Cultural Activity Report 2

T he history of human beings on this planet is, geo- logically speaking, very short. The history of their coming together in groups for their common good is even shorter, covering a span of perhaps 25,000 to

50,000 years on a planet that scientists estimate to be between 4 and 5 billion years old. We call these groups, as they become more and more sophisticated, civilizations. A civiliz ation is a social, economic, and political entity distinguished by

the ability to express itself through images and written lan- guage. Civilizations develop when the environment of a region can support a large and productive population. It is no accident that the first civilizations arose in fertile river valleys, where agriculture could take hold: the Tigris and the Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the Nile in Egypt, the Indus on the Indian subcontinent, and the Yellow in China. Civilizations require technologies capable of supporting the

The Ancient World and the Classical Past P r e h i s t o r y t o 2 0 0 c e

Nebamun Hunting Birds, from the tomb of Nebamun, Thebes, Egypt (detail). ca. 1400 bce (see Fig 3.2 in Chapter 3).

P A R T O N E

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 24 13/11/2013 07:21

principal economy. In the ancient world, agriculture was supported by the technologies related to irrigation.

With the rise of agriculture, and with irrigation, human nature began to assert itself over and against nature as a whole. People increasingly thought of themselves as mas- ters of their own destiny. At the same time, different and dispersed populations began to come into contact with one another as trade developed from the need for raw materi- als not native to a particular region. Organizing this level of trade and production also required an administrative elite to form and establish cultural priorities. The existence of such an elite is another characteristic of civilization. Finally, as the history of cultures around the world makes abundantly clear, one of the major ways in which socie- ties have acquired the goods they want and simultaneously organized themselves is by means of war.

If a civilization is a system of organization, a culture is the set of common values—religious, social, and/or politi- cal—that govern that system. Out of such cultures arise sci- entific and artistic achievements by which we characterize different cultures. Before the invention of writing sometime around the fourth millennium bce, these cultures created myths and legends that explained their origins and relation to the world. As we do today, ancient peoples experienced the great uncontrollable, and sometimes violent, forces of nature—floods, droughts, earthquakes, and hurricanes. Pre- historic cultures understood these forces as the work of the invisible gods, who could not be approached directly but only through the mediating agency of shamans and priests, or kings and heroes. As cultures became increasingly self- assertive, in the islands between mainland Greece and Asia Minor, in Egypt, in China, on the Indian subcontinent, and on the Greek mainland, these gods seemed increasingly knowable. The gods could still intervene in human affairs, but now they did so in ways that were recognizable. It was suddenly possible to believe that if people could come to understand themselves, they might also understand the gods. The study of the natural world might well shed light on the unknown, on the truth of things.

It is to this moment—it was a long “moment,” extending for centuries—that the beginnings of scientific inquiry can be traced. humanism, the study of the human mind and its moral and ethical dimensions, was born. In China, the for- malities of social interaction—moderation, personal integ- rity, self-control, loyalty, altruism, and justice—were codified in the writings of Confucius. In Mesopotamia and Greece, the presentation of a human character working things out (or not) in the face of adversity was the subject of epic and dra- matic literature. In Greece, it was also the subject of philos- ophy—literally, “love of wisdom”—the practice of reasoning that followed from the Greek philosopher Socrates’ famous dictum, “Know thyself.” Visual artists strove to discover the perfections of human form and thought. By the time of the rise of the Roman Empire, at the end of the first millen- nium bce, these traditions were carried on in more prac- tical ways, as the Romans attempted to engineer a society embodying the values they had inherited from the Greeks.

PART ONE TIMELINE

30,000 bce Art created in the Chauvet Cave

10,000–8000 bce Emergence of agricultural civilizations in Mesopotamia, India, Egypt, China

1792–1750 bce Hammurabi’s Law Code

1500–322 bce Vedic period in India; origins of Hinduism

3200–2000 bce Development of pictographic writing systems in Mesopotamia, India, Egypt, China

2500 bce Pyramids in Egypt

1200 bce Mesopotamia: Epic of Gilgamesh

1200 bce Earliest use of Phoenician phonetic alphabet

1300 bce Emergence of Olmec culture in Mesoamerica

800–600 bce Etruria: Origins of Roman culture

563–483 bce Lifetime of Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha) in India

551–479 bce Lifetime of Confucius in Zhou dynasty China

469–399 bce Lifetime of Socrates, Greek philosopher

461–429 bce Pericles, Socrates, Sophocles Parthenon on Athens’s Acropolis

1000 bce King David reigns in Israel

800 bce Acropolis (citadel) and agora (market) Homeric epics: Iliad and Odyssey

27 bce Octavian becomes Emperor Augustus

20 bce Augustus of Primaporta

1

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 1 13/11/2013 07:21

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 2 13/11/2013 07:21

3

THINKING AHEAD

1.1 Discuss the ways in which cave art and small sculptural figurines in the Paleolithic era have been interpreted.

1.2 Explain how the art and architecture of the Neolithic era reflect changing cultural concerns.

1.3 Understand the function of myth in prehistoric culture.

1.4 Describe the role of sacred sites in prehistoric culture.

O n a cold December afternoon in 1994, Jean-Marie Chauvet and two friends were exploring the caves in the steep cliffs along the Ardèche River gorge

in southern France. After descending into a series of nar- row passages, they entered a large chamber. There, beams from their headlamps lit up a group of drawings that would astonish the three explorers—and the world (Fig. 1.1).

Since the late nineteenth century, we have known that prehistoric peoples, peoples who lived before the time of writing and so of recorded history, drew on the walls of caves. Twenty-seven such caves had already been discov- ered in the cliffs along the 17 miles of the Ardèche gorge (Map 1.1). But the cave found by Chauvet and his friends transformed our thinking about prehistoric peoples. Where previously discovered cave paintings had appeared to mod- ern eyes as childlike, this cave contained drawings compa- rable to those a contemporary artist might have done. We can only speculate that other comparable artworks were pro- duced in prehistoric times but have not survived, perhaps because they were made of wood or other perishable materi- als. It is even possible that art may have been made earlier than 30,000 years ago, perhaps as people began to inhabit the Near East, between 90,000 and 100,000 years ago.

At first, during the Paleolithic era, or “Old Stone Age,” from the Greek palaios, “old,” and lithos, “stone,” the cultures

of the world sustained themselves on game and wild plants. The cultures themselves were small, scattered, and nomadic, though evidence suggests some interaction among the vari- ous groups. We begin this book, then, with the cultures of prehistoric times, evidence of which survives in wall paint- ings in caves and in small sculptures dating back more than 25,000 years.

Fig. 1.1 Wall painting with horses, Chauvet Cave, Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, Ardèche gorge, France. ca. 30,000 bce. Paint on limestone, height approx. 6'. Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication. Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles de Rhône-Alpes. Service Régional de l’Archéologie. In the center of this wall are four horses, each behind the other in a startlingly realistic depiction. Below them, two rhinoceroses fight.

The Rise of Culture From Forest to Farm

100 miles

100 km

4 miles

4 km

Bayol

Niaux Réseau Clastres

Fontanet

Chauvet

Vacheresse

Ebbou Le Colombier

Tête-du-Lion Les deux-Ouvertures

Chabot Le FiguierOulen

Le Portel

Gargas

Altamira Les Trois Freres`

Jovelle

Gabillou

Rouf�gnac Lascaux

La Mouthe Pech Merle Cougnac

La Baume-Latrone

Cosquer

Ardeche `

Ardeche `

Marseilles

Lyons

Toulouse

Major Paleolithic caves in France and Spain

Cahors

Bordeaux Isle

FRANCE

SPAIN

ARDECHE REGION

`

ARDECHE REGION`

ATLANTIC

OCEAN R

h ôn

e

Garonne

Dordogne Lot

Map 1.1 Major Paleolithic caves in France and Spain.

1

Listen to the chapter audio on MyArtsLab

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 3 13/11/2013 07:22

4 PART ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

THE BEGINNINGS OF CULTURE IN THE PALEOLITHIC ERA

In what ways has the role of art in Paleolithic culture been discussed?

A culture encompasses the values and behaviors shared by a group of people, developed over time, and passed down from one generation to the next. Culture manifests itself in the laws, customs, ritual behavior, and artistic produc- tion common to the group. The cave paintings at Chauvet suggest that, as early as 30,000 years ago, the Ardèche gorge was a center of culture, a focal point of group living in which the values of a community find expression. There were oth- ers like it. In northern Spain, the first decorated cave was dis covered in 1879 at Altamira. In the Dordogne region of southern France to the west of the Ardèche, schoolchil- dren discovered the famous Lascaux Cave in 1940 when their dog disappeared down a hole. And in 1991, along the French Mediterranean coast, a diver discovered the entrance to the beautifully decorated Cosquer Cave below the waterline near Marseille.

Agency and Ritual: Cave Art Ever since cave paintings were first discovered, scholars have marveled at the skill of the people who produced them, but we have been equally fascinated by their very existence. Why were these paintings made? Most scholars believe that they possessed some sort of agency—that is, they were created to exert some power or authority over the world of those who came into contact with them. Until

recently, it was generally accepted that such works were associated with the hunt. Perhaps the hunter, seeking game in times of scarcity, hoped to conjure it up by depicting it on cave walls. Or perhaps such drawings were magic charms meant to ensure a successful hunt. But at Chauvet, fully 60 percent of the animals painted on its walls were never, or rarely, hunted—such animals as lions, rhinoceroses, bears, panthers, and woolly mammoths. One drawing depicts two rhinoceroses fighting horn-to-horn beneath four horses that appear to be looking on (see Fig. 1.1).

What role, then, did these drawings play in the daily lives of the people who created them? The caves may have served as some sort of ritual space. A ritual is a rite or ceremony habitually practiced by a group, often in religious or quasi- religious contexts. The caves, for instance, might be understood as gateways to the underworld and death, as symbols of the womb and birth, or as pathways to the world of dreams experienced in the dark of night, and rites connected with such passage might have been con- ducted in them. The general arrangement of the animals in the paintings by species or gender, often in distinct chambers of the caves, suggests to some that the paint- ings may have served as lunar calendars for predict- ing the seasonal migration of the animals. Whatever the case, surviving human footprints indicate that these caves were ritual gathering places and in some way were intended to serve the common good.

