The First Artists: In Search of the World's Oldest Art

by Paul Bahn, Michel Lorblanchet, Pierre Soulages (Foreword by)

Overview

Two of the greatest living authorities on Ice Age art delve hundreds of thousands of years into the human past to discover the earliest works of art ever made, drawing on decades of new research

Where is the world’s very first art located? When, and why, did people begin experimenting with different materials, forms, and colors? Prehistorians have long been asking these questions, but only recently have they been able to piece together the first chapter in the story of art.

Overturning the traditional Eurocentric vision of our artistic origins, Paul Bahn and Michel Lorblanchet seek out the earliest art across the whole world. There are clues that even three million years ago distant human ancestors were drawn to natural curiosities that appeared representational, such as the face-like “Makapansgat cobble" from South Africa, not carved but naturally weathered to resemble a human face. In the last hundred thousand years people all over the world began to create art: the oldest known paint palettes in South Africa’s Blombos Cave, the famous Venus figures across Europe all the way to Siberia, and magnificent murals on cave walls in every continent except Antarctica.

This book is the first to assess the discovery, history, and significance of these varied forms of art: the artistic impulse developed in the human mind wherever it traveled.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780500773925
Publisher:	Thames & Hudson
Publication date:	07/11/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	715,611
File size:	18 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Paul Bahn is co-author of Thames & Hudson's hugely influential and bestselling textbook Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice, and has also published a variety of popular books, including Easter Island: Earth Island (with John Flenley), Mammoths: Giants of the Ice Age (with Adrian Lister), and Images of the Ice Age, widely regarded as the standard introduction to cave art.
Michel Lorblanchet is a leading French specialist in the field of Palaeolithic art. In his former role of Director of Research at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) he pioneered experimental methods of reproducing, as well as scientific methods of dating, ancient art. His Art pariétal: Grottes ornées du Quercy, the sum of 45 years of research, is considered the definitive work on the art of the Quercy region, which includes more than thirty painted caves.
Pierre Soulages is a French painter, engraver, and sculptor.

Table of Contents

Foreword Pierre Soulages 6

Introduction: what is 'art'? 8

1 Theories, chimps and children: early attempts to tackle the problem 11

2 Finding art in nature: the first stirrings of an aesthetic sense 49

3 Can we see art in the first tools? Polyhedrons, spheroids and handaxes 95

4 All work and no play? Looking at marks on bones and stones 109

5 Figuring it out: pierres-figures and the first carvings 156

6 Jingles and bangles: the origin of music and decorated bodies 170

7 The first art in the landscape: dots and lines 191

8 The writing's on the wall: the earliest cave art 223

9 A global phenomenon: the appearance of rock art around the world 241

Conclusion 261

Bibliography 272

Acknowledgments 291

Sources of illustrations 292

Index 293