What Is Paleolithic Art?: Cave Paintings and the Dawn of Human Creativity

This is a journey and a personal reflection by one of the most renowned figures in cave exploration and painting. This exploration of the art, which has captivated people the world over, continues Clottes’ pursuit of an explanation for the why” of Paleolithic cave painting, and is steeped in his thoughts about the shamanistic explanations. Clottes summarizes the history of earlier explanations of and approaches to rock art in Southwest Europe, and then takes readers on a tour to visit rock art sites and specialists in aboriginal artists and shamans around the world. He evokes a continuum between the living rock art sites to the Ice Age sites of Chauvet, Altamira, and hundreds of others. Clottes’s views illuminate the animals and figures that adorn cave walls, and his deep understanding, love, and empathy that he has for the art, imagination, and spiritual world of our Ice Age ancestors is unparalleled.
Was it a trick of the light that drew our Stone Age ancestors into caves to paint in charcoal and red hematite, to watch the heads of lions, likenesses of bison, horses, and aurochs in the reliefs of the walls, as they flickered by firelight? Or was it something deeper—a creative impulse, a spiritual dawn, a shamanistic conception of the world efflorescing in the dark, dank spaces beneath the surface of the earth where the spirits were literally at hand?In this book, Jean Clottes, one of the most renowned figures in cave exploration and the study of cave paintings, pursues an answer to this “why?” of Paleolithic art. While other books focus on particular sites and surveys, Clottes’s work is a contemplative journey across the world, a personal reflection on how we have viewed these paintings in the past, what we learn from looking at them across geographies, and what these paintings may have meant—what function they may have served—for their artists. Steeped in Clottes’s shamanistic theories of cave painting, What Is Paleolithic Art? travels from well-known Ice Age sites like Chauvet, Altamira, and Lascaux to visits with contemporary aboriginal artists, evoking a continuum between the cave paintings of our prehistoric past and the living rock art of today. Clottes’s work lifts us from the darkness of our Paleolithic origins to reveal, by firelight, how we think, why we create, why we believe, and who we are.