At Chauvet, the use of color suggests that the paint- ings served some sacred or symbolic function. For instance, almost all of the paintings near the entrance to the cave are painted with natural red pigments derived from ores rich in iron oxide. Deeper in the cave, in areas more difficult to

Fig. 1.2 Wall painting with bird-headed man, bison, and rhinoceros, Lascaux Cave, Dordogne, France. ca. 15,000– 13,000 bce. Paint on limestone, length approx. 9'. In 1963, Lascaux was closed to the public so that conservators could fight a fungus attacking the paintings. Most likely, the fungus was caused by carbon dioxide exhaled by visitors. An exact replica called Lascaux II was built and can be visited.

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 4 13/11/2013 07:22

CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 5

reach, the vast majority of the animals are painted in black pigments derived from ores rich in manganese dioxide. This shift in color appears to be intentional, but we can only guess at its meaning.

The skillfully drawn images at Chauvet raise even more important questions. The artists seem to have understood and practiced a kind of illusionism—that is, they were able to convey a sense of three-dimensional space on a two- dimensional surface. In the painting reproduced at the beginning of this chapter, several horses appear to stand one behind the other (see Fig. 1.1). The head of the top horse overlaps a black line, as if peering over a branch or the back of another animal. In no other cave yet discovered do drawings show the use of shading, or modeling, so that the horses’ heads seem to have volume and dimension. And yet these cave paintings, rendered over 30,000 years ago, predate other cave paintings by at least 10,000 years, and in some cases by as much as 20,000 years.

One of the few cave paintings that depicts a human figure is found at Lascaux. What appears to be a male wear- ing a bird’s-head mask lies in front of a disemboweled bison (Fig. 1.2). Below him is a bird-headed spear thrower, a device that enabled hunters to throw a spear farther and with greater force. (Several examples of spear throwers have survived.) In the Lascaux painting, the hunter’s spear has pierced the bison’s hindquarters, and a rhinoceros charges off to the left. We have no way of knowing whether this was an actual event or an imagined scene. One of the paint- ing’s most interesting and inexplicable features is the dis- crepancy between the relatively naturalistic representation of the animals and the highly stylized, almost abstract reali- zation of the human figure. Was the sticklike man added later by a different, less talented artist? Or does this image suggest that man and beast are different orders of being?

Before the discovery of Chauvet, historians divided the history of cave painting into a series of successive styles, each progressively more realistic. But Chauvet’s paintings, by far the oldest known, are also the most advanced in their realism, suggesting the artists’ conscious quest for visual naturalism, that is, for representations that imitate the actual appearance of the animals. Not only were both red and black animals outlined, their shapes were also modeled by spreading paint, either with the hand or a tool, in grad- ual gradations of color. Such modeling is extremely rare or unknown elsewhere. In addition, the artists further defined many of the animals’ contours by scraping the wall behind so that the beasts seem to stand out against a deeper white ground. Three handprints in the cave were evidently made by spitting paint at a hand placed on the cave wall, result- ing in a stenciled image.

Art, the Chauvet drawings suggest, does not necessar- ily evolve in a linear progression from awkward beginnings to more sophisticated representations. On the contrary, already in the earliest artworks, people obtained a very high degree of sophistication. Apparently, even from the earliest

times, human beings could choose to represent the world naturalistically or not, and the choice not to represent the world in naturalistic terms should not necessarily be attributed to lack of skill or sophistication but to other, more culturally driven factors.

Paleolithic Culture and Its Artifacts Footprints discovered in South Africa in 2000 and fossilized remains uncovered in the forest of Ethiopia in 2001 suggest that, about 5.7 million years ago, the earliest upright humans, or hominins (as distinct from the larger classification of hominids, which includes great apes and chimpanzees as well as humans), roamed the continent of Africa. Ethiopian excavations further indicate that sometime around 2.5 or 2.6 million years ago, hominid populations began to make rudimentary stone tools, though long before, between 14  million and 19 million years ago, the Kenyapithecus (“Kenyan ape”), a hominin, made stone tools in east cen- tral Africa. Nevertheless, the earliest evidence of a culture coming into being are the stone artifacts of Homo sapiens (Latin for “one who knows”). Homo sapiens evolved about 100,000–120,000 years ago and can be distinguished from earlier hominids by the lighter build of their skeletal struc- ture and larger brain. A 2009 study of genetic diversity among Africans found the San people of Zimbabwe to be the most diverse, suggesting that they are the most likely origin of modern humans from which others gradually spread out of Africa, across Asia, into Europe, and finally to Australia and the Americas.

Homo sapiens were hunter-gatherers, whose survival depended on the animals they could kill and the foods they could gather, primarily nuts, berries, roots, and other edible plants. The tools they developed were far more sophisticated than those of their ancestors. They included cleavers, chisels, grinders, hand axes, and arrow- and spear- heads made of flint, a material that also provided the spark to create an equally important tool—fire. In 2004, Israeli archeologists working at a site on the banks of the Jordan River reported the earliest evidence yet found of controlled fire created by hominids—cracked and blackened flint chips, presumably used to light a fire, and bits of charcoal dating from 790,000 years ago. Also at the campsite were the bones of elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and small species, demonstrating that these early hominids cut their meat with flint tools and ate steaks and marrow. Homo sapiens cooked with fire, wore animal skins as clothing, and used tools as a matter of course. They buried their dead in ritual ceremonies, often laying them to rest accompanied by stone tools and weapons.

The Paleolithic era is the period of Homo sapiens’ ascendancy. These people carved stone tools and weap- ons that helped them survive in an inhospitable climate. They carved small sculptural objects as well, which, along with the cave paintings we have already seen, appear to

View the Closer Look for the Lascaux Cave on MyArtsLab

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 5 13/11/2013 07:22

6 PART ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

played a central role in Paleolithic culture. Most likely, they had considerable religious and spiritual influence, and their preponderance in the imagery of the era suggests that Paleolithic culture may have been matrilineal (in which descent is determined through the female line) and matri- local (in which residence is in the female’s tribe or house- hold). Such traditions exist in many primal societies today.

The peoples of the Upper Paleolithic period followed herds northward in summer, though temperatures dur- ing the Ice Age rarely exceeded 60 degrees Fahrenheit (16 degrees Celsius). Then, as winter approached, they retreated southward into the cave regions of northern Spain and southern France.

THE RISE OF AGRICULTURE IN THE NEOLITHIC ERA

How do Neolithic art and architecture reflect the era’s changing cultural concerns?

As the ice covering the Northern Hemisphere began to recede around 10,000 bce, the seas rose, covering, for instance, the cave entrance at Cosquer in southern France (see Map 1.1), filling what is now the North Sea and English Channel with water, and inundating the land bridge that had connected Asia and North America. Agri- culture began to replace hunting and gathering, and with it, a nomadic lifestyle gave way to a more sedentary way of life. The consequences of this shift were enormous, and ushered in the Neolithic era, or “New Stone Age.”

For 2,000 years, from 10,000 to 8000 bce, the ice covering the Northern Hemisphere receded farther and farther northward. As temperatures warmed, life gradu- ally changed. During this period of transition, areas once covered by vast regions of ice and snow developed into grassy plains and abundant forests. Hunters developed the bow and arrow, which were easier to use at longer range on the open plains. They fashioned dugout boats out of logs to facilitate fishing, which became a major food source. They domesticated dogs to help with the hunt as early as 11,000 bce, and soon other animals as well—goats and cat- tle particularly. Perhaps most important, people began to cultivate the more edible grasses. Along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, they harvested wheat; in Asia, they cultivated millet and rice; and in the Americas, they grew squash, beans, and corn. Gradually, farming replaced hunt- ing as the primary means of sustaining life. A culture of the fields developed—an agri-culture, from the Latin ager, “farm,” “field,” or “productive land.”

Agricultural production seems to have originated about 10,000 bce in the Fertile Crescent, an area arch- ing from southwest Iran, across the foothills of the Taurus Mountains in southeastern Turkey, then southward into Lebanon. By about 8000 bce, Neolithic agricultural societies began to concentrate in the great river valleys of the Middle East and Asia (Map 1.2). Here, distinct centers of people

be the first instances of what we have come to call “art” (see Materials & Techniques, page 7). Among the most remarkable of these sculptural artifacts are a large number of female figures, found at various archeological sites across Europe. The most famous of these is Woman, the limestone statuette of a woman found at Willendorf, in present-day Austria (Fig. 1.3), dating from about 22,000 to 21,000 bce and sometimes called the Venus of Willendorf. Markings on Woman and other similar figures indicate that they were originally colored, but what these small sculptures meant and what they were used for remains unclear. Most are 4 to 5 inches high and fit neatly into a person’s hand. This suggests that they may have had a ritual purpose. Their exaggerated breasts and bellies and their clearly delineated genitals support a connection to fertility and childbearing. We know, too, that the Willendorf Woman was originally painted in red ocher, suggestive of menses. And, her navel is not carved; rather, it is a natural indentation in the stone. Whoever carved her seems to have recognized, in the raw stone, a connection to the origins of life. But such figures may have served other purposes as well. Perhaps they were dolls, guardian figures, or images of beauty in a cold, hostile world where having body fat might have made the differ- ence between survival and death.

Female figurines vastly outnumber representations of males in the Paleolithic era, which suggests that women

Fig. 1.3 Woman (Venus of Willendorf), found at Willendorf, Austria. ca. 25,000–20,000 bce. Limestone, height 4". Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna. For many years, modern scholars called this small statue the Venus of Willendorf. They assumed that its carvers attributed to it an ideal of female beauty comparable to the Roman ideal of beauty implied by the name Venus.

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 6 13/11/2013 07:22

CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 7

Materials & Techniques Methods of Carving

Carving is the act of cutting or incising stone, bone, wood, or another material into a desired form. Surviving artifacts of the Paleolithic era were carved from stone or bone. The artist probably held a sharp instru- ment, such as a stone knife or a chisel, in one hand and drove it into the stone or bone with another stone held in the other hand to remove excess material and realize the figure. Finer details could be scratched into the material with a pointed stone instrument. Artists can carve into any material softer than the instrument they are using. Harder varieties of stone can cut into softer stone as well as bone. The work was probably pains- takingly slow.

