First content-based lecture of the year. We are going to be starting off at the very beginning with global prehistory. So you have a warm-up that I want you all to do. I want you to take a look at these two sculptures right here. I've given you the name and the date range for each of them.
Before you even get into any of that without looking up anything on your laptops or anything in your textbooks, What I want you to do is to look at these two sculptures and to jot down some observations about each artwork. I want you to think about what are you seeing in each of these pieces? What are you not seeing, which can be just as important as what you do see?
Why do you think that these sculptures look the way they do? You'll notice that they are both depicting human figures, but we've probably never seen humans that look like either of these before. So look at the stylistic choices the artists are making.
I also want you to think about how these pieces were made, who you think made them, or why they were made. And ultimately you should be coming up with a short list of similarities and differences. So take a moment to pause the video right here and jot down those observations.
Also keep in mind that the Venus of Willendorf, which is this statue right here, is only about four inches high and this figure from Aangazal is about three and a half. half feet high. So that's another thing that you can write about in your comparison.
All right. So prehistory is a term that you've probably heard before, a term that you've probably used before even, but a lot of people don't really know what it means. So prehistory is this notion of a time before history as we know it.
So it's usually referred to as like an age before the written record, before humans. like had a written language and we're writing things down. So because we don't have human records of this period, we don't know that much about it.
A lot of it has been shrouded in mystery for thousands of years. So what we do know about this period has been deduced primarily from scientific evidence. I'm going to be talking about a couple of different kinds of evidence in a moment, but a couple of things that a scientist might use are carbon dating, stratigraphic dating, contextual evidence.
etc. So you'll come to understand that a well-rounded understanding of prehistory requires multidisciplinary applications. You have people that are on the human studies side of things in anthropology that are looking at human behavior.
We have archaeology, so people looking at human remains as well as these architectural sites and archaeological sites. We have biologists. chemists, etc. So there's a lot of members on this prehistory team that work together to construct our understanding of a time before the written record.
So one thing that you should all understand is that a lack of writing or a lack of records does not mean that these people were stupid and that they didn't have intention in their artwork or in their actions. Most prehistoric artwork seems to serve one or more functions or purposes. The notion that humans would have been creating artwork in the first place suggests that they were doing things beyond survival and reproduction. So there's certainly an intent to it.
It's important enough to devote resources to it in this time that is considered very difficult for most early humans to survive in. So perhaps one of the first things that we should talk about with relation to global prehistory is this notion of what art is. So humans and human ancestors have...
been making tools for, as far as we know, around 2.5 million years. And there's actually some modern day primates like chimpanzees and orangutans and bonobos that have been observed creating tools and using them to hunt for food. So oftentimes, these might be kind of like rudimentary looking spears or a shooley and hand axes like this. Nothing quite this complicated, I believe, has been made by a non-human as far as we know.
So we know that these tools were made by humans and they were not just like these randomly shaped rocks that happened to look like tools because they show evidence of deliberate shaping. So there have been a lot of archaeologists that have actually recreated the processes to create these kinds of tools and show how they might be used in the time that they were made. They've also been found in large quantities near archaeological sites where human remains have also been found. So there's a direct correlation.
between these objects and human archaeological sites. So, art historians typically do not regard these objects as quote-unquote art. They're considered tools as their purpose is to aid in survival and nothing else. There's not really an aesthetic intention to these pieces that we can interpret within the bounds of the context that we understand. So, a lot of times you'll see kind of like a date range surrounding an ancient object or something from prehistory.
And there's lots of different ways that we can figure out or deduce how old something is. Because, of course, again, like if artists don't have a written record, they're not writing the date on things as they're making them. Right.
So there's a couple of different ways. These are just a couple of them. So stratigraphy is basically the study of looking at geological strata.
So basically, the concept behind this is that there is land and then. stuff happens on it and then more land accumulates on top of it over geological time. So you've probably seen images of the fossil record where you have like layers that are representing different epochs, different ages in the history of the planet. So this happens at a somewhat smaller scale when you're looking at human remains and evidence of human like settlements as well. So logic.
helps you to deduce that typically the oldest stuff is going to be towards the bottom and the newest stuff is going to be towards the top. There's also a technique that's used by chemists called radiocarbon dating. So there's different isotopes of carbon that are present in living things. So most living, basically all living things on the planet have carbon in them. That means that they're organic.
