparently struck by arrows

or spears, or else marked as if wounded or snared (Fig. 10) . As for the many animals not

shown as direct victims of the hunt, they could belong ro art's magical purpose

nonetheless. T .arge herds, with well-fed - or pregnant beasts signified yet more wishful

thinking on the part of hunters hoping for me hountiful increase of their prey. And, of

course, it was the mysterious or occulr function of the paintings that, for Rreuil,

explained why they were located deep under ground. Magic had to he performed in

dark places, out of sight; it was a <;ecret operation.

Rreuil's theory appealed rn i:hose who emisaged the Ice Age in Europe as a period

of hard survival. when mammoths roamed the land, and fierce bears competed with

humans for rocky shelters. And the element of superstitious or irrational belief suited

anyone whose view of the past was shaped by the sort of desk-hound - anthropology so

eloquently presented by JG. Frazer in his multi-volume - compendium, The Golden Bough

(1907--15). Subtitled' A Study in Magic and Religion', Frazer's work seemed, frcirn

the poet T.S. Eliot's admiring point of view, to create 'an abysm of time'. Yet the Frazerian

pursuit of data from 'primitive' societies relied upon an ideal of progress characteristic

ofVicrnrian Britain. Frazer himself styled it as 'the long march, the slow and toilsome

ascent, of humanity from savagery to civilisation'. Trust in magicians was, for Frazer,

a key defining feature of 'savage' societies.

Anthropology has moved on from such complacency. But the main objection to

Rreuil's theory arises not from ideological disdain; rather from more attentive

archaeological examination of the ancient debris within the caves -- in particular. analysis

IO (previous pa~e) Wounded bison from Ni aux caves. ~ear Ariege. France. ( 4.000 BC

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food remains left around hearr:hs or in middens I rubbish dump~ ). If the paintings

were created for the purpose of ~uccessful hunting, it would be logical tu expect that the

animals depicted on the cave walls werL chose featuring in the daily diet of the cave's

mhabirants. But this correlation does not hold. At Lascaux, the animals painted were bulls,

horses and red deer. 1v1ost of the bones discarded in the cave, however, were of reindeer.

At Altamira they drew his,m, hut the associated bones were those of deer, goat and wild

hnar, with ~hellfish adding a little variety. Mammoths appear with some frequency in the

caves of the Ardeche and Perigord region~, but not in the reL·• ,rd l'f human subsistence

at that time. As one archaeologist puts it, 'the Cpper Palaeolimic painters had horses and

b1~on on their mind, whereas they had reindeer and ptarmigan in their stomachs' .

If nor propelled by hunger, why did they paint? Although me science of

neurophysiology wa~ in its infancy, Brem! and his contemporaries sensed mat it \'ia~

fundamentally unnarural for the human mind to produce and use representational

images in the first place, citing the reporred case of a Turki~h Muslim who, having had no

\C'.Xperience of picturc::s or drawings, failed to idemify a nvo-dimensional - image of a horse

because he could not ,valk around it. The 1.,apacicy for images, though quickly acquired,

did not seem to be innate. Ifwe need to have s,,mt' mental expenem:e or training in order

to rewgm:o SYmbols, how did we l'.Ver acLJuire me ability to ~reati: them in the first place?

So the quc~t .:ontinucd -- the quest to explain how this peculiar human habit of

representation began.

Ar<T AS AS YMGCLk.. S '('::, TEM

Anyone who .:onsider, the practicalitie, of interior decorntion at Altamira and Lascaux

will suppose thal some system uf ~caffolding mmt han been l'.rected for the painters.

Experts confirm the suppositilm. Image~ were not casually scrawled on the walls, but laid

out as part of a considered programme or scheme of decoration.

It is to the credit of another French ~cholar, Andre Lerni-Gourhan - (1911-86), -

that the theory he offered as an alternative to art-for-hunting - - was based on an acceptance

or Palaec lithic imagery as a grand project -- anything but random sketches. Strongly

influenced by the Structuralist school of anthropology (see page 89) , Leroi-Gourhan -

proposed considering Lhe cave-paintings - as a symbolic system based on binary

oppositions er pairing,, with the essential Ji vision being that between man and woman.