There are basically two types of sculpture: sculpture-in-the-round and relief sculp ture. S c u l p tu r e - i n -t h e - r o u nd i s f u l ly t hr e e - dimensional; it occupies 360 degrees of space. The Willendorf statuette (see Fig. 1.3) was carved from stone and is an example of sculpture-in-the-round. Relief sculpture is

carved out of a flat background surface; it has a distinct front and no back. Not all relief sculptures are alike. In high-relief sculpture, the figure extends more than 180 degrees from the background surface. Woman Hold- ing an Animal Horn, found at Laussel, in the Dordogne region of France, is carved in high relief and is one of the earliest relief sculp- tures known. This sculpture was originally part of a great stone block that stood in front of a Paleolithic rock shelter. In low or bas relief, the figure extends less than 180 degrees from the surface. In sunken relief, the image is carved, or incised, into the surface, so that the image recedes below it. When a light falls on relief sculptures at an angle, the relief casts a shadow. The higher the relief, the larger the shadows and the greater the sense of the figure’s three-dimensionality.

Woman Holding an Animal Horn, Laussel, Dordogne, France. ca. 30,000–15,000 bce. Limestone, height 173⁄8". Musée des Antiquités Nationales, Saint Germain-en-Laye, France.

Map 1.2 The great river valley civilizations. ca. 2000 bce. Agriculture thrived in the great river valleys throughout the Neolithic era, but by the end of the period, urban life had developed there as well, and civilization as we know it had emerged.

1,000 km

1,000 miles

YELLOW RIVER (Shang)

INDUS-GANGES (Harappan and

Vedic civilizations)

TIGRIS-EUPHRATES (Ancient Mesopotamia

and Babylonia)

NILE (Ancient Egypt)

River Valley Civilizations

Jericho Susa Jiangzhai

GANSU

I can only nd "Gansu Province" in China? Not a town or city, this is why there is no dot and is in caps

Ain Ghazal

CHINA

AFGHANISTAN

PACIFIC

OCEAN Arabian

Sea

Lake Balkhash

Lake Baikal

Black Sea

Aral Sea

Bay of

Bengal

South China Sea

East China Sea

Brahamaputra

In du

s

Ganges

Ye llo

w

N ile

P ersian Gulf

R e

d S

e a

C aspian S

ea

Su tle

j

Euphrates

Tigris

Ya ng

tz e

Danube

Mediterranean Sea

Watch a video about the technique of relief carving on MyArtsLab

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 7 13/11/2013 07:22

8 PART ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

involved in a common pursuit began to form. A civiliza- tion is a social, economic, and political entity distinguished by the ability to express itself through images and written language. Civilizations develop when the environment of a region can support a large and productive population. An increasing population requires increased production of food and other goods, not only to support itself, but to trade for other commodities. Organizing this level of trade and production also requires an administrative elite to form and to establish priorities. The existence of such an elite is another characteristic of civilization. Finally, as the history of cultures around the world makes abundantly clear, one of the major ways that societies have acquired the goods they want and simultaneously organized themselves is by means of war.

Gradually, as the climate warmed, Neolithic culture spread across Europe. By about 5000 bce, the valleys of Spain and southern France supported agriculture, but there is no evidence of farming in the northern reaches of the European continent and England dating back any earlier than about 4000 bce. The Neolithic era did not end in these colder climates until about 2000 bce, and continued in more remote regions, such as Africa and the Americas, well into the first millennium.

Meanwhile, the great rivers of the Middle East and Asia provided a consistent and predictable source of water, and people soon developed irrigation techniques that fostered organized agriculture and animal husbandry. As production outgrew necessity, members of the community were freed to occupy themselves in other endeavors—complex food preparation (bread, cheese, and so on), construction, reli- gion, and even military affairs. Soon, permanent villages began to appear, and villages began to look more and more like cities.

Neolithic Çatalhöyük and Skara Brae Sometime around 7400 bce, at Çatalhöyük (also known as Chatal Huyuk) in central Turkey, a permanent vil- lage began to take shape that would flourish for nearly 1,200 years. At one point or another, as many as 3,000 people lived in close proximity to one another in rectan- gular houses made of mud bricks held together with plas- ter. These houses stood side by side, one wall abutting the next, with entrances through the roof and down a ladder. There were no windows, and the only natural light in the interior came from the entry way. The roof appears to have served as the primary social space, especially in the summer months. Domed ovens were placed both on the roof and in the interior.

The people of Çatalhöyük were apparently traders, prin- cipally of obsidian, a black, volcanic, and glasslike stone that can be carved into sharp blades and arrowheads, which they mined at Hasan Dag, a volcano visible from the vil- lage. The rows of windowless houses that composed the village, the walls of which rose to as high as 16 feet, must have served a defensive purpose, but they also contained

what archeologists have come to view as an extraordinary sense of communal history. Their interior walls and floors were plastered and replastered, then painted and repainted with a white lime-based paint, again and again over hun- dreds of years. Beneath the floors of some—but not all—of the houses were burials, averaging about six per house, but sometimes rising to between 30 and 62 bodies. For reasons that are not entirely clear, from time to time, these bod- ies were exhumed, and the skulls of long-deceased ancestors were removed. The skulls were then reburied in new graves or in the foundations of new houses as they were built and rebuilt. Whatever the rationale for such ceremonies, they could not have helped but create a sense of historical conti- nuity in the community.

Çatalhöyük was first extensively excavated from 1958 by Sir James Mellaart, who concluded that the village’s culture was matrilineal, based in no small part on his discovery of a number of female figurines including a clay sculpture of a seated woman (Fig. 1.4), who represented, he believed, a fertility or mother goddess. Found in a grain bin— evidence of the community’s growing agricultural sophisti- cation—she sits enthroned between two felines, perhaps in the process of giving birth. But Ian Hodder of Cambridge University, who took up excavations of the site in 1993, after a nearly 30-year hiatus, has recently concluded that she is something other than a fertility goddess. In 2005, he wrote:

Fig. 1.4 Woman seated between two felines, Çatalhöyük, Turkey. ca. 6850–6300 bce. Terra cotta, height 45⁄8". Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara. The woman’s head in this sculpture is a modern addition.

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 8 13/11/2013 07:22

CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 9

Fig. 1.5 Reconstruction of a “shrine,” Çatalhöyük, Turkey. ca. 6850– 6300 bce. Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara. The relief sculpture below the arch in the center of the room appears to be a decapitated animal or even, possibly, human form.

There are full breasts on which the hands rest and the stom- ach is extended in the central part. There is a hole in the top for the head which is missing. As one turns the figurine around one notices that the arms are very thin, and then on the back of the figurine one sees a depiction of either a skeleton or the bones of a very thin and depleted human. The ribs and vertebrae are clear, as are the scapulae and the main pelvic bones. The figurine can be interpreted in a number of ways—as a woman turning into an ancestor,

as a woman associated with death, or as death and life con- joined. … Perhaps the importance of female imagery was related to some special role of the female in relation to death as much as to the roles of mother and nurturer.

Supporting Hodder’s theories is a burial of a deceased woman who holds in her arms the plastered and painted skull of a male.

Similarly, Mellaart believed that many of the rooms that contained large numbers of bodies were shrines or temples (Fig. 1.5). The walls of these rooms were deco- rated with the skulls of cows and the heads and horns of bulls. Found under the floors of some houses were boar tusks, vulture skulls, and fox and weasel teeth. But Hodder has found evidence that these houses—he calls them “history houses”—were not shrines at all, but more or less continually occupied, suggesting that art and decora- tion were integral to the daily lives of the community’s resi- dents. Numerous wall paintings reinforce this idea. In one painting (Fig. 1.6), small human beings surround a large horned animal, probably a deer, in what has been inter- preted as a dangerous game of baiting wild animals. One man appears to be pulling the deer’s tongue out of its mouth, while others jump and run around it. The deer itself is depicted with a large erect penis, suggesting that male virility is at least in part at stake in the game. All of this suggests that, by the Neolithic era, the religious and spir- itual prominence of the female in Paleolithic culture was gradually diminishing.

Preserved in the cold northern climate of the Orkney Islands off the northeastern coast of Scotland is Skara Brae.

Fig. 1.6 Wall painting showing the capturing or baiting of a deer, Çatalhöyük, Turkey. ca. 6850–6300 bce. Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara. The painting, along with many others like it, suggests that the hunt played a significant role in Neolithic culture, as it did in Paleolithic times.

See Frank Stella, Çatal Hüyük (level VI B) Shrine VI B.1, 2001,

at MyArtsLab Aluminum pipe and cast

aluminum, 97” × 1263⁄4” × 91”. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro and John L. Severance Fund 2001.126. © 2014 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society

(ARS), New York

The CoNtiNUiNG PreseNCe of the PAst

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 9 13/11/2013 07:22

10 PART ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

Fig. 1.7 House interior, Skara Brae, Orkney Islands, Scotland. ca. 3100–2600 bce. This is a view of the interior of house 7 in Fig. 1.8. In this and other houses, archeologists have found stone cooking pots; mortars for grinding grains, including barley and wheat; carved stone balls; bone tools used for fishing and sewing; and pottery. In this view, the corbeled walls are just beginning to curve inward.

Some 4,000 years younger than Çatalhöyük, Skara Brae is a Neolithic village dating from between 3100 and 2600 bce. The seaside village was apparently buried long ago beneath a layer of sand during a massive storm, and then, in 1850, uncovered when another storm swept the sand away.

The houses of Skara Brae are made entirely of stone— virtually the only building material on the treeless Orkney Islands. The walls are made by corbeling, a construction technique (see Materials & Techniques, page 18), in which layers of flat stones are piled one upon the other, with each layer projecting slightly inward as the wall rises. As the walls curve inward, they are buttressed, or supported, on the outside by earth. Nothing of the roofs has survived, sug- gesting that they were constructed of organic matter such as straw thatch or seaweed (seaweed remained a common roofing material in the Orkney Islands into the twentieth century). Furniture was built into the walls—in the house shown here, rectangular stone beds at either side of a cen- tral hearth, and a stone bench along the back wall (Fig. 1.7). The bed frames would have been filled with organic

7

6

1

2

3

5

4 30 ft0

9 m

Fig. 1.8 Plan, Village of Skara Brae, Orkney Islands, Scotland. ca. 3100–2600 bce. The numbers refer to individual houses.