They have these organic molecules in them. So all organisms have a known or a they have radioactive carbon in their bodies. It decays at a known rate. So the amount of non-decayed carbon-14 left in the sample basically determines how long it has been since an organism died.
So this is only really useful for objects that of things that are once considered alive. So bone, antler, shell, and other... biomaterials. It's not like you could take a random rock and do radiocarbon dating on that. Another form of evidence that an archaeologist or an art historian might use is contextual evidence.
So oftentimes an object's function, purpose, age, etc. is determined for evidence found in close proximity to that object, so usually around its site. So for example, there have been examples of mortars and pestles. So basically, A mortar and pestle is a long kind of like cylindrical piece of stone and then a cup and you put things inside the cup and then you use the stone to grind it into a fine powder.
So you couldn't do radiocarbon dating on the stone itself, but say an ancient human being took some sort of seed or grain and they put it in the cup and they ground it to make flour. and there might be microscopic remains of that flower in the crevices of that object that a scientist can then scrape out and then test. So oftentimes contextual evidence is this like more indirect method of figuring out how old something is.
You could also deduce that if you were to find a Shulian hand axis, for example, these these kinds of stone items and they're in the same site as some sort of animal bone and they're on the same same stratigraphic layer that they might be of similar age. So a major concept that I want everybody to understand before we're leaving class today is the importance of climate change in the migration of early humans and human ancestors. So there's three different species that we typically talk about when we talk about early humans and human ancestors. We have Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis, a.k.a. the Neanderthals, and Homo erectus. So the surviving species today, what we basically are classified as, is Homo sapiens sapiens.
So we're like a further derived form of Homo sapiens. So the Neanderthals and Homo erectus have... since died out. There is some evidence in, um, that has been found in DNA that a lot of people from modern day Western Europe actually have some Neanderthal DNA.
Um, So there's some evidence that there was some interbreeding between these populations throughout their history. They were closely related enough that that could have happened. So basically humanity as we know it was started in southeastern Africa right over here in the Rift Valley region. So this is where humans and human ancestors including the homo genus as well as the australopiths were originally known to exist.
So one thing that everybody should understand is that Homo sapiens, which are our closest ancestors in this list, were not the first to migrate. Homo erectus actually spanned across a pretty broad range of Eurasia before they eventually died out. And then Homo neanderthalensis took over pretty much all of what is now continental Europe and parts of the Middle East. The one species that was able to really go out and populate the entire known world was Homo sapiens.
They're the ones that got the furthest as evidenced by these red regions and arrows. So the numbers beside the arrows signify the number of years before the present that human activity is predicted to have existed in these places. There's a big misconception about human migrations and that's that there was like this one population chilling out in the Rift Valley over here and then there was like a group of 20 people that went out and populated the rest of the world and that was the only migration that happened. What actually happened is that there is like geologic, not geological, there's genetic evidence as well as like temporal evidence that suggests that there were several waves of migrations out of this region. to go to the rest of the African continent as well as the rest of the world.
That was happening over tens of thousands of years. So that range right around now is around 120 to 50,000 BCE. It changes every couple of years as we find more things, more evidence out there.
So these migrations of early humans were primarily facilitated by climate change and I'm going to talk about the nuances of that in a moment. So there's a couple of things that are involved that climate change kind of like caused in terms of like global phenomena that allowed people to move out of this region over here which is typically called the Rift Valley and out to the rest of the world. So you probably understand that the continent of Africa today has this kind of like rainforesty region right here. This area tends to not receive as much sun because there's more like plant coverage. And then there's this massive desert right here called the Sahara that is extremely hot, extremely dry.
And generally you can't really pass through it without like contemporary technology, like having large quantities of water and like a very organized plan to get across this region without dying of thirst or hunger. So one thing that was happening... um around 125 000 years ago was this thing called axis wobble so at this point in time the the axis um the the equator was kind of shifting in terms of like the the area of the earth that was considered the hottest that was receiving the most radiation from the sun was kind of um wobbling around so these areas that were bombarded by sunlight actually became more um tropical in nature.