BIRTH OF THE IMAGINATION

Notoriously, there are very few images of humans in the caves. But what if certain

animals were to be associated with males, and others with females) With reasons ranging

from the elementary tC) the sophisticated, Lerni-Gourhan - argued that horses, ihexes and

deer were symbolically masculine, while aurochs and bison were feminine. H is analysis

defies summary: hut ultimately -- as might be guessed -- it leads ta the supposition of

some kind of fertility rite staged in the caves, for which the images must serve as liturgy.

Some would say that Leroi-Gourhan's - approach was music to the ears of anyone

raised on the psychological doctrines of Sigmund Freud. Cenainly there were Freudian

overtones to the way in which T ,eroi-Gourhan - explained the geometric motifs that

recurred in the caves. Again he identified a male-female - gender divide. Straight lines

and dots signified male, while circular or enclosing forms were emblematic of female

form. Other archaeologists had already noted certain painted shapes or graffiti suggestive

of one particular part of female anatomy -- the \·ulva -- which favoured this sexually

symbolic reading. Leroi-Gourhan - himself, howe,·er, remained reluctant to specify the

implied fertility rite.

Today it may be hard to resist being amused by the sort of interpretation that sees

every straight line or spear as phallic, every circle as a womb. Yet, as even his critics agree,

Leroi-Gourhan - was surely right to persevere in his assumption that the Palaeolithic

artists worked intentionally; that there was a method and a m eaning to their work as a

whole. But if one problem with his theory is that it depends upon a modern obsession

with sexuality, then the general question arises of how we should proceed. We still need

some explanation of how the knack or capacity for representation fir st clicked into plat.:e .

Can any analysis bridge the distance between modern dewers and ancient artists?

OUT OF AFRICA

In the age of our great--grandparents -- the generation for whom the work of J.G. Frazer

was enlightening -- there was little objection to making comparisons bern;een the

prehistoric past and communities of so--called 'primitive peoples' that had survived

(by isolation) into the industrialized world. Today, it would be thought offensive and

misleading to describe, for example, the existence of Australian Aborigines around

1800 An as equivalenr to the Stnne Age. And yet the impulse to draw some analogies

between a surviving or documented society of hunter--gatherer~ and the hunter-gathe- ring

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1 IF P,1RTH o r THE IMAGINATION

existence of people in the Palaeolithic past is difficult to resist, even if the distance is

measured not only across time, but also across continents. Just such a non-judgemental -

explanation by analogy has lately emerged, injecting fresh energy in to rhe debate about

the beginnings of humanity's gift for representation. The theory comes from Africa,

and how it evolved is worth tracing in some detail.

The Drakensberg mountains are the main contours of southern Africa. To the east,

beyond a coastal plain, lies Durban; due north is Johannesburg and the interior plateau

or veldt; within the range, geologically, is the small, snow-topped - Kingdom ofLesorho.

Most of the Drakensberg peaks now belong to the province of KwaZulu--Natal. In and

around this area are many place-names - that resonate in South Africa's modern history,

sites of conflict berween Boer settlers, British colonists and Zulu tribesmen: Spion Kop,

Ladysmith, Rorke's Drift and more. But before the British, the Boers or the Zulus

impacted on this landscape, it had been long occupied by a people whose official place

in history is so uncertain that no one is quite sure what to call them. They used to he

referred to collectively as 'Bushmen'; lately 'rhe Sao· has been preferred. In fact, both

names have pejoram·e connotations, but since there is no ready alternative, we shall use

the term 'Bushmen' here, for the sake of convenience and without disrespect.

The Bushmen's modes of hahirntion and subsistence in the Drakensberg changed

very little over thousands of years. The men hunted animals, using spears and arrows

tipped with poison; the women gathered plants, grasses and roots, with no other tool

than a weighted digging-stick. - Small communities moved from upland to lowland areas

as seasons changed, making use of natural shelters where available. Like other nomadic

peoples, the Drakensberg Bushmen needed very few possess10ns, so one might have

guessed that they left few traces of their presence in this territory. This is, indeed, the

case -- except in the crags and cre\'ices of the sandstone escarpment there are thousands

of painted images.

Comparable in quantity to the rock art sitc::s of the Kakadu area in northern

Australia, the Bushmen paintings of the Drakensberg are not catalogued; unlike the

Kakadu images, they are entirely anonymous and impossible to date. Paintings done only

200 years ago may look brighter than work done 20,000 years earlier, and certain scenes

(such as men shown carrying guns) appear to be rcfcrc:nccs to the colonial intruders.

