Ancient Art Lecture 3: Neolithic Art

Welcome back everyone! Today we are going to discuss the Neolithic Age, which followed the Paleolithic Age, and if you remember from the last time we talked about the two different kinds of art in the Paleolithic Age, parietal and mobilary, and the art basically stayed put in caves or it moved around in the form of small statuettes. Today things are going to progress a bit. This is our timeline, and you can see that we have skipped ahead a lot, and this period lasts from about 7000 BCE to about 2500 BCE, and you can see that it overlaps with some other cultures that we'll study, like the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians. Focusing in on that timeline, here are some specific things we'll talk about. The town of Shattelfoya. We'll talk about giant structures known as dolmens. We'll talk about Stonehenge and Newgrange, which is in Ireland, kind of like the Stonehenge in Ireland. You can also see on that timeline that I took Dadoubert on it so you could see what this jump is. So usually when we have these timelines, the things we're studying will be in one color, and the thing we studied last Neolithic art begins when bands of hunter-gatherers settle down and begin organized agriculture or animal husbandry, or have permanent year-round settlements. After the Ice Age, retreating glaciers created large temperate zones with cereal grasses like wheat that were cultivatable and that attracted herds of animals. New technologies made hunters more effective. This kind of freed some people to attend to other communal needs, such as political and military affairs or ceremonial practices. So now the question is, how did this happen specifically? What is ultimately responsible for this transition? Three basic things need to happen, and they kind of need to happen in this order. First, you need to domesticate plants and animals, which means create gardens and have pens with sheeps and goats. And if you do that, then you get a surplus of goods, like you've grown enough wheat that you don't need to eat it all, and you can put some away for later. And if you have extra animals to keep you fed over the winter, or enough wheat to keep you fed, then you have time to do other things, and that leads to specialization. And specialization creates this ability to have military or political leaders and it also allows people time to decorate things, which basically gives us art. So this is what we'll talk about today. The artwork that was a result of less time spent hunting and gathering and more time creating a lifestyle that was more sedentary. It may be supposed that the increased need to spend more time and labor in tending crop fields required more localized dwellings. The gradual ending of the ice age affected the distribution, density, and stability of plant, animal, and marine life. People exerted increasing control over land and resources and built simple but durable structures as they became more attached to the land and its resources. Despite these advances, however, the transitions to agriculture are puzzling because agriculture is much more labor-intensive and uncertain than hunting and gathering. So you've got to ask, like, why were they doing it? Food surpluses, in case of a shortage, needed to be built up and distributed equitably and populations could then become denser. All these factors meant that societies that developed agriculture were likely to develop social hierarchy and stratification as opposed to the strict equality of most modern hunter-gatherer bands. Lower classes labored to produce food and upper classes managed that food and controlled the population through that The first Neolithic civilization we're going to talk about is Çatalhöyük, which as you can see is right kind of in the south-central part of Turkey, modern-day Turkey, and it dates to about 7400 BCE and was home to as many as 3,000 people. The houses of Çatalhöyük were densely clustered and made of mud, brick, and mortar. There were no footpaths or streets between the dwellings and they were clustered in a honeycomb-like maze and most were accessed by holes in the ceiling with doors reached by ladders and stairs. The rooftops were effectively streets. The ceiling openings also served as the only source of ventilation, allowing smoke from the house's open hearths and ovens to escape. While earlier structures made of, like, mammoth tusks did provide shelter, houses had more significant functions for the communities of people who lived in them. There was seasonal replastering and repainting of the walls in Çatalhöyük, which enhanced a sense of long-term continuity. Skulls of the dead were placed in the foundations of new houses. Interior walls at Çatalhöyük were painted with scenes, some depicting violent interactions between humans and animals. It was a mix of shelter, architecture, art, spirit, ritual, and ceremony, and it makes it tough to label the structure as domestic, to something just to live in, or sacred, like a church. Theoretically, these homes are both. So here we are again, no written history and experts are basically left to speculate, but in the foundations of a lot of these homes are these plastered human skulls, and often even entire bodies were buried under the floors of homes. And they would cover some of these skulls in clay or plaster, and they would put things in the eyes, shells, perhaps, and they would paint things to imitate hair and mustaches. And they're, we don't know if they're religious objects or powerful images that were made maybe to mourn the loss of loved ones. Many experts argue that the plaster skulls could be linked to the practice of headhunting and used as trophies. Like those plastered skulls, we also have dolmens that were found throughout Europe, and we're unsure of the purpose of them as well. They could have been ceremonial, or they could have been tomb architecture, but they are megalithic, and they consist of large stone monuments, and archaeologists disagree about the nature of the societies that even created these monuments. This is a simple type of dolmen wherein a chamber was formed with upright stones supporting capstone. These stones were often transported over long distances, and they indicate a perhaps stratified society composed of people who planned and designed the megalith, and there were others that had to move the stone. This is called post and lintel construction, and the dolmen was the simplest type of megalithic tomb. Big, upright, supporting at least one large table-like rock on top, with the burial chamber, sometimes single, sometimes multiple, under the flat rock. Now we know it's a burial chamber because we found fragments of bones in it. Smaller rock and dirt were often mounded on