They received more rain and less sun, so they were more easily passable by early humans. So whereas this corridor right here into the Arabian Peninsula was once virtually impassable to humans, there were a couple of windows during Axis wobble that allowed humans to actually migrate northward and across the Arabian Peninsula and into Eurasia. There is also a big contribution of climate change to the environment.
the arrangement of land masses on the planet. So one of these things was the ice ages. So you've probably heard of like the ice age as this like monolithic, like notion how it was cold for a long time, and then it was warm, it wasn't actually like that.
So what we have are these glacial periods. So these periods where the global temperature was very low, or relatively low. And then these times when the the global temperature was relatively higher.
So this is today right here. Our kind of global temperature is in what is considered like an interglacial period. It's actually getting warmer because of anthropogenic impact, greenhouse gases, and so on. But there were actually several glacial periods where the average global temperature was relatively low.
So you probably know from chemistry and biology that the amount of water on the planet is consistent. There's not water that is entering or leaving the atmosphere. In fact, there is no element on Earth that is really entering or leaving the atmosphere in any significant quantities.
The only exception to this is iridium, which enters the atmosphere through things like asteroids. So the amount of water on the planet is consistent. So what happens is that that during these glacial periods, a lot of water is frozen in the poles, creating these massive glaciers. So if the amount of water is that is frozen on, if there's a lot of water that's frozen on land, what it's going to happen is that the sea level is going to decrease.
So the water table is going down. And what happens is that because a lot of these islands, or a lot of these seas between these modern day islands are relatively shallow. when the sea level goes down, these landmasses are revealed.
So there is actually a pretty significant amount of time when these areas, which are now kind of like these more isolated islands, were connected by landmasses and people were literally able to just walk across them. This includes flora and fauna as well. So there's a lot of consistencies between the animals that you can find here in this region versus the ones that you can find in this region. So as these landmasses are merging together during these glacial periods, people are able to pass across these previously unpassable areas.
So some key locations for these land bridges that are forming are in South Asia, which is here, as well as East Asia and North America. So you've probably seen on a world map this connection between Alaska and Russia right here. So this landmass over here.
There was also a bridge that was connecting these two regions right here to allow humans to pass from Eurasia over into what is now called North America. So we're talking about, again, this period between 120,000 BCE and 50,000 BCE when humans are beginning to migrate out of Africa to populate the rest of the world. So there's typically three ages. that are designated when we talk about art.
The Paleolithic, the Mesolithic, and the Neolithic. I've highlighted Paleolithic and Neolithic because these are the two that we focus on in the AP curriculum. The Mesolithic is more of like a transition period between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic.
So for those of you who know your Greek and Latin roots, you probably see the word lith and you're like, oh yeah that word means stone. So paleo is a word that means old. and neo is a word that means new. So this is basically old stone, middle stone, new stone, referring to like stone ages. So during the Paleolithic period, the climate is relatively cold.
It's one of these glacial periods. It's at this point that we're seeing what I recognize as the first consciously manufactured pictorial images in human history. Humanity at the time this point is comprised primarily of hunter-gatherer societies.
They are people that hunt for their food and they gather the things that they do not hunt. Oftentimes the subjects that we see in artwork from this period are animals and images of fertile or fecund women. So human subjects at this point in time are typically more representational in nature, reduced kind of like to these stick figures with a couple of identifiable features. So this image right here from the Lesseau Cave in France and is a pretty like famous section of the cave.
So we have this one bull over here that has probably been hit by a spear and its entrails are then spilling out. And there's also this very curious human figure right here that might be lying on the ground. He has a bird head and the only other kind of discernible feature that he has are his genitals.
There's also this other bird figure right here. There's a lot of like very strange conspiracy theories and like postulations behind this figure. People are not quite sure what it means. So, again, human subjects tend to be more representational in nature. We see lots and lots and lots of images globally of these fertile-looking women.
So one of my favorite art pieces that you'll see over and over again in this unit is the Venus of Willendorf. So she is this four-inch tall figure that was found in Austria. And as you'll notice, she has these very emphasized enlarged breasts and genitalia without really having any facial features. This is a release sculpture that was found in another cave, again, of this female presenting figure with kind of like enlarged breasts, stomach, and genitalia. So typically you would envision these features as possibly representing kind of like an ideal female at this time, a person who has the physical resources to bear children.