Essentially, howe\·er, the numerous images seem very similar and coherent within the

region, and similar to paintings left in some other places occupied by the Bushmen.

THE BIRTH OF THE IMAGINATION

These were not always recognized for what they were. In 1918 climbers exploring

the Rrandberg Massif (of modern Namibia) came across rock paintings in a certain

ra\ine. Coloured copies were duly made and shown some years larer to Henri Breuil,

then attending a conference in Johannesburg. The Abbe pronounced that no indigenous

people had made these images, hut foreigners of'Nilotic-Mediterranean - origin' --

perhaps emigres from Bronze Age Crete, whose style seemed apparent in a particular

figure duhbed by Breuil as the 'W.hite T ,ady'. Ir has since transpired that this figure is

male, and typical Bushman work; but to upholders of the apartheid system -- whereby

white and black people in South Africa were kept apart -- Breuil's verdict was welcome

proof that the earliest inhahitants of this land had been Europeans. The notion was

so pleasing to the country's colonial administrators that, during the Second World War,

they gave academic refuge to Breuil in Johannesburg -- sponsored by none other than

the country's premier,j.C. Smurs.

Breu il's preposterou~ gloss of the 'White Lady' is perhaps sufficiem indication of

how little specialist attention wa~ de"oted to the images left by the Bushmen -- images that

were, of course, gradually fading from modern view. The neglect more or lc::ss persisred

until the early 1960s, when a young local schoolmaster started to explore the Drakensberg

paintings more studiously. His name was David Lewis-Williams, - and what began as

a teacher's pastime led first to a doctorate, then a professorial chair, and ultimately a

dedicated Rock An Institute (at the University ofWitwatersrand in Johannesburg).

The conspicuous subjects of Bushmen paintings throughout the Drakensberg

are animals ( Fig. 11) . Often enough it seems there is a scene in which some four-legged -

prey, such as an antelope, is surrounded by figures armed with bows or spears. Casual

viewers might readily suppose that these were characteristic reflections of daily life

among the Bushmen, to whom hunting was supremely important (their disputes with

the settlers arose mosrly from access to game or cattle raiding). Bue, as Lewis-Williams -

showed, one does not have to look very hard at the Drakensberg paintings hefore

realizing that these depictions of hunting are not so straightforward as that. Some of the

human figures, on closer examination, appear to have hoofs for feet, and animal heads.

Other figures. seemingly realistic at first glance, have their necks represented in lines

of many white stipples. A certain large sort of antelope, the eland, did indeed appear

often and prominently in the paintings. Rut the Bushmen had many other sources of

food, four-legged - or not. Why so much emphasis upon the eland? As for rhese hybrid

-- 34 --

11 (above) A scene from the main frieze ofthe Game Pass

Shelter. Kamberg, South Africa.

Date uncertain.

12 (right) A drawing of a detail from the main frieze of the

Game Pass Shelter. showing a

dying eland and a figure with

hooves and an animal head.

BIRTH OF THE IMAGINATION

human-animal - figures -- therianthrop1c is the official descriptive term for them -- why

were some of them appearing to snatch at an eland's t;ciil?

Lewis-Williams - aired all these queries, which arose from interpreting the

Drakensberg images as scenes of everyday life among the Bushmen. He was also aware

that while hunter-gathering - peoples may seem, in Western eyes, to be leading remarkably

simple lives, at one with nature, anthrnpological research invariably demonstrated

otherwise. Hunter-gatherers - around the \'l.'Orld tended to organize their lives around

very precise and prescriptive systems of ritual and supernatural belief. Why presume

any less of me Bushmen?

Answers to questions abnut the meaning of the Drakensberg images would, naturally,

lie with the Bushmen who painted chem. Despite near--genocide in the past, and the more

recent imposition of horders and pas1,ports, Bushmen have survived in the Kalahari

Desert, especially in parts of Bomvana and northwest Namibia. But the problem for rnose

trying tn track down the meaning of Bushman art is that since their displacement from the

Drakensberg to the Kalahari over a century ago, the Bushmen have not been able to sustain

the artistic tradition. The Kalahari is a very different terrain from the Drakensberg: it

offers few rock surfaces or shelters suitable for painting. What did persist among the

Kalahari Bushmen, however, was a powerful strand of religious practice and belief thar

could he connected to previous images; also, the rare testimony of Bushmen voices

recorded during the nineteenth century and kept in an archive at Cape Town. Combining

these two sources, Lewis-Williams - was able to make a convincing case that the thousands

of Bushmen images in the Drakensberg were far from being scenes of daily life; rather ,

they belonged to the surreal experience of minds and bodies in a state of ecstasy.