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 10 13/11/2013 07:22

CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 11

Fig. 1.9 Deep bowl with sculptural rim, late Middle Jomon period (ca. 2500–1600 bce), Japan. ca. 2000 bce. Terra cotta, 141⁄2" × 121⁄3". Musée des Arts Asiatiques-Guimet, Paris. The motifs incised on this pot may have had some meaning, but most interesting is the potter’s freedom of expression. The design of the pot’s flamelike rim is anything but practical.

Fig. 1.10 Basin (pen), Majiayao culture, Majiayao phase, Gansu Province, China. ca. 3200–2700 bce. Earthenware with painted decoration, diameter 11". The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Anonymous Loan (L.1996.55.6). The designs on this bowl are examples of the kind of markings that would eventually develop into writing.

materials such as heather or straw, and covered with furs. Storage spaces have been fashioned into the walls above the beds and in the back left corner. The only light in the house would have come from the smoke hole above the hearth.

The houses in the village were connected by a series of narrow walkways that were probably covered (Fig. 1.8). Each of the houses is more or less square, with rounded cor- ners. They are relatively spacious, ranging in size from 12 by 14 feet to 20 by 21 feet. That Skara Brae was continually inhabited for 500 years suggests that life in the village was relatively comfortable despite the harsh climate.

Neolithic Pottery Across Cultures The transition from cultures based on hunting and fishing to cultures based on agriculture led to the increased use of pottery vessels. Ceramic vessels are fragile, so hunter- gatherers would not have found them practical for carrying food, but people living in the more permanent Neolithic settlements could have used them to carry and store water, and to prepare and store certain types of food.

As early as 10,000 bce, Japanese artisans were mak- ing clay pots capable of storing, transporting, and cook- ing food and water. Over the course of the Neolithic era, called the Jomon period in Japan (12,000–300 bce), their

work became increasingly decorative. Jomon means “cord markings” and refers to the fact that potters decorated many of their wares by pressing cord into the damp clay. As in most Neolithic societies, women made Jomon pot- tery; their connection to fertility and the life cycle may have become even more important to Neolithic cultures in the transition from hunting and gathering to agricul- tural food production. Jomon women built their pots up from the bottom with coil upon coil of soft clay. They mixed the clay with a variety of adhesive materials, includ- ing mica, lead, fibers, and crushed shells. After forming the vessel, they employed tools to smooth both the outer and interior surfaces. Finally, they decorated the out- side with cord markings and fired the pot in an outdoor bonfire at a temperature of about 1650 degrees Fahren- heit (900 degrees Celsius). By the Middle Jomon period, potters had begun to decorate the normal flat-bottomed, straight-sided jars with elaborately ornate and flamelike rims (Fig. 1.9), distinguished by their asymmetry and their unique characteristics. These rims suggest animal forms, but their significance remains a mystery.

The Neolithic cultures that flourished along the banks of the Yellow River in China beginning in about 5000 bce also produced pottery. These cultures were based on grow- ing rice and millet (grains from the Near East would not be introduced for another 3,000 years), and this agricul- tural emphasis spawned towns and villages, such as Jiang- zhai, the largest Neolithic site that has been excavated in China. The Jiangzhai community, near present-day Xi’an, in Shaanxi Province, dates to about 4000 bce and con- sisted of about 100 dwellings. At its center was a communal gathering place, a cemetery, and, most important, a kiln, an oven specifically designed to achieve the high tempera- tures necessary for firing clay. Indeed, the site yielded many pottery fragments. Farther to the east, in Gansu Province, Neolithic potters began to add painted decoration to their work (Fig. 1.10). The flowing, curvilinear forms painted

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 11 13/11/2013 07:22

12 PART ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

on the shallow basin illustrated here include “hand” motifs on the outside, and round, almost eyelike forms that flow into each other on the inside.

Some of the most remarkable Neolithic painted pottery comes from Susa, on the Iranian plateau. The patterns on one particular beaker (Fig. 1.11) from around 5000 to 4000 bce are highly stylized animals. The largest of these is an ibex, a popular decorative feature of prehistoric ceramics from Iran. Associated with the hunt, the ibex may have been a symbol of plenty. The front and hind legs of the ibex are rendered by two tri- angles, the tail hangs behind it like a feather, the head is oddly disconnected from the body, and the horns rise in a large, exaggerated arc to encircle a decorative circular form. Hounds race around the band above the ibex, and wading birds form a deco- rative band across the beaker’s top.

In Europe, the production of pottery apparently developed some time later, around 3000 bce. Early pots were made either by molding clay over a round stone or by coiling long ropes of clay on top of one another and then smoothing the seams between them. Then the pots were fired at temperatures high enough to make them watertight—above 700 degrees Fahren- heit (370 degrees Celsius).

By this time, however, artisans in Egypt had begun using the potter’s wheel, a revolving platter for forming vessels from clay with the fingers. It allowed artisans to produce a uniformly shaped vessel in a very short time. By 3000 bce, the potter’s wheel was in use in the Mid- dle East as well as China. Because it is a machine created expressly to produce goods, it is in many ways the first mechanical and technological breakthrough in history. As skilled individuals specialized in making and decorating pottery, and traded their wares for other goods and services, the first elemental forms of manufacturing began to emerge.

Neolithic Ceramic Figures It is a simple step from forming clay pots and firing them to modeling clay sculptural figures and submitting them to the same firing process. Examples of clay modeling can be found in some of the earliest Paleolithic cave sites where, at Altamira, for instance, in Spain, an artist added clay to an existing rock outcropping in order to underscore the rock’s natural resemblance to an animal form. At Le Tuc d’Audoubert, south of Lascaux in France, an artist shaped two clay bison, each 2 feet long, as if they were leaning against a rock ridge.

But these Paleolithic sculptures were never fired. One of the most interesting examples of Neolithic fired clay figurines were the work of the so-called Nok people who lived in what is now Nigeria. We do not know what they called themselves—they are identified instead by the name of the place where their artifacts were discovered. In fact,

Fig. 1.11 Beaker with ibex, dogs, and long-necked birds, from Susa, southwestern Iran. ca. 5000–4000 bce. Baked clay with painted decoration, height 111⁄4". Musée du Louvre, Paris. The ibex was the most widely hunted game in the ancient Middle East, which probably accounts for its centrality in this design.

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 12 13/11/2013 07:22

CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 13

Fig. 1.12 Nok head. ca. 500 bce–200 ce. Terra cotta, height 143⁄16". This slightly larger-than-life-size head was probably part of a complete body, and shows the Nok people’s interest in abstract geometrical representations of facial features and head shape. Holes in the eyes and nose were probably used to control temperature during firing.

we know almost nothing about the Nok. We do not know how their culture was organized, what their lives were like, or what they believed. But while most Neolithic peoples in Africa worked in materials that were not permanent, the Nok fired clay figures of animals and humans that were approximately life-size.

These figures were first unearthed early in the twentieth century by miners over an area of about 40 square miles. Carbon-14 and other forms of dating revealed that some of these objects had been made as early as 800 bce and others as late as 600 ce. Little more than the hollow heads have survived intact, revealing an artistry based on abstract geo- metrical shapes (Fig. 1.12). In some cases, the heads are

represented as ovals, and in others, as cones, cylinders, or spheres. Facial features are combinations of ovals, triangles, graceful arches, and straight lines. These heads were prob- ably shaped with wet clay and then, after firing, finished by carving details into the hardened clay. Some scholars have argued that the technical and artistic sophistication of works by the Nok and other roughly contemporaneous groups suggests that it is likely there are older artistic tradi- tions in West Africa that have not as yet been discovered. Certainly, farther to the east, in the sub-Saharan regions of the Sudan, Egyptian culture had exerted considerable influence for centuries, and it may well be that Egyptian technological sophistication had worked its way westward.

View the Closer Look for the Nok head on MyArtsLab

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 13 13/11/2013 07:22

14 PART ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

The Neolithic Megaliths of Northern Europe A distinctive kind of monumental stone architecture appears late in the Neolithic period, particularly in what is now Britain and France. Known as megaliths, or “big stones,” these works were constructed without the use of mortar and represent the most basic form of architectural construction. Sometimes, they consisted merely of posts— upright stones stuck into the ground—called menhirs, from the Celtic words men, “stone,” and hir, “long.” These sin- gle stones occur in isolation or in groups. The largest of the groups is at Carnac, in Brittany (Fig. 1.13), where some 3,000 menhirs arranged east to west in 13 straight rows, called alignments, cover a 2-mile stretch of plain. At the east end, the stones stand about 3 feet tall and gradually get larger and larger until, at the west end, they attain a height of 13 feet. This east–west alignment suggests a con- nection to the rising and setting of the sun and to fertil- ity rites. Scholars disagree about their significance; some speculate that the stones may have marked out a ritual pro- cession route; others think they symbolized the body and the process of growth and maturation. But there can be no doubt that megaliths were designed to be permanent struc- tures, where domestic architecture was not. Quite possibly the megaliths stood in tribute to the strength of the leaders

responsible for assembling and maintaining the consider- able labor force required to construct them.

Another megalithic structure, the dolmen, consists of two posts roofed with a capstone, or lintel. Because it is composed of three stones, the dolmen is a trilithon, from Greek tri, “three,” and lithos, “rock,” and it formed the basic unit of architectural structure for thousands of years. Today, we call this kind of construction post-and-lintel (see Mate- rials & Techniques, page 18). Megaliths such as the dolmen in County Clare, Ireland (Fig. 1.14), were probably once covered with earth to form a fully enclosed burial chamber, or cairn.

A third type of megalithic structure is the cromlech, from the Celtic crom, “circle,” and lech, “place.” Without doubt, the most famous megalithic structure in the world is the cromlech known as Stonehenge (Fig. 1.15), on Salis- bury Plain, about 100 miles west of present-day London. A henge is a special type of cromlech, a circle surrounded by a ditch with built-up embankments, presumably for fortification purposes.

The site at Stonehenge reflects four major building peri- ods, extending from about 2750 to 1500 bce. By about 2100 bce, most of the elements visible today were in place. In the middle was a U-shaped arrangement of five post-and-

Fig. 1.13 Neolithic menhir alignments at Ménec, Carnac, Brittany, France. ca. 4250–3750 bce. According to an ancient legend, the Carnac menhirs came into being when a retreating army was driven to the sea. Finding no ships to aid their escape, they turned to face their enemy and were transformed into stone.