So you can imagine that when you're in a hunter-gatherer society. There's not a lot of resources to go around. And women typically need to be not malnourished.
They need to have enough nutrition and enough reserves of fat and other resources to be able to reproduce. So this is considered an ideal figure at the time. This is one of the prevailing theories around the prevalence of these kinds of images. In terms of sculpture, there's a lot of small freestanding sculptures.
Oftentimes they're portable, so they're just small enough to be taken around. And they're oftentimes made using stone, ivory, or bone. Oftentimes, a lot of them, there's evidence that they were painted in some way or covered in a sort of pigmented stone like red ochre.
And of course, we see some relief sculptures that are carved into cave walls using chisels. like this woman holding a bison horn here. So a lot of these images, as you can imagine, are coming from hunter-gatherer societies. They don't necessarily have the faculties about them to be creating these large things to cart around with them everywhere.
Typically, hunter-gatherer societies are nomadic. They're traveling around following their food and oftentimes following the seasons. so that they can survive. So it doesn't really make sense to make this large thing that you're then carrying around. So a lot of the sculptures from this era are relatively small.
A lot of these sculptures depict humans, animals, and combinations thereof. So this figure right here, as you can see, has a human torso and legs and this lion-like head. In terms of paintings, the Paleolithic is best known perhaps for its cave paintings. Usually you'll see paintings in different sizes and scales and rocks. Oftentimes these paintings are deliberately far from the entrance, so it takes a bit of a walk from the entrance of the cave to get to these locations inside where you're seeing the richest quantity and quality of these pictorial images.
which is suggesting this notion of exclusivity, that not everybody had access to these spaces because they might have been considered sacred in some way. So they're reserved for special members of the communities or shamans. There's also evidence of a lot of these images being superimposed on top of one another.
Imagine like going like seeing the concrete on an underpass and you see like generations of graffiti layered on top of one another. So we see the same kind of effect in these caves where you're having like some drawings from very, very long ago that are kind of faded in the background. And then people from subsequent generations, hundreds or even thousands of years later, are painting on top of them. So animals are portrayed somewhat realistically.
There's a sense of three dimensionality to these images, but humans are not really portrayed that often. So we see this emphasis in Paleolithic art on. animals.
And this really aligns with the hunter-gatherer kind of like lifestyle and ideology, where basically their entire livelihood are these animals that they're following around and hunting. And humans are occupying a relatively like smaller and less significant role in this natural order, which is why you don't really see them that often. Again, these are postulations that have been made. we don't have any written records to confirm any of this.
So I want to talk a little bit about twisted perspective. So twisted perspective is a somewhat flattened representation of a subject, usually a human or an animal, that shows a composite view of the subject's features. So oftentimes in an image that is in twisted perspective, you'll see some elements that are in profile, so viewed from the side, and then there are others that are viewed more frontally or in a more three-quarter view. So I've included...
Sometimes it's a little bit difficult to discern this. when you're looking at animal figures. But when you look at this image of a bull right here, you can see that there's like we have this this notion of one leg in front of the other.
So we're seeing that yeah that looks like pretty anatomically accurate. But when you look at the head right here, when you look at a a bull in complete profile, there's this foreshortening that is happening where one horn is covering a lot of the other and it's creating this projection of almost like a single horn. There's also this bar at the top of the head that is basically supporting the horns. And again, we're not seeing it very much because of this foreshortening and this profile perspective.
So compare this to how the horns are arranged on this bull right here from Lesseux Caves. So pretty much everything is in profile, like from up from here over to this side, and then you get to the top of the head and it's like they've twisted this portion of the top of the head over so that you can more recognizably see this two horned orientation right here. so oftentimes this is done to create a more like quote-unquote recognizable figure. you would consider like things that are like essential to your understanding of what a bull is are going to be emphasized the most.
so these horns are particularly kind of like emblematic of a bull so and having two of them so it would be in the artist's best interest theoretically to have both of those horns showing even if they have to mess around with the perspective a little bit. so um twisted perspective is a little bit more obvious in the depiction of human figures so this is an image of a wall painting from ancient egypt. i want you to try recreating these poses at your desk um and including the way that the legs are very rigid and close together and the way that the torsos are twisted and you can see both shoulders instead of just one, you'll notice that these poses do not feel natural. So oftentimes these twisted perspective poses are not things that artists are observing in nature and then copying like you're doing a landscape painting, but rather it's this kind of like conception in your brain of like these elements go together and make human or these things go together to make bull.