An eland is in the rhroes of death (Fig. 12): its head hangs heavy; its dewlap -- the

thick fold of skin below the neck -- is sagging; and its hind legs are crossed. The Bushmen

say that the crossed hind legs of the eland are a clear sign of poisoned darts taking effect.

Here, however, we notice something else The therianthropic figure holding the eland 's

1ail in one hand, and a spear in the other, appears to ha\'e h£s legs crossed too. H e has an

animal's head and hoofs. Can it be, then, that he is also dying? If so, is he a figure who

not only connects between the realms of human and animal, but who also interacts

between the Jiving and the dead?

Transcripcs of Rushman beliefs and practices point to the reality of just such a

figure in the person of a shaman: a senior individual esteemed as a healer, a rain-maker, -

36

THE BIRTH OF THE IMAGINATION

an inspiration for the hunt, and someone with access to the spirit world. This is not only

the stuff of archives: to this day, shamans exist among the Kalahari Rushmen. Being

good-natured - about visits from inquisitive researchers, tourists and film crews alike, the

Bushmen have repeatedly confirmed the central significance of shamanic rituals to their

society. Bushman shamans have their own metaphoric ways of recounting how they

experience their connection with the supernatural; they speak in terms of being stretched

on ropes, lines or threads to an almighty creator or some netherworld of ancestors. But

(again thanks to an open disposition on the part of those concerned) it is also possible

to witness a 'trance dance', in which a Bushman shaman performs.

This was how it happened in a small kraal or village not far from Tsumkwe in

northwest Namibia. At dusk a fire was lit, around which the women of the village, with

their infants, sat in a circle. They began to set up a rhythm of chanting and clapping.

Various of their menfolk were around, including the aged headman of the village; some

began to tread around the circle, humming along with the songs. The star of the show

THE BLEEK AND LLOYD ARCHIVE

DEFINED BY one anthropologist as 'the ' the archive kept at the Un,versity of Cape Town.

harmiess people', ' the Bt.,shmen communities Others, however. provide a nch verbatim account

of southern Africa were persecuted throughout of hunting techn ques, stargazing. medicine and so

the nineteenth century by white sett lers and Bartu on. It s from this record that we comprehend the

pastoralists alike. Many were exterminated; some centrality of ritual in the lives of the Bus1men.

were kep, as convicts in Cape Town. It was among Christian m,ss1onaries thought them irreligious

these pr soners that Wilhelm Bl eek ( 1827 --75) On the contrary. the fT'0st powerful figures in any

did his research. Bleek was a philolog1st, with a Bushman clan were its spiritual leaders, its ritual

primary inte'est in the clicking language of the specialists. They have their ow,, local titles: to term

Bushmen. Aided by his sister--in--law Lucy Lloyd. he them ‘shamans· ' is, for the sake of converience. at

fil led numerous notebooks with transcript ans of 1east preferable to ''witch doctors'. ' Whatever we call

interviews covering al i aspects of Bushman life and these elders, the Bleek and Lloyd papers suggest

folklore. Alas, two notebooks carrying information that they were very likely to have been :he artists of

about Bushman pair.ting are listed as m·ss1f1g from the Drakensberg and other Bushman-painted - sites.

-- 37 --

13 A Bushman dance at a village near Tsumkwe. northwest Namibia, ,n the summer of 2004.

BIRTH OF THE IMAGINATION

then arrived: a diminutive, sinewy old man, wearing only a loincloth and a set of rattles

about his ankles. He now led the stamping around the circle; and for the next two hours

or so he hardly paused as lord of the dance. Sometimes he reached for the heads of those

sitting down, as if to transmit some of his energy to them. Occasionally, he staggered

away into the shadows, doubled up and gasping for breath; at one point, while weaving

across the circle, he fell into the fire and had to be pulled out: sand was heaped over him

to cool him down. Some of the women rose up and followed him. There was no

weariness from them in clapping and singing. It seemed the ceremony could go on as

long as the fire glowed under the stars (Fig. 13).