top to form an artificial hill or cairn. Sometimes these are called barrows. In Ireland, built around the time of the pyramids of Giza in Egypt, is Newgrange, and it is the mound of a passage grave in Newgrange, Ireland. It stood 44 feet high, and it contained a three-part chamber. The mound has a retaining wall at the front, which you can see is that kind of white wall. It's made mostly of white quartz cobblestone, and it is ringed by engraved kerbstones, which are these kind of giant boulders covered in megalithic art. The mound is also ringed by a stone circle. At the end of the passage are three small chambers off of a larger central chamber with a high corbelled vault roof, which just means a ceiling that eventually ascends into a point by stacking rocks on top of each other until they touch. And these corbelled vaults were also in the pyramids of Giza. And it's hard to know who was first, but it is amazing that this technological breakthrough happened in two distinctively different cultures. One of my favorite things about Newgrange is it shows that Paleolithic people found caves to live in while Neolithic people actually built caves. There are a bunch of videos from like Irish News, because they did some kind of documentary about this that I want you to watch, but I will give you sort of a brief summary. So the chamber aligns with the winter solstice, and the sun shines into the furthermost burial chamber right at the point where the winter solstice happens. And those spirals can be seen on outside stones, as you can see in the entrance, and the stone directly behind the entrance stone. So if you like made a straight line from the entrance to behind all the way around, there's a stone that has those same swirls. We're not sure what they mean, but they're found on other megalithic stones in Ireland and are illuminated by the sun at specific points of the year. Newgrange and other burial mounds in the area are places of pilgrimage. The evidence of this can be found in artifacts and bones from inside the tomb. One of the mounds had an intricately sculpted stone from northern Scotland, which is very far away, and a lot of these designs and these stones can be found all around Europe. There are also some videos to watch about Stonehenge, but again here's a summary. It's in southern England. It's an example of a complex megalithic monument. Stone circles of the henge were constructed in over eight phases as part of a cemetery of cremation burial. The center was arranged with five sandstone trilithons, and were arranged over time. A henge is a circle of stones or posts, often surrounded by a ditch and built up embankments. Stonehenge is not the largest neolithic henge, but it is one of the most complex. The stones used to make it were brought from great distances during four major building phases from 2750 to 1500 BCE. It was associated with burial, and it was the center of a large burial complex. Before the construction of the modern monument, there were large post holes with tree trunks in them on the site, dating back to around 8000 BCE. It seems very unlikely that Stonehenge could have been made by earlier Paleolithic nomads. It would have been a waste to invest so much time and energy building a monument in a place to which they might never return or might only return to infrequently. The effort to build this was extraordinary, so it had to have been a place where people congregated often. Stonehenge is approximately 320 feet in circumference, and the stones which compose the outer ring weigh as much as 50 tons. The small stones, weighing as much as 6 tons, were quarried from as far away as 450 miles, so things from far away are brought to this site. The assumption is that the design, planning, and execution of Stonehenge could have only been carried out by a culture in which authority was unquestioned. This is a culture that was able to rally hundreds of people to perform very hard work for extended periods of time. This is another characteristic of the Neolithic era, actually. There's also a great video about a man who was like a historical actor at Stonehenge, and he makes a pot at Stonehenge. If you go to visit, you can see him do this. But I just want to say a little bit about pottery during the Neolithic era, and that is that it serves multiple functions. And I don't just mean it carries things, but I mean it also serves as a canvas for artistic creation. Pottery marked a shift from reliance on skin or textiles or wooden containers, and the technology for producing ceramics developed in stages over time. And we saw a little bit of this when we looked at the Vestinice woman in the Paleolithic era, where they were using fire to create something, and pottery is like an evolution of that activity. Another thing that can be found during the Neolithic period, which is kind of similar to the Paleolithic period, are small statues. And again, we're unsure of the purpose. It could have been protection, or it could have been toys to be played with, or it could have been both. These figurines, which illustrate both humans and animals, are made from a variety of materials, but the largest proportion are quite small and made of barely fired clay. These casual figures are found most frequently in garbage bins, but also in oven walls, house walls, floors, left and abandoned structures. This would suggest a lack of importance. The figurines often show evidence of having been poked, scratched, or broken, and it is generally believed that they function as wish tokens or to ward off bad spirits. Very often in art history classes, you will be given an assignment which is, look at these two images that don't look like anything similar to each other and compare them and contrast them. And so here is your first taste of that. This is a comparison between a wall painting in Çatalhöyük and a cave painting in And the top there is basically the right image is the same exact image as on the left, it's just more clear. And so knowing what you know now about Neolithic peoples, I want you to compare these two paintings, differences, similarities, and I want you to consider the Neolithic trend of dual usage and how artistry and utility intersected. So when you're looking at that image from Çatalhöyük, I want you to think how is this used in multiple ways? And maybe it's the same in Lascaux. Maybe you can come up with some theory about that rotunda of bulls that we're looking at might have had dual uses as well. Don't just make things up. I want you to take the information at hand and use that as your source to get you to see what's similar and what's different between these two works of art, and what their usages might have been. Also, what are the similarities and differences in the usage?