Prehistoric Art and Ideology

Abstract

THE material remains of past civilizations sometimes include art. Where this is so, as in the spectacular case of Upper Paleolithic art in Western Europe, we may be able to add an ideological dimension to our understanding of the ancient people. Traditional anthropological interest in art treated the subject as an isolated ethnographic category, focused almost exclusively on the technique of art-making, on the iconography, and on the uses to which art is put. But attention has turned increasingly to questions about the ties between art and other aspects of culture. For example, monographs by Mills (1953) and McAllester (1954), produced under the aegis of the Harvard Values Study project, have looked for relationships between esthetic values in Navaho art and music and Navaho value as a whole. Malraux's Voices of Silence (1953) exhibits a convergent trend in art history. These and similar studies are laying the foundation on which efforts to interpret prehistoric art must rest. Translating into achievement the prospect of reconstituting prehistoric culture through the study of prehistoric art depends upon finding ways and means for archeologists to ask, however indirectly, the same questions which ethnologists increasingly pursue among recent and living art-makers. If relationships between art and other parts of can be discerned and described in individual cultures and compared across cultures so as to yield generalizations, if we can make a reasonable case for the idea that a people's art is patterned by the point of view of their culture, if we can suggest the ways in which art exhibits this patterning, we might hope to put the lessons learned to work in behalf of a plausible reconstruction of the attitudes and outlook of a prehistoric people. We might gain a means of narrowing the gap between that span of time for which we know something of man as an economic animal and that much shorter period for which we are acquainted with him as a thinking, believing, feeling creature. The concern of this paper is two-fold: What kind of controls on interpretation can we derive from the study of ethnographic materials? And, what problems can we approach fruitfully through the analysis of art style? The crucial general issues about the nature of artistic behavior and the character of the relationship between Art and Culture are not confronted directly.