It is in such situations that a shaman can go imo an 'altered state of consciousness'.

Physically, this manifests itself in various ways: loss of balance, stomach cramps,

hyperventilation and nosebleeds. Mentally, it can lead to hallucinations, the intense

visionary experience of travelling out of body into strange yet connncing places. No one

could draw or paint while in the midst of this sort of emorional seizure. But revealing

or recalling what had come imo vision during an altered state of consciousness .. . that

would be truly marvellous, and proof, as it \Vere, of the shaman's special status.

For several decades now, David Lewis--Williams has argued the case that the

thousands of Bushman images left in the Drakensberg are best explained as 'shamanic' :

directly derived from the hallucinatory experiences of shamans while in an altered state

of consciousness. There are, to begin with, clear signs that physiological effects of tl1e

trance dance are depicted: figures doubled up with abdominal spasms; figures with red

lines (blood ) streaming from their noses. The marked elongation of many figures may

reflect the reported sensation of being stretched.

Rock surfaces, such as the Game Pass Sheher, became interfaces between reality

and the spirit world, on which the imagery of the trance was recorded and displayed.

To call these interfaces 'membranes' is not inappropriate. Figures of animals might

emerge from cracks in the stone (as they do), and placing a hand upon the stone, too,

might give some sense of its potent access ro the domain of spirits and ancestors.

No summary matches the eloquence with which L ewis-William- s has pursued

and published this theory: we may simply state here that many experts worldwide accept

it. Anthropologically, it is not an isolated or eccentric phenomen on. Parallels can be

drawn, for instance, benveen the Bushman shamans and those among various indigenous

tribes of North America, such as the Yokuts and Numic of California, whose use

-- 39 - -

H F BIRTH OF T I---- E IM /•.GI NtCIOI'.

of hallucinogenic substances can be traced in petroglypl1s (rock markings) left in sites

of sacred significance Evidence also suggests that shamam or 'clever men' among

the Aboriginal communities of northern Australia played a particular role in creating

the millennia-old - imagery of thar region. European colonists may have dismissed it

all as so much mumbo-jumbo, - although the} were happy to accept stories (and images)

of a man who could cure lepers with his touch and undergo an agonizing death

without dying .

What, hmvever, ha5 this to do with the cave-paintings - of Europe in the Upper

Palaeolithic period?

THE NF LJROPSYC: 1"'1010GICAL MODEL

Readers may already haYe guessed the next move in the Lewis-Williams - argument. It is

not to suggest that Bushmen, Native Americans and Australian Aborigines are wlturall_, .

comparahle to people of the Stone Age, but to point out that all anatomically modern

humans -- including those of the Palaeolithic -- share a brain that is hard-wired - (pre­­

programmed) in a certain way. What occurs within this brain when we enter an altered

state of consciousness is therefore predictable -- a common human experience, as like!)

to have the same visual and visible effects today as it would haYe done 35 ,000 years ago.

There are many ways of inducing the ahered state of consciousness: drugs,

dancing, darkness, exhaustion. hunger, meditation, migraine and schizophrenia are

among them. In the Western tradition it is by no means confined to hippies and a fashion

for the mind-expanding - substance known as LSD. Opium takers of the Romantic

period, notably the English writers Thomas De Quincev and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

were generous in pro\·iding \'erbal descriptions of their visions. And in our own times

sc1ent1srs ha\'e disco\'ered simple procedures of sensmy deprivation that enable research

into the brain 's function when it comes to seeing things '. The research goes on, but

already it is clear that the human nervous system exhibits certain features of response

that can be generalized -- prm·iding , for archaeologists. 3 so-called - neuropsychrilogical

model fur explaining the \ erJ- beginnings of symbolic representation.

!vligraine sufferers do not need to be reminded of the fact that , even in a completely

darkened room, and with their eves firmly shut, they are persecuted by flashing lights.

It is a common symptom of an altered state of consciousness: the sensation of brightness,

BIRTH OF THE IMAGINATION

often framed in kaleidoscopic patterns -- dots, lozenges, blocks, appearing in multiple

units as netvlOrks, tessellations and suchlike. These patterns may be construed as cercain

objects in the world -- a spider's web, or a honeycomb. In addition, the subject of an

altered stare of consciousness may feel that he or she is airborne, or in water, or plunging

through some vortex or tunnel. Patterns slide one into another, and shapes are fluently

transformed; in some hypnagogic (half-asle- ep) or dreaming moods we may see animals

appear: to follow Shakespeare's phrasing, we will think a cloud to be very like a whale,

or mistake a bush fm· a bear.