So now we're transitioning into the Neolithic. So remember that there's this transitional period called the Mesolithic that we don't really talk about that much. But during this point in time, you'll notice when you're looking at these glacial and interglacial periods that we're beginning to transition from this glacial period into a time when temperatures are becoming a lot warmer. So the climate is becoming warmer. The glaciers and ice sheets that have been frozen up in the caps and the poles are melting.
The water levels are resuming their kind of like current levels more or less. So we see the sea level rising around 300 feet in a thousand years, which in terms of geological time is extremely fast. We also have this thing that is often referred to as the Neolithic Revolution. So this is basically the dawn of agriculture.
We see the domestication of plants and animals and humans beginning to settle in more permanent homes and buildings. So there's no need to be moving around constantly because you're not following the food because you're corralling all the food in one place. You're creating some sort of like field where you're growing your food. So humans are becoming a lot more sedentary and their lives are a lot more stable as a result.
So there's this sweet spot in what is now kind of considered the Middle East called the Fertile Crescent. So this is the sweet spot for the first civilizations and permanent settlements that we start studying in the West. There's plenty of sun, water, and natural resources in these regions.
You'll also notice that a lot of these regions are flanked by these very significant bodies of water. So this is something consistent that you'll see in all the civilizations that we study. in global prehistory, as well as the ancient Mediterranean, is that they're all depending on these water sources, particularly fresh water, to survive.
Water is also an important component of travel as well. So this is where we begin to see these concentrated human population centers, what we'll call city-states. So what's really interesting is that You can oftentimes distinguish a Neolithic and a Paleolithic painting by the roles that humans are playing in the painting. So oftentimes paintings from the Neolithic period are more organized and narrative in nature. So they're telling a story.
And you're also seeing an abundance of human figures. And oftentimes these human figures are dominating over nature in some way. Oftentimes you'll see images of humans with domesticated animals and livestock.
where you'll see them hunting the animals and like triumphing over triumphing triumphing over them. So they're having a more central role in these narrative paintings. We also see the first landscape. So things other than kind of like these human figures and animal figures on these kind of like non-planar landscapes of solid rock, we actually start seeing these depictions of things that resemble human dwellings and cities. So this is in Kata Hoyuk, which was in modern day Turkey.
And it's very possible that this orangish shape right here is a depiction of a volcano. So humans and animals are no longer the only subjects depicted in art. We're seeing humans kind of expand their portfolio of things that they're drawing and then and we're starting to see these narratives incorporated as well.
In terms of sculpture, there's a very logical progression here. If you're staying in a place longer, then it's going to make more sense for you to devote time into creating a more permanent architectural settlement instead of just having a hut that you can easily dismantle and carry around with you. So we're seeing a lot of energy put into erecting these massive stones, in particular, which I refer to as megaliths.
There's kind of like a weird distinction between megalith and menhir. So menhir is like a non-rectangular prison-shaped rock, so it's more organically shaped. Whereas a megalith is something that is usually carved to resemble like a typical rectangle. So humans basically start basically like pushing up rocks to mark an important location.
And then they find out what if we take two rocks and we put them close together and then we put another another rock on the top. You have your first basic unit of architecture, which is post and lintel construction. So we're going to see post and lentil construction for thousands of years before the Romans invent the arch.
So another thing that we're seeing with respect to sculpture is that we're seeing access to more varied media. So again, you have more time to settle down in a certain area. A lot of these places are establishing trade routes so that they can obtain materials from places other than their local area.
their local region. So you'll see materials in these sculptures that are not from the local area. We'll see this a lot especially in the ancient Mediterranean unit.
We're also seeing statues becoming larger because again you're in a more fixed location and you don't have to carry it around with you. So it's not a problem if you make something larger. So now knowing what you do about the Paleolithic and the Neolithic, I want us to go back to these two sculptures right here.
And I want you to think about like how does the Venus of Willendorf reflect aspects of Paleolithic art? And then conversely, how does this human figure from Angazol represent aspects of Neolithic art? So now that you have some contextual information, I want you to finish the last part of your handout and apply your knowledge to your your new understanding of these two pieces.