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 14 13/11/2013 07:22

CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 15

Fig. 1.15 Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, England. ca. 2750–1500 bce. Like most Neolithic sites, Stonehenge invites speculation about its significance. Of this, however, we are certain: At the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, the sun rises directly over the Heel Stone (see page 17). This suggests that the site was intimately connected to the movement of the sun.

lintel trilithons. The one at the bottom of the U stands taller than the rest, rising to a height of 24 feet, with a 15-foot lintel 3 feet thick. A continuous circle of sandstone posts, each weighing up to 50 tons and all standing 20 feet high, surrounded the five trilithons. Across their top was a continuous lintel 106 feet in diameter. This is the Sarsen Circle. Just inside the Sarsen Circle was once another circle, made of bluestone—a bluish dolerite—found only in the mountains of southern Wales, some 120 miles away. (See Closer Look, pages 16–17.)

Why Stonehenge was constructed remains a mystery, although it seems clear that orienta- tion toward the rising sun at the summer sol- stice connects it to planting and the harvest. Stonehenge embodies, in fact, the growing importance of agricultural production in the northern reaches of Europe. Perhaps great ritu- als celebrating the earth’s plenty took place here. Together with other megalithic structures

Fig. 1.14 Neolithic dolmen. Poulnabrone Dolmen, on the Burren limestone plateau, County Clare, Ireland. ca. 2500 bce. A mound of earth probably once covered this structure, an ancient burial chamber.

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 15 13/11/2013 07:22

16 PART ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

C L O S E R L O O K

H ow the Neolithic peoples of Britain constructed Stonehenge is uncertain. Scholars believe that the giant stones of the Sarsen Circle, which weigh up

to 50 tons, were transported from the Marlborough Downs, roughly 20 miles to the north, by rolling them on logs. Most of the way, the going is relatively easy, but at the steepest part of the route, at Redhorn Hill, modern work studies esti- mate that it would have taken at least 600 men to push the stones up the hill. A relatively sophisticated understanding of basic physics—the operation of levers and pulleys—was needed to lift the stones, and their lintels, into place.

Recently, archeologists at Stonehenge have uncovered a second cromlech-like circle at Durrington Walls, about 2 miles north of the stone megalith, consisting of a circu- lar ditch surrounding a ring of postholes out of which very large timber posts would have risen. The circle was the center of a village consisting of as many as 300 houses. The site is comparable in scale to Stonehenge itself. These discoveries—together with the ability to carbon date human remains found at Stonehenge with increased accu- racy—suggest that Stonehenge was itself a burial ground. Archeologist Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield speculates that villagers would have transported their dead down an avenue leading to the River Avon, then journeyed downstream, in a ritual symbolizing the passage to the afterlife, finally arriving at an avenue leading up to

Finally, the platform is removed, and the trilithon is complete.

Once the platform reaches the top of the posts, the lintel is levered onto the posts.

The pit around the stone is filled with stones and chalks to pack it into place.

As many as 200 men pull the stone upright on ropes as timbers support it from behind.

One by one, layers of timber are placed under the lever, both raising the stone and dropping it into the prepared pit.

A sarsen stone is raised with a long lever. Logs are placed under the stone, and then it is rolled into place.

The lintel is raised on successive layers of a timber platform.

Stonehenge from the river. “Stonehenge wasn’t set in isola- tion,” Parker Pearson says, “but was actually one half of this monument complex. We are looking at a pairing—one in timber to represent the transience of life, the other in stone marking the eternity of the ancestral dead.”

SCOTLAND

UNITED KINGDOM

DOMAIN OF THE LIVING

DOMAIN OF THE ANCESTORS

IRELAND

Stonehenge

Stonehenge Avenue

Newly discovered avenue

Durrington Walls

ENGLAND WALES

NORTHERN IRELAND

SCOTLAND

London

Woodhenge Stonehenge

Cursus

(prehistoric boundary)

Journey from life to death

R iv

er A

vo n

Riv er A

von

0 ml 1

0 km 1

S A L I

S B U R

Y P L A I N

Durrington Walls in relation to Stonehenge. Courtesy of National Geographic.

Something to Think About … The circle is a geometric form that appears in the earliest manifestations of art and architecture. Can you speculate on its appeal?

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 16 13/11/2013 07:22

CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 17

The Outer Bank This ditch, 330 feet in diameter, is the oldest construction at the site, originally exposing the white limestone beneath the surface soil to form a giant circle.

The Avenue The shadow cast by the Heel Stone on Midsummer’s Eve would extend directly down this ceremonial approach.

The Heel Stone On Midsummer’s Eve, this stone casts a shadow directly into the circle. The stone stands 16 feet high and weighs 35 tons. It was brought from a quarry 23 miles away.

The Slaughter Stone It was once believed that humans were sacrificed on this stone, which now lies flat on the ground, but it was originally part of a great portal.

The Bluestone Circle This circle of 80 smallish slabs was built in about 2000 bce from stone quarried in South Wales.

The Sarsen Circle Erected about 1500 bce, the circle is capped by lintel stones held in place by mortise- and-tenon joints, similar to those used by woodworkers. The end of the post is narrowed and slotted into a hole in the lintel.

The Altar Stone One of the most distinct stones in Stonehenge, the so-called Altar Stone is a 16-foot block of smoothed green sandstone located near the center of the complex.

Five Massive Trilithons Inside the outer circle stood a horseshoe of trilithons, two on each side and the largest at the closed end at the southwest. Only one of the largest trilithons still stands. It rises 22 feet above ground, with 8 feet more below ground level. The stone weighs about 50 tons.

The Design and Making of Stonehenge

View the Closer Look for Stonehenge on MyArtsLab

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 17 13/11/2013 07:22

18 PART ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

of the era, it suggests that the late Neolithic peoples who built it were extremely social beings, capable of great cooperation. They worked together not only to find the giant stones that stand at the site, but also to quarry, trans- port, and raise them. In other words, theirs was a culture of some magnitude and no small skill. It was a culture capable of both solving great problems and organizing itself in the name of creating a great social center. For Stonehenge is, above all, a center of culture. Its fascination for us today lies in the fact that we know so little of the culture that left it behind.

THE ROLE OF MYTH IN CULTURAL LIFE

What is the function of myth in prehistoric culture?

Much of our understanding of pre historic cultures comes from stories that have survived in cultures around the world that developed without writing—that is, oral cul- tures—such as the San cultures of Zimbabwe, and the Oceanic peoples of Tahiti in the South Pacific. These cul- tures have passed down their myths and histories over the centuries, from generation to generation, by word of mouth. Although, chronologically speaking, many of these cultures are contemporaneous with the medieval, Renaissance, and even modern cultures of the West, they are actually closer to the Neolithic cultures in terms of social practice and organization. Especially in terms of myths and the rituals associated with them, they can help us to understand the outlook of actual Neolithic peoples.

A myth is a story that a culture assumes is true. It also embodies the culture’s views and beliefs about its world,

often serving to explain otherwise mysterious natural phe- nomena. Myths stand apart from scientific explanations of the nature of reality, but as a mode of understanding and explanation, myth has been one of the most impor- tant forces driving the development of culture. Although myths are speculative, they are not pure fantasy. They are grounded in observed experience. They serve to rationalize the unknown and to explain to people the nature of the universe and their place within it.

Both nineteenth-century and more recent anthropologi- cal work among the San people suggests that their belief sys- tems can be traced back for thousands of years. As a result, the meaning of their rock art that survives in open-air caves below the overhanging stone cliffs atop the hills of what is now Matobo National Park in Zimbabwe (Fig. 1.16), some of which dates back as far as 5,000 to 10,000 years ago, is not entirely lost. A giraffe stands above a group of smaller giraffes crossing a series of large, white, lozenge-shaped forms with brown rectangular centers, many of them overlapping one another. To the right, six humanlike figures are joined hand in hand, probably in a trance dance. For the San people, pro- longed dancing activates num, a concept of personal energy or potency that the entire community can acquire. Led by a shaman, a person thought to have special ability to commu- nicate with the spirit world, the dance encourages the num to heat up until it boils over and rises up through the spine to explode, causing the dancers to enter into a trance. Sweat- ing and trembling, the dancers variously convulse or become rigid. They might run, jump, or fall. The San believe that in many instances, the dancer’s spirit leaves the body, traveling far away, where it might enter into battle with supernatu- ral forces. At any event, the trance imbues the dancer with almost supernatural agency. The dancers’ num is capable of curing illnesses, managing game, or controlling the weather.

Materials & Techniques Post-and-Lintel and Corbel Construction

Post-and-lintel is the most basic technique for spanning space. In this form of construction two posts, or pieces fixed firmly in an upright position, support a lintel, or horizontal span. Two posts and a single lintel, as seen in County Clare and at Stonehenge (see Figs. 1.14, 1.15), constitute a trilithon (from the Greek tri, “three,” and lithos, “rock”). The houses at Skara Brae (see Fig. 1.8) are examples of corbel construction. In corbeling, layers of rock are laid with the edge of each row projecting inward beyond the row below it until the walls almost meet at the top. The rows are buttressed, or sup- ported, by earth piled on the outside. A roof of organic material can cover the top, or a stone can be set over the top to completely enclose the space (to create a tomb, for instance).

posts

lintel

1. Post and lintel

4. Wood-post framing of prehistoric structure

Granite post-and-lintel construction, Valley Temple of Khafre, Giza, Egypt, c. 2500 BCE

2. Cross-section of post-and-lintel underground burial chamber

3. Cross-section of corbeled underground burial chamber

5.

Post-and-lintel construction

Corbel construction

Watch an architectural simulation about post-and-lintel on MyArtsLab

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 18 13/11/2013 07:22

CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 19

Fig. 1.16 Wall painting with giraffes, zebra, eland, and abstract shapes, San people, Inanke, Matobo National Park, Zimbabwe. Before 1000 ce. Photo: Christopher and Sally Gable © Dorling Kindersley. The animals across the bottom are eland, the largest of antelope, resembling cattle.