What characterizes all these sensations is how vivid they are. The nightmare victim

wakes with a scream; the LSD addict maims himself terribly, convinced that his fingers

are extending over the windowsill and on to the road outside. No external reality is there.

Our reaction is entirely to what we see without any direct perception of the world around

us. Such images have been termed as entoptic, 'within the eye'.

The Lewis-Wi- lliams hypothesis, then, is nor just that Palaeolithic cave-painting -

was shamanic or shamanistic in origin. It is even more momentous; suggesting that the

human knack of representational imagery was itself initially triggered by this

neuropsychological process. In other words, the Palaeolithic painters were not making

observations of the world around them; they were transferring on to cave walls the

images they already had behind their eyes. They were displaying what had come to them

in an altered state of consciousness; recollecting powerful visions; trying to recapture

what they had seen in their hallucinations -- even when these had flashed by as a series

of abstract patterns (Fig. 14).

The acceptance of this model does nae reduce all other cave-paintin- g theories to

nonsense. In societies where shamans are or ,vere esteemed as authorities -- including not

only the Bushmen and other groups already mentioned, but also the Inuit or 'Eskimos'

of Canada, tribes of Amazonian South America, and nomadic societies of Siberia, where

the t.erm 'shaman' originates -- shamans claim power from and over animals. The trance

dance of the Bushmen may celebrate a successful hunt, or serve to bring good fortune

to an imminent expedition; either way, then, a measure of 'hunting magic' is implied by

the shaman's central role. From shamanic lore, too, it is evident that certain animals

can be invested with extraordinary power and significance. (For the Bushmen, the eland

has such special status.) Siberian shamans would say that their souls were entrusted

to animal guardians, or chiim some personal familiar or daemon in four-legged - form.

-- 41 --

-- ... -•

,. -

14 Abstraci: ~l'"'e Mar< rgs ,n -:.,e CuevJ. : ~ ;i Pil~;i Ancfah,r,.:i, Spiiin, r; 13.000 :l-:~Sue~ rrn-;rk•1~ ::1:.: lyp,,al of ~.1tc.,ptic pa.t.eM£ gere.'::.ted wthin :l'e m 1d CJr r.g Jfl a tere: !..ate o' CC"IS<: ousreS$.

BIRTH O F THE IMAGINATION

So it may be right to suppose that certam animals possess symbolic value, full of luck and

fertility, regardless of whether they feature as regular prey. But can we claim that

. hamans existed in prehistory?

'Let me tell you how I became a lion. It was a good dance several years ago . . .

I felt the pull of the fire .. . and danced while staring at it . . . I saw the fire become

very large .. . I saw a lion in it. I trembled when I looked at it. Then the lion

opened its mouth and swallowed me. The next thing I remember seeing was the

lion spitting out another lion. That other lion was me. I felt the energy of the lion

and TOared with great authority. The power scared the people.'

The recorded experience of a modern Bushman shaman while m an altered state

of consciousness may directly illuminate, by analogy, several three-dimensional - images

discovered in the Jura region, the mountainous borderland between Switzerland

and France. They evidently served as pendants or amulets, and their form is

therianthropic -- with the bodies of humans and the heads oflions (Fig. 15). The

material from which they were made is of an animal source -- the tusk of a mammoth.

At the risk of bemg over-fanciful, - we might say tl1at the images were 'spat out' from

me mammoth.

A number of caves contain paintings or engravings mat seem to show hybrids

of humans and animals, or human figures with animal masks and attributes. At Chauvet,

for example, there is depicted a composite creature made up of a bison's head and

body, and a pair of human legs. Is mis some kind of minotaur or, as the discoverers of the

cave preferred to call it, a sorcerer? Abbe Breuil had used me same term for an antlered,

furry figure with human legs and feet among ilie images in a recess of the cave complex

known as Les Trois Freres, in the French Pyrenees. Since it is well documented that

much shamanic practice worldwide expresses itself in just such animal guise, me

temptation to suppose that shamans operated in Palaeolithic Europe is hard to resist.

Hard to resist, and hard to prove. Conceptually, however, shamanism offers a

persuasive route towards the neuropsychological model. The image of a lion-man - was

fashioned because it had been vi\'idly imagined during an altered state of consciousness.

