Prehistoric Art in Europe: A Deep-Time Social History

Abstract

Although many researchers have studied prehistoric European artthere has been virtually no attention paid to the broad prehistory of art as a specialized form of material culture: virtually all studies focus narrowly on single bodies of art. This paper presents a new approach to analyzing prehistoric art: quantitative deep time study. It analyzes a database of 211 art traditions from across Europe and from 40,000 B.C. to 0 AD.to identify changes in the amountnatureand use of prehistoric art. The results reveal clear long-term trends. The amount of art made increased sharply with the origins of sedentary farming and continued to rise throughout prehistory. New forms of art arise in conjunction with new ways of life: “period genres “ are closely tied into patterns of social change. There are also long-term shifts in aesthetics and the uses of art (such as a gradual shift from arts of ritual and concealment to arts of surface and display). These resultsthough preliminaryshow that a deep-time approach familiar from topics such as climate change is applicable to art; the resulting social history can illuminate both art and its social context.