Artist Inspo: Prehistory Gone Parietal

Taking our place in the landscape

What is it about humans that makes us want to leave a mark?

As soon as we got our foothold on this planet, we started carving, painting, and scratching messages into the landscape around us. We thought we could make any special place more special by adding our own touch. I’m not talking about how we changed our environment through land management or tool-making. I’m talking about the visual markers we made that had no obvious purpose for our survival.

I’m talking about art.

For a long, long time, we humans focused only on survival. From about 2.5 million years BCE to 300,000 BCE, we left only stone tools in our wake. But sometime before 270K BCE, we created the oldest art (yet found) in Central India. One of us pounded small depressions into stone, and eventually people all over the planet were doing the same.

Some call the Australian cupules at left “non-functional phenomenon;” others theorize that Scottish cup and ring marks symbolize water.

The Encyclopedia of Art notes:

[Cupules] are the oldest art ever made […], they exist on every populated continent, and were created during all three eras of the Stone Age—Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic—as well as in historical times. Unfortunately, experts are mystified by their meaning and cultural significance. As a result, they are not taken as seriously—as a form of art—as Ice Age murals or sculpture.

But art isn’t any less “art” because we don’t understand it. Some have theorized that the act of repeatedly striking these rocks could have created a kind of music, or might have been part of a purposeful ritual. The cupules dating to ~60K BCE in France’s La Ferrassie cave mark the grave of a Neanderthal with disabilities—an individual who would only have survived through the care of his community. Surely these marks meant something to their creators. We can’t know for certain what that was, but like all great art, the cupules hold meaning even today—even for me.

It’s likely that we decorated movable objects even before we made cupules, scratching patterns onto ostrich eggs in South Africa and sculpting “fertility” figures like this one made 233,000 years ago (possibly by another species of human):

The “Venus of Berekhat Ram” (source)

But I’m fascinated by the marks we have left on the landscape itself. An image scored into a massive rockface or hidden deep inside a cave must have felt permanent to its creator in a way that transportable sculpture or jewelry could not.

A full replica of France’s Chauvet Cave now accommodates the huge number of visitors who wish to see its (possibly religious) paintings (source)

Yet I can’t believe that all of these creations were just solemn by-products of ritual. For one thing, in Tibet archaeologists have found children’s handprints and footprints that were pressed into still-wet travertine 200,000 years ago:

An enhanced view shows depth; but does child’s play constitute art? (source)

Imagine two small beings discovering this delightfully squishy substance, and making patterns in it together with their hands and feet. Whether you think they were training to create more formal art (a possibility raised in this fascinating podcast) or that they were just passing the time, the consensus is that they made these marks with intention. Don’t you feel a kinship with these children? Can you imagine how the travertine felt, squelching between their toes? Can you remember pressing your own patterns into mud, or lake sand, or wet concrete? In my book, the fact that these handprints trigger such emotional responses qualifies them as art.

The term for art that integrates with the landscape is “parietal.” In contrast with portable art, parietal art is by definition immovable, and we haven’t yet lost the urge to set this kind of seal on our surroundings. Think of the Nazca lines (more of which are still being discovered), California’s Blythe Intaglios, and the Cerne Abbas Giant; then leap forward in time to consider Robert Smithson’s 1970 Spiral Jetty or Andrew Rogers’ 2006 Bunjil. Perhaps we should think even of Sister Corita.

Smithson’s Spiral Jetty integrates with the landscape; it “can be seen from time to time, depending on the water level” (source)

I know that some ancient parietal art was likely created as supplication for protection, to mourn a passing, or to build community. But why would such works still speak to us today, and even inspire new works? I think it is because leaving our mark can be, sometimes, a simple act of joy. Art helps us express our delight in survival, our awe for fellow creatures, and the pleasure we take in the sounds, sights, and textures we find all around us. Of course we still want to take part in that tradition.

For myself, I love this ancient art because it reads as an act of hope. It implies that a mark on the landscape might survive and illuminate our existence for others. Each work expresses the belief that we can send a message straight to the hearts of those who stumble across us, sometime far, far in the shadowy future.

We have, it seems, always been creatures of faith.