The onus is upon sceptics to produce a more plausible alternative explanation. So far,

none has been formcoming.

-- 43 --

BIRTH OF THE IMAGINATION

FROM ART TO AGRICULTURE

The cave-paintings - atAltamira were once disbelieved because they seemed too 'early'.

In turn, archaeologists who accepted the earliness of such cave-paintings - were faced with

a problem of succession. In Europe, at least, the practice of painring in caves apparently

came to an end abour 12,000 years ago. We know that the emergence, several thousand

years later, of the great ci\'ilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, was

accompanied by an increasing use of, even reliance upon, the symbolic resource of images:

this hook makes further reference to that process in due course (see, for example,

page 61). Rut in the meantime, what happened to the human ability to create images?

Until recently, there was no satisfactory answer to that question. 1t was possible,

admittedly, to claim that in some parts of the world -- notably Australia -- the habits

of representation that commenced about 40,000 years ago never lapsed. But this was

impossible to prove. In terms of archaeologically stratified evidence, a definite gap

existed, between tl1e end of the Old Stone Age (the Palaeolithic) and the early phases

of the New Stone Age (the Neolithic). Then a certain hilltop in southern Turkey

disclosed its secret.

T he Turkish--Kurdish town of Urfa ( or Sanliurfa), near the Syrian border, is

touristically billed as 'historic'. Here Abraham, the patriarch of the second millennium BC,

venerated by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, is supposed to have sojourned on his

way from the city of Ur to the land of Canaan. Rut it now transpires that religious

activity around Urfa pre-dates - Abraham by thousands of years.

An archaeological survey in the 1960s observed in the hills around Urfa a particular

site where several knolls of reddish earth arose from a limestone plateau. These knolls,

and the rocky area nearby, were covered in the debris of flint-knapping - -- the flakes

and chips of flint left by the prehistoric manufacture of tools and weapons. Some large

man-made - slabs of stone were also noticed, hut assumed to be of much later date than

the Neolithic debris. No further investigation was carried out until 1994, when Klaus

Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute visited me site and established that the

knolls were not natural, bur part of an artificial hill, heaped as a prominent mark in the

local landscape. With experience of other sites in tl1is ancient area of Upper Mesopotamia,

Schmidt was immediately able to classify the site as a lepe or mound, datable to the early

Neolithic phase before the use of ceramics (sometimes referred to as the Pre-Pott- ery

-- 44 --

15 A lion--man statuette from Hohleste1n-Stadel. - south west Germany

c. 32-- 30,000 BC. possibly used as a pendant or an amulet.

' -

16 (top) Aerial v,ew of a stone c, rel e at Gobekli Tepe, Turkey, c. 9000 BC

17 (abo~e) Animal detail -- probably a fox-- from GobeJ<JiTepe

BIRTH OF THE IMAGINATION

Neolithic). He also suspected that the limestone slabs on this hill -- henceforth known

as Gobekli Tepe -- belonged to some large prehistoric structure.

Digging imo the mound not only confirmed Schmidt's intuitions, but revealed

a dimension of Pre-Ponery - Neolithic that no one expected.

The excavations at Gobekli Tepe are ongoing, with scope for more surprises.

What has come to light so far is a series of walled enclosures, of which about 20 are

built around massive stone pillars set in a circle (Fig. 16). Two separate pillars occupy the

centres of these circles. Each of the pillars is fashioned out of solid rock into a T-shape -

about 7 metres (23 feet) tall . Rectangular carved doorways once provided marked

or tunnelled access to the enclosures, and in the floor of one circle a small inset basin

has been found, with an anached channel -- possibly, as the excavator suggests, for the

collection of blood. Food was consumed here, as indicated by many animal bones,

but nowhere on the hillside are there signs of domestic habitation. So this was not, it

seems, a place where people li\'ed, but rather a special assembly point -- some kind

of sanctuary in the mountains that attracted people from a radius of settlements some

80 kilometres (50 miles) or further afield .

Like other prehistoric monuments, such as Stonehenge in Britain and the menhirs

of France, GobekliTepe retains an enigmatic sense of unfathomed r itual significance.

But not only is it much earlier than Stonehenge -- by 7000 years -- it is also much

different in one key respect. The \Yell-trimmed - pillars of Gobekli Tepe are not just

megaliths (big stones) . They are decoraced-- embellished with images either engraved on

to the surface or else picked out in shallow relief (Fig. 17) .