Myth in the Native American Cultures of the Southwest Seventeen thousand years ago, about the time that the hunter-gatherers at Lascaux painted its caves, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were more than 300 feet below modern levels, exposing a low-lying continental shelf that extended from northeastern Asia to North America. It was a land- scape of grasslands and marshes, home to the woolly mam- moth, the steppe bison, wild horses, caribou, and antelope. Although recent research has found evidence of migration into North America as early as 25,000 years ago, at some point around 15,000 bce, large numbers of hunter-gath- erers in northeastern Asia followed these animals across the grasslands land bridge into the Americas. By 12,000 bce, prehistoric hunters had settled across North America and begun to move farther south, through Mesoamerica (the region extending from central Mexico to northern Central America), and on into South America, reaching the southern end of Chile no later than 11,000 bce.

Around 9000 bce, for reasons that are still hotly debated—perhaps a combination of overhunting and cli- matic change—the peoples of the Americas developed agricultural societies. They domesticated animals—turkeys,

guinea pigs, dogs, and llamas, though never a beast of burden, as in the rest of the world—and they cultivated a whole new range of plants, including maize and corn (domesticated in the Valley of Mexico by 8000 bce), beans, squash, tomatoes, avocados, potatoes, tobacco, and cacao, the source of chocolate. The wheel remained unknown to them, though they learned to adapt to almost every con- ceivable climate and landscape. A creation myth, or story of a people’s origin, told by the Maidu tribe of California, characterizes this early time: “For a long time everyone spoke the same language, but suddenly people began to speak in different tongues. Kulsu (the Creator), however, could speak all languages, so he called his people together and told them the names of the animals in their own lan- guage, taught them to get food, and gave them their laws and rituals. Then he sent each tribe to a different place to live.”

The Anasazi and the Role of Myth The Anasazi people thrived in the American Southwest from about 900 to 1300 ce, a time roughly contemporaneous with the late Middle Ages in Europe. They left us no written record of their culture, only ruins and artifacts. As William M. Fer- guson and Arthur H. Rohn, two prominent scholars of

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 19 13/11/2013 07:22

20 PART ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

the Anasazi, have described them: “They were a Neolithic people without a beast of burden, the wheel, metal, or a written language, yet they constructed magnificent masonry housing and ceremonial structures, irrigation works, and water impoundments.” At Mesa Verde, in what is today southwestern Colorado, their cliff dwell- ings (Fig. 1.17) resemble many of the Neolithic cities of the Middle East, such as Ain Ghazal (“spring of the gazelles”), just outside what is now Amman, Jordan. Though Ain Ghazal flourished from about 7200 to 5000 bce, thousands of years before the Mesa Verde community, both complexes were con- structed with stone walls sealed with a layer of mud plas- ter. Their roofs were made of wooden beams cross-layered with smaller twigs and branches and sealed with mud. Like other Neolithic cultures, the Anasazi were accomplished in pottery-making, decorating their creations with elaborately abstract, largely geometric shapes and patterns.

The Anasazi abandoned their communities in the late thirteenth century, perhaps because of a great drought that lasted from about 1276 to 1299. Their descendants may be the Pueblo peoples of the American Southwest today.

(Anasazi is in fact a Navajo word meaning “enemy ances- tors”—we do not know what the Anasazi called them- selves.) What is remarkable about the Pueblo peoples, who despite the fact that they speak several different languages share a remarkably common culture, is t hat many aspects of their culture have survived and are practiced today much as they were in ancient times. For all Pueblo peoples, the

Fig. 1.17 Spruce Tree House, Mesa Verde, Colorado, Anasazi culture. ca. 1200–1300 ce. The courtyard was formed by the restoration of the roofs over two underground kivas.

Fig. 1.18 Roof construction of a kiva. After a National Park Service pamphlet.

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 20 13/11/2013 07:22

CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 21

village is not just the center of culture but the very center of the world. And the cultural center of village life is the kiva (Fig. 1.18), two of which have been restored at Spruce Tree House to form the plaza visible in Fig. 1.17. They are constructed of horizontally laid logs built up to form a dome with an access hole. The roof area thus created is used as a common area. Down below, in the enclosed kiva floor, was a sipapu, a small, round hole symbolic of the Ana- sazi creation myth, which told of the emergence of the Anasazi’s ancestors from the depths of the earth. In the parched Southwestern desert country, it is equally true that water, like life itself, also seeps out of small fissures in the earth. Thus, it is as if the Anasazi community itself, and everything necessary to its survival, had emerged from Mother Earth.

Zuni Pueblo Emergence Tales The Pueblos have main- tained the active practice of their ancient religious rites and ceremonies, which they have chosen not to share with outsiders. Most do not allow their ceremonial dances to be photographed. These dance performances tell stories that relate to the experiences of the Pueblo peoples, from plant- ing, hunting, and fishing in daily life to the larger experi- ences of birth, puberty, maturity, and death. Still other stories explain the origin of the world, the emergence of a particular Pueblo people into the world, and their history. Most Pueblo people believe that they originated in the womb of Mother Earth and, like seeds sprouting from the soil in the springtime, were called out into the daylight by their Sun Father. This belief about origins is embodied in a type of narrative known as an emergence tale, a form of creation myth (reading 1.1).

So begins this emergence tale, which embodies the fun- damental principles of Zuni religious society. The Zuni, or “Sun People,” are organized into groups, each responsible for a particular aspect of the community’s well-being, and each group is represented by a particular -eto·we, or fetish, connecting it to its spiritual foundation in Earth’s womb. The pekwins mentioned here are sun priests, who control the ritual calendar. Bow priests oversee warfare and social behavior. In return for corn and breath given them by the Sun Father, the Zuni offer him cornmeal and downy

Into the daylight of their sun father they came forth standing. Just as early dawn they came forth. After they came forth there they set down their sacred possessions in a row. The two said, “Now after a little while when your sun father comes forth standing to his sacred place you will see him face to face. Do not close your eyes.” Thus he said to them. After a little while the sun came out. When he came out they looked at him. From their eyes the tears rolled down. After they had looked at him, in a little while their eyes became strong. “Alas!” Thus they said. They were covered all over with slime. With slimy tails and slimy horns, with webbed fingers, they saw one another. “Oh dear! is this what we look like?” Thus they said.

Then they could not tell which was which of their sacred possessions.

From this point on in the tale, the people and priests, led by the two children, seek to find the sacred “middle place,” where things are balanced and orderly. Halona-Itiwana it is called, the sacred name of the Zuni Pueblo, “the Middle Ant Hill of the World.” In the process, they are transformed from indeterminate, salamander-like creatures into their ultimate human form, and their world is trans- formed from chaos to order.

At the heart of the Zuni emergence tale is a moment when, to the dismay of their parents, many children are transformed into water-creatures—turtles, frogs, and the like—and the Hero Twins instruct the parents to throw these children back into the river. Here they become kachi- nas or katcinas, deified spirits, who explain:

The Pueblo believe that kachina spirits, not unlike the num of the San people of Africa, manifest themselves in performance and dance. Masked male dancers impersonate the kachinas, taking on their likeness as well as their super- natural character. Through these dance visits the kachinas, although always “nearby,” can exercise their powers for the good of the people. The nearly 250 kachina personalities

R E A D I N G 1. 1

Zuni Emergence Tale: Talk Concerning the First Beginning

Yes, indeed. In this world there was no one at all. Always the sun came up; always he went in. No one in the morning gave him sacred meal; no one gave him prayer sticks; it was very lonely. He said to his two children: “You will go into the fourth womb. Your fathers, your mothers, kä-eto·we, tcu- eto·we, mu-eto·we, le-eto·we, all the society priests, society pekwins, society bow priests, you will bring out yonder into the light of your sun father.”

May you go happily. You will tell our parents, “Do not worry.” We have not perished. In order to remain thus forever we stay here. To Itiwana but one day’s travel remains. Therefore we stay nearby. … Whenever the waters are exhausted and the seeds are exhausted you will send us prayer sticks. Yonder at the place of our first beginning with them we shall bend over to speak to them. Thus there will not fail to be waters. Therefore we shall stay quietly nearby.

feathers attached to painted prayer sticks symbolizing both clouds—the source of rain—and breath itself. Later in the tale, the two children of the Sun Father bring everyone out into the daylight for the first time:

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 21 13/11/2013 07:22

22 PART ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

and natural phenomena with human form or attributes anthropomorphism), thus explaining what otherwise would remain inexplicable;

• belief that humans can communicate with the spirits of nature, and that, in return for a sacrificial offering or a prayer, the gods might intercede on their behalf.

Japan and the Role of Myth in the Shinto Religion A culture’s religion—that is, its understanding of the divine—is thus closely tied to and penetrated by mythical elements. Its beliefs, as embodied in its religion, stories, and myths, have always been closely tied to seasonal celebrations and agricultural produc- tion—planting and harvest in particular, as well as rain—the success of which was understood to be inex- tricably linked to the well-being of the community. In a fundamental sense, myths reflect the community’s ideals, its history (hence, the preponderance of crea- tion myths in both ancient societies and contempo- rary religions), and its aspirations. Myths also tend to mirror the culture’s moral and political systems, its social organization, and its most fundamental beliefs.

A profound example is the indigenous Japanese religion of Shinto. Before 200 ce, Japan was frag- mented; its various regions were separated by sea and mountain, and ruled by numerous competing and often warring states. The Records of Three Kingdoms, a classic Chinese text dating from about 297 ce, states that in the first half of the third century ce, many or most of these states were unified under the rule of Queen Himiko. According to the Records: “The country formerly had a man as ruler. For some seventy or eighty years after that there were disturbances and warfare. Thereupon the people agreed upon a woman for their ruler. Her name was Himiko.” After her rule, Japan was more or less united under the Yamato

emperors, who modeled their rule after the Chinese, and whose imperial court ruled from present-day Nara Prefec- ture, then known as Yamato Province. Its peoples shared a mythology that was finally collected near the end of the Yamato period, in about 700 ce, called the Kojiki or Chroni- cles of Japan. (See reading 1.2, page 29.) According to the Kojiki, the islands that constitute Japan were formed by two kami, or gods—Izanagi and his consort Izanami. Among their offspring was the sun goddess, Amaterasu Omikami, from whom the Japanese imperial line later claimed to have descended. In other words, Japanese emperors could claim not merely to have been put in position by the gods; they could claim to be direct descendants of the gods, and hence divine themselves.

