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Art (Pre)History: Ritual, Narrative and Visual Culture in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe John Robb 1 # The Author(s) 2020

Abstract Can we reconstruct how prehistoric people perceived things (their “ways of seeing” or visual culture)? This challenge is made more difficult by the traditional disciplinary assumptions built into prehistoric art studies, for instance focusing narrowly upon a single body of art in isolation. This paper proposes an alternative approach, using comparative study to reveal broad regional changes in visual culture. Although prehistoric art specialists rarely work comparatively, art historians are familiar with describing continent-wide general developments in visual culture and placing them in social context (for instance, the traditional broad-brush history from Classical to medieval to Renaissance systems of representation). This paper does the same for Neolithic (6000–2500 BC) vs. Bronze Age (2500–800 BC) and Iron Age (800 BC–Classical) rock and cave art from sites across Europe, uncovering broad patterns of change. The principal pattern is a shift from a Neolithic iconic art which uses heavily encoded imagery, often schematic geometric motifs, to a Bronze/Iron Age narrative art, which increasingly involves imagery of identifiable people, animals and objects. Moreover, there is also an increasing tendency for motifs to be associated in scenes rather than purely accumulative, and with contextual changes in how art is used—a movement from hidden places to more open or accessible places. Underlying all these changes is a shift in how rock and cave art was used, from citations reproducing ritual knowledge to composed arrays telling narratives of personhood. Keywords Neolithic . Bronze Age . Iron Age . Europe . Prehistoric art . Rock art . Cave

painting . Megalithic art . Visual culture . Narrative

* John Robb [email protected]

1

Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Robb

Big Histories of Art, Historic and Prehistoric This paper attempts to look at prehistoric art in a way which is both new and old— entirely new for prehistoric art studies, but deeply familiar for visual culture in general. Imagine a range of the images commonly encompassed by the term “Western Art”. Without even thinking about it, you will almost certainly recognise what “period” they belong to. Their formal features—what subjects they depict, how “naturalistic” they are, how they use space and perspective and so on—place them stylistically within the canonical history of Western art: Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, neo-Classical, Impressionist, Modernist and so on. Moreover, these features, and others such as the place these images were originally designed to be seen in and the kinds of viewers they anticipate, helped form “ways of seeing” which were deeply intertwined with the pictures’ social context and historical moment. Visual culture changes historically as society changes; we can therefore write a big history of art. Indeed, though most art historians write specialist studies of par