It may come as no surprise that the principal subjects of this decoration are, once

again, animals. Foxes and snakes dominate the repertoire, but gazelle, aurochs, wild

boar, wild ass, cranes and a lion also feature . Spiders, too, are shown. In addition one

block carries the image of a woman squatting in a sexual posture, though this may be

of later date.

The pillars themselyes appear schematically anthropomorphic or human-shaped, -

the shaft standing for legs and rnrso, the T-bar - equating to shoulders and head. Carved

arms are added to one of them, as 1f to confirm the intention. This in turn encourages the

presumption that the images ser\'e to harness forms of wildlife whose power belongs tn

these pillar-figures, - or perhaps protects them. The foxes bare their teeth, the tusks of the

boar are pronounced, and the snakes have been identified as venom-loaded - \·ipers.

-- ◄7 --

BIRTi. CF Tr-1E IMAG N AT ION

The possibility that the decoration of the pillars at GobekJi Tepe is shamanic has

heen seriously considered by the excavators. Rut, as they point out, the scale of

structural enterprise at this site points to a society in which ritual was mediated not so

much by shamans as by 'true priests'. The images, after all, were the ultimate phase,

or finishing touches at least, to what had been a massive collective effort. At a small

distance away from the main 'temple' area is the natural limestone amphitheatre from

which the pillars were quarried. In the upper reaches of this quarry there i~ a marked

ca\'ity left by the removal of one T-shaped - pillar much larger than any so far brought

to light at the site; and right next to this space is a stone of similar size abandoned

in a cracked and therefore unfinished state. Had it been successfully removed from the

bedrock, it would have measured some 6 metres {20 feet) , and weighed about 50 tonnes

To shift it across to the mound would have required the combined traction power of

about 500 people.

Given that the mound itself i~ man--made, built from thousands of tonnes of earth

and rock brought up from the plain below, we are bound to 5peculate that the measure of

human organization required to build Gobekli Tepe was some way towards that required

to build the Egyptian pyramids. Gobekli Tepe, in the words of its exca\'ators, therefore

stands at 'the dawn of a new world. ::i world with powerful rulers and a complex, stratifiecl,

hierarchical society' .

So this is a maJor revelation from current archaeology; and unlike the fir,t 'reveal'

of Altamira , it causes true wonder, not ciishelief. And for thosP who like to regard art

as an optional luxury in life, a pastime to be indulged only when the necessary business

of survival and subsistence has been completed, Gdbekli Tepe offers a particular

challenge -- with which we shall conclude .

For more than half a century, archaeologists have agreed that farming -- the keeping

of domesticated animals and the cultivation of crops -- began in the Near East during the

early ]'..;eolithic period, c. 9000 BC. Sheep and goats were the principal animals featuring

in this agricultural revolution, while wheat and barley were the principal crops. Key sites

providing evidence for animal enclosures and domesticated grains include Jarmo, in

northern Iraq; <;::atalhuyiik, in western Turkey; and Jericho, in Palestine. The Jordan valley

and the reaches of Upper Mesopotamia have also yielded specific clues regarding the

transition from nomadic hunting and gathering to settled farming. The debate then arises

about which came first: a demographic shift to settled communities, lead mg to a reliance

BIRTH OF THE IMAGINATION

upon farming for food, or the intensive exploitation of certain livestock and cereals,

leading to settled communities?

In the book of Genesis, the change occurs as a direct consequence of the expulsion

of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. The sons of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel,

are specified as a tiller of the soil and a shepherd respectively, fulfilling God's edict that

mortals should henceforth survive 'by the sweat of their brow'. Gobekli Tepe raises an

alternative possibility -- that what instigated the first production of food was art.

About 30 kilometres (20 miles) south from Gobekli Tepe lies the Karacadag range.

Research among these hills has shown that they are home to the closest wild relative of an

early species of domesticated grain, einkorn wheat. The suggestion is that wild grain was

brought from the Karacadag, and cultivated around Gobekli Tepe in order to feed all the

hundreds of people building or simply frequenting the site.

So there is the momentous conclusion: that some 11,000 years ago imagery had

become so powerful in the minds of human beings that it helped to bring about the

greatest transformation in human history.

-- 49 --