Amaterasu is the principal goddess of the early indig- enous religious practices that came to be known as Shinto. She is housed in a shrine complex at Ise, a sacred site from pre historic times. In many respects, Shinto shares much

embody clouds, rain, crops, animals, and even ideas such as growth and fertility. Although kachina figurines (Fig. 1.19) are made for sale as art objects, particularly by the Hopi, the actual masks worn in ceremonies are not considered art objects by the Pueblo people. Rather, they are thought of as active agents in the transfer of power and knowledge between the gods and the men who wear them in dance, just like the African Baule mask. In fact, kachina dolls made for sale are considered empty of any ritual power or significance.

Pueblo emergence tales, and the ritual practices that accompany them, reflect the general beliefs of most Neo- lithic peoples. These include the following:

• belief that the forces of nature are inhabited by living spirits, which we call animism;

• belief that nature’s behavior can be compared to human behavior (we call the practice of investing plants, animals,

Fig. 1.19 Kachina doll (Maalo), Hopi culture. Late 19th century. Wood, pigment, feathers, fiber, and string, height 111⁄2". Brooklyn Museum of Art. Museum Expedition 1904, Museum Collection Fund, 04.297.5604. The kachina is probably Maalo, an old-style traditional kachina who appears during Angi’wa (a series of Night Dances), and whose dance portrays a prayer for rain and good crop yield.

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 22 13/11/2013 07:22

CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 23

with Pueblo religions. In Shinto, trees, rocks, water, and mountains—especially Mount Fuji, the volcano just out- side Tokyo which is said to look over the country as its protector—are all manifestations of the kami, which, like kachinas, are the spirits that are embodied in the natural world. Even the natural materials with which artists work, such as clay, wood, and stone, are imbued with the kami and are to be treated with the respect and reverence due to a god. The kami are revered in matsuri, festivals that usu- ally occur on an annual basis in which, it is believed, past and present merge into one, everyday reality fades away, and people come face to face with their gods. The matsuri serve to purify the territory and community associated with the kami, restoring them from the degradation inevitably worked upon them by the passing of time. During the fes- tival, people partake of the original energies of the cosmos, which they will need to restore order to their world. Offer- ings such as fish, rice, and vegetables, as well as music and dancing, are presented to the kami, and the offerings of food are later eaten.

The main sanctuary, or shoden, at Ise consists of undecorated wooden beams and a thatched roof (Fig. 1.20). Ise is exceptional in its use of these plain and sim- ple materials, which not only embody the basic tenet of Shinto—reverence for the natural world—but also the continuity and renewal of a tradition where wood, rather

Fig. 1.20 Naiku (Inner) Shrine housing Amaterasu, Ise, Japan. Late 5th–early 6th century ce. Although the site has been sacred to Shinto since prehistoric times, beginning in the reign of the emperor Temmu (r. 673–86 ce), the Shinto shrine at Ise has been rebuilt by the Japanese ruling family, with some inevitable lapses, every 20 years. The most recent reconstruction occurred in 2013 and will occur again in 2033.

than stone, has always been the principal building mate- rial. The most prominent festival at Ise is the shikinen-sengu ceremony, which involves the installation of the deity in a new shrine in a celebration of ritual renewal held every 20 years. The shrine buildings are rebuilt on empty ground adjacent to the older shrine, the deity is transferred to the new shrine, and the older shrine is razed, creating empty ground where the next shrine will be erected. The empty site is strewn with large white stones and is left totally bare except for a small wooden hut containing a sacred wooden pole, a practice that scholars believe dates back to very ancient times. This cycle of destruction and renewal con- nects the past to the present, the human community to its gods and their original energies.

The three sacred treasures of Shinto—a sword, a mirror, and a jewel necklace—were said to be given by Amaterasu to the first emperor, and they are traditionally handed down from emperor to emperor in the enthronement ceremony. The mirror is housed at Ise, the sword at the Atsuta Shrine in Nagoya, and the jewel necklace at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. These imperial regalia are not considered mere sym- bols of the divine but “deity-bodies” in which the powers of the gods reside, specifically wisdom in the mirror, valor in the sword, and benevolence in the jewel necklace. To this day, millions of Japanese continue to practice Shinto, and they undertake pilgrimages to Ise each year.

View the Closer Look for the Ise Shrine on MyArtsLab

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 23 13/11/2013 07:22

24 PART ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

SACRED SITES: THE EXAMPLE OF THE AMERICAS

What role do sacred sites play in prehistoric culture?

In some prehistoric cultures, priests or priestesses were principally responsible for mediating between the human and the divine. In others, as in Shinto, the ruler was the representative of the divine world on earth. But in almost all prehistoric cultures, communication with the spiritual world was conducted in special precincts or places such as Ise. Many scholars believe that caves served this purpose in Paleolithic times. In Neolithic culture, sites such as Stone- henge and the Anasazi kiva served this function.

The Olmec As early as 1300 bce, a preliterate group known as the Olmec came to inhabit the area between Veracruz and Tabasco on the southern coast of the Gulf of Mexico (see Map 1.3), where they built huge ceremonial precincts in the middle of their communities. Many of the character- istic features of later Mesoamerican culture, such as pyra- mids, ball courts, mirror-making, and the calendar system, originated in the lowland agricultural zones that the Olmec inhabited.

The Olmec built their cities on great earthen platforms, probably designed to protect their ceremonial centers from rain and flood. On these platforms, they erected giant pyramidal mounds, where an elite group of ruler-priests lived, supported by the general population that farmed the rich, sometimes swampy land that surrounded them. These pyramids may have been an architectural reference to the volcanoes that dominate Mexico, or they may have been tombs. Excavations may eventually tell us. At La Venta, very near the present-day city of Villahermosa, three colos- sal stone heads stood guard over the ceremonial center on the south end of the platform (Fig. 1.21), and a fourth guarded the north end by itself. Each head weighs between 11 and 24 tons, and each bears a unique emblem on its headgear, which is similar to old-style American leather football helmets. At other Olmec sites—San Lorenzo, for instance—as many as eight of these heads have been found, some up to 12 feet high. They are carved of basalt, although the nearest basalt quarry is 50 miles to the south in the Tuxtla Mountains. They were evidently at least partially carved at the quarry, then loaded onto rafts and floated downriver to the Gulf of Mexico before going back upriver to their final resting places. The stone heads are generally believed to be portraits of Olmec rulers, and they all share the same facial features, including wide, flat noses and thick lips. They suggest that the ruler was the culture’s principal mediator with the gods, literally larger than life.

200 miles

200 km

Tres Zapotes

Laguna de los Cerros La Venta

San Lorenzo

San Jose Mogote

Oaxaca

Tehuazan

Alvarado

San Cristobel de las Casas

Villahermosa

Tuxtla Gulterres

Principal site

Modern town or city

BELIZE

GUATEMALA

HONDURAS

EL SALVADOR

M E X I C O

YUCATAN

CAMPECHE

TABASCO

VERACRUZ

OAXACA CHIAPAS

QUINTANA

ROO

P A C I F I C

O C E A N

Gulf of

Tehuantepec

G u l f o f

M e x i c o

Usumacinta

Mo tag

ua

S i e

r r

a

M a

d r e

Map 1.3 Olmec civilization sites. The Olmec inhabited most of the area that we now refer to as Mesoamerica from 1300 to 400 bce.

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 24 13/11/2013 07:22

CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 25

The Mound Builders Sometime between 1800 and 500 bce, at about the same time that the Olmec were building the La Venta mound cluster in Mexico, Neolithic hunter-gatherers in eastern North America began building huge ceremonial centers of their own, consisting of large-scale embankments and burial mounds (Map 1.4). These people, who probably had arrived in North America sometime between 14,000 and 10,000 bce, are known as the Woodlands peoples because the area where they lived, stretching from the Mississippi River basin in the west to the Atlantic Ocean in the east, was originally forested.

One of these Woodlands peoples, the Hopewell cul- ture in southern Ohio, enveloped the corpses of what we presume were their highest-ranking leaders from head to toe in freshwater pearls, weighted them down with plates of beaten copper, and then surrounded them with jewelry, sculpture, and pottery. These burials give us a fair idea of the extent of Woodlands trade. Their copper came from the Great Lakes, decorative shell from the Gulf coast, alligator and shark teeth from Florida, and mica from the Appalachian Mountains. There are even exam- ples of obsidian that can be traced to what is now Yellow- stone National Park, and grizzly bear teeth from the Rocky Mountains.

The most intriguing of the Woodlands mounds is the Great  Serpent Mound, near Locust Grove, Ohio

500 km

500 miles

Poverty Point

Spiro Moundville

Etowh

Cahokia

Yellowstone National Park

Mesa Verde

Great Serpent Mound

Archeological site

MISSOURI

OHIO

MINNESOTA

ILLINOIS

WISCONSIN

MICHIGAN PENNSYLVANIA

IOWA

INDIANA

NEW YORK

KANSAS KENTUCKY

TEXAS

OKLAHOMA

ARKANSAS TENNESSEE

NORTH CAROLINA

LOUISIANA

MISSISSIPPI GEORGIA

ALABAMA

FLORIDA

VIRGINIA

WEST VIRGINIA

NEBRASKA

NEW MEXICO

NORTH DAKOTA

SOUTH DAKOTA

MONTANA

WYOMING

COLORADOUTAH

SOUTH CAROLINA

A

p p a l

a c h i a

n M

o u

n ta

in s

CANADA

MEXICO

G u l f o f M e x i c o

R o

c k

y

M o

u n

t a

i n

s

M is

si ss

ip p i

Il li no

is

Missouri

Fig. 1.21 Colossal head, La Venta, Mexico, Olmec culture. ca. 900–500 bce. Basalt, height 7'50". La Venta Park, Villahermosa, Tabasco, Mexico. Giant heads such as this one faced out from the ceremonial center and evidently served to guard it.

Map 1.4 Archeological sites of the Anasazi and the mound builders’ archeological sites in North America.

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 25 13/11/2013 07:22

26 PART ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

Fig. 1.22 Great Serpent Mound, Adams County, Ohio, possibly Fort Ancient culture. ca. 1000 bce–1650 ce. Length approx. 1,254'. Recently, archeologists have carbon dated an artifact found at the Great Serpent Mound as late as 1070 ce. Because of this, the mound is believed to be the product of the Fort Ancient people, who were descended from the Hopewell. The late date of the artifact also suggests that the mound may be related to Halley’s Comet, which passed by the earth in 1066.

(Fig. 1.22). Nearly a quarter of a mile long, it contains no burial sites. Its “head” consists of an oval enclosure that may have served some ceremonial purpose, and its tail is a spiral. The spiral would, in fact, become a favorite deco- rative form of the Mississippian culture, which developed out of the Woodlands-era cultures and raised ritual mound building to a new  level of achievement. The great mound at Cahokia (Fig. 1.23), near the juncture of the Illinois, Missouri, and Mississippi rivers at present-day East St. Louis, Illinois, required the moving of over 22 million cubic feet of earth and probably three centuries to con- struct, beginning about 900 ce. It was the focal point of a ritual center that contained as many as 120 mounds, some of which  were aligned with the posi- tion of the sun at the equinoxes, as well as nearly 400 other platforms, wooden enclosures, and houses. Evidence sug- gests that the Mississippians worshiped the sun: The Natchez people, one of the Mississippian peoples who survived con- tact with European culture, called their chief the Great Sun, and their highest social class the Suns.

The Mississippian culture sustained itself primarily by the cultivation of corn, suggesting close connections to Mexico, where cultivation of corn was originally

perfected. As many as 4 million people may have lived in the Mississippi Valley. Cahokia itself thrived, with a pop ulation of around 20,000 people within its 6-square- mile area, until just before 1500, when the site was mysteri- ously abandoned.

Fig. 1.23 Monks Mound, the centerpiece of Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Collinsville, Illinois, Mississippian culture. ca. 1150 ce. East–west length approx. 3 miles; north–south length approx. 21⁄4 miles; base of great mound, 1,037' × 790'; height approx. 100'. A stockade, or fence, surrounded the mound and a large area in front of it, suggesting that warfare probably played an important role in Mississippian life.

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 26 13/11/2013 07:22

CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 27

T he two images shown here in some sense bracket the six parts of The Humanities. The first (Fig. 1.24), from the Chauvet Cave, is one of the earliest known

drawings of a horse. The second (Fig. 1.25), a drawing by contemporary American painter Susan Rothenberg (1945–), also represents a horse, though in many ways less realistically than the cave drawing. The body of Rothen- berg’s horse seems to have disappeared and, eyeless, as if blinded, it leans forward, its mouth open, choking or gag- ging or gasping for air.

In his catalog essay for a 1993 retrospective exhibition of Rothenberg’s painting, Michael Auping, then chief

Fig. 1.25 Susan Rothenberg, Untitled. 1978. Acrylic, flashe (vinyl paint), and pencil on paper, 20" × 20". Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Art Center Acquisition Fund, 1979. © 2014 Susan Rothenberg/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Part of the eeriness of this image comes from Rothenberg’s use of flashe, a French vinyl-based color that is clear and so creates a misty, ghostlike surface.

Fig. 1.24 Horse. Detail from the Chauvet Cave, Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, Ardèche gorge, France (Fig. 1.1). ca. 30,000 bce. Note the realistic shading that defines the volume of the horse’s head. It is a realism that artists throughout history have sometimes sought to achieve, and sometimes ignored, in their efforts to express the forces that drive them.

curator at the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo, New York, described Rothenberg’s kind of drawing: “Relatively spontaneous, the drawings are Rothenberg’s psychic energy made imminent. … [They] uncover realms of the psyche that are perhaps not yet fully explicable.” The same could be said of the cave drawing executed by a nameless hunter- gatherer more than 30,000 years ago. That artist’s work must have seemed just as strange as Rothenberg’s, lit by flickering firelight in the dark recesses of the cave, its body disappearing, too, into the darkness that surrounded it.

It seems certain that in some measure both drawings were the expression of a psychic need on the part of the artist—whether derived from the energy of the hunt or of nature itself—to fix upon a surface an image of the power and vulnerability of the animal world. That drive, which we will see in the art of the Bronze Age of the Middle East— for instance, in the haunting image of a dying lion in the palace complex of an Assyrian king at Nineveh (see Fig. 2.12 in Chapter 2)—remains constant from the beginnings of art to the present day. It is the compulsion to express the inexpressible, to visualize the mind as well as the world. ■

& C o N t i N U i t y C h A N G e Representing the Power of the Animal World

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 27 13/11/2013 07:22

THINKING BACK

1.1 Discuss the ways in which cave art and small sculptural figurines in the Paleolithic era have been interpreted.

The widespread use of stone tools and weapons by Homo sapiens, the hominid species that evolved around 120,000 to 100,000 years ago, gives rise to the name of the earliest era of human development, the Paleolithic era. The peo- ples of the Paleolithic era made objects and images that we can identify today as works of art. Carvers fashioned stone figures, both in the round and in relief. In cave paintings, such as those discovered at Chauvet Cave, the artists’ great skill in rendering animals helps us to under- stand that the ability to represent the world with natu- ralistic fidelity is an inherent human skill, unrelated to cultural sophistication. If culture can be defined as a way of living—religious, social, and/or political—formed by a group of people and passed on from one generation to the next, what can these earliest works of art tell us about the first human cultures? What questions remain a mystery?

1.2 Explain how the art and architecture of the Neolithic era reflect changing cultural concerns.

As the ice that covered the Northern Hemisphere slowly melted, people began cultivating edible grasses and domesticating animals. Gradually, farming supplanted hunting as the primary means of sustaining life, espe- cially in the great river valleys where water was abundant. The rise of agriculture is the chief characteristic of the Neolithic age. Along with agriculture, permanent vil- lages such as Çatalhöyük and Skara Brae began to appear. What do these villages suggest about the changing nature of cultural life? What does the appearance of fire-baked pottery tell us about life in Neolithic culture?

During the fifth millennium bce, Neolithic peoples began constructing monumental stone architecture, or megaliths, in France and England. Upright, single stone posts called menhirs were placed in the ground, either individually or in groups, as at Carnac in Brittany. Ele- mentary post-and-lintel construction was employed to create dolmens, two posts roofed with a capstone. The most famous of the third type of monumental construc- tion, the circular cromlech, is Stonehenge, in England. What does the enormous amount of human labor required for the construction of these megaliths suggest about the societies that built them?

1.3 Understand the function of myth in prehistoric culture. Neolithic culture in the Americas lasted well into the second millennium ce. Much of our understanding of the role of myth in prehistoric cultures derives from the sur- viving traditions of contemporary Native American tribes such as the Hopi and Zuni, who are the direct descend- ants of the Anasazi. Their legends, such as the Zuni emergence tale, encapsulate the fundamental religious principles of the culture. Such stories, and the ritual prac- tices that accompany them, reflect the general beliefs of most Neolithic peoples. Can you describe some of these beliefs? What do the myths of the Pueblo peoples have in common with Japanese Shinto mythology?

1.4 Describe the role of sacred sites in prehistoric culture. In almost all prehistoric cultures, communication with the spiritual world was conducted in special precincts or places. The main sanctuary at Ise in Japan is an exam- ple. So are sites such as Stonehenge and the kivas in Anasazi culture. What do the colossal stone heads at La Venta suggest about the ceremonial centers over which they stand guard? Can you speculate, in a general way, about the role of mounds in Woodlands and Mississippian culture?

Study and review on MyArtsLab

28 PART ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 28 13/11/2013 07:22

reADiNGs R E A D I N G 1. 2 The Japanese Creation Myth: The Kojiki

The following is the beginning of a modern retelling of the Kojiki or Chronicles of Japan, the oldest surviving account of ancient Japanese history. This creation myth details the origins of Japan and the sacred spirits, or kami, which are objects of worship for the indigenous religion of Japan, Shinto.

Before the heavens and the earth came into existence, all was a chaos, unimaginably limitless and without definite shape or form. Eon followed eon: then, lo! out of this boundless, shape- less mass something light and transparent rose up and formed the heaven. This was the Plain of High Heaven, in which mate- rialized a deity called Ame-no-Minaka-Nushi-no-Mikoto (the Deity-of-the-August-Center-of-Heaven). Next the heavens gave birth to a deity named Takami-Musubi-no-Mikoto (the High- August-Producing-Wondrous-Deity), followed by a third called Kammi-Musubi-no-Mikoto (the Divine-Producing-Wondrous- Deity). These three divine beings are called the Three Creating Deities.

In the meantime what was heavy and opaque in the void gradually precipitated and became the earth, but it had taken an immeasurably long time before it condensed sufficiently to form solid ground. In its earliest stages, for millions and mil- lions of years, the earth may be said to have resembled oil floating, medusa-like, upon the face of the waters. Suddenly like the sprouting up of a reed, a pair of immortals were born from its bosom. … Many gods were thus born in succession, and so they increased in number, but as long as the world remained in a chaotic state, there was nothing for them to do. Whereupon, all the Heavenly deities summoned the two divine beings, Izanagi and Izanami, and bade them descend to the nebulous place, and by helping each other, to consoli- date it into terra firma. [The heavenly deities] handed them a spear called Ama-no-Nuboko, embellished with costly gems. The divine couple received respectfully and ceremoniously the sacred weapon and then withdrew from the presence of the deities, ready to perform their august commission. Proceeding

forthwith to the Floating Bridge of Heaven, which lay between the heaven and the earth, they stood awhile to gaze on that which lay below. What they beheld was a world not yet con- densed, but looking like a sea of filmy fog floating to and fro in the air, exhaling the while an inexpressibly fragrant odor. They were, at first, perplexed just how and where to start, but at length Izanagi suggested to his companion that they should try the effect of stirring up the brine with their spear. So saying he pushed down the jeweled shaft and found that it touched something. Then drawing it up, he examined it and observed that the great drops which fell from it almost immediately coagulated into an island, which is, to this day, the Island of Onokoro. Delighted at the result, the two deities descended forthwith from the Floating Bridge to reach the miraculously created island. In this island they thenceforth dwelt and made it the basis of their subsequent task of creating a country. … First, the island of Awaji was born, next, Shikoku, then, the island of Oki, followed by Kyushu; after that, the island Tsu- shima came into being, and lastly, Honshu, the main island of Japan. The name of Oyashi-ma-kuni (the Country of the Eight Great Islands) was given to these eight islands.

READING CRITICALLY

One of the key moments in this creation myth is when the heavenly deities order Izanagi and Izanami to “descend to the nebulous place, and by helping each other, to con- solidate it into terra firma.” What does this tell us about Japanese culture?

CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 29

M01_A0024-P0029_CH01.indd 29 13/11/2013 07:22