Human and Animal Individuals in the Middle Magdalenian
- PDF / 3,457,670 Bytes
- 24 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 21 Downloads / 191 Views
Human and Animal Individuals in the Middle Magdalenian Clément Birouste 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The category of “animal species” is at the heart of traditional interpretations of Palaeolithic art. In this context, animal depictions have traditionally been conceptualized in terms of the “animal species” they are supposed to represent. Moreover, the relationships between humans and animals have been discussed in similar terms. In this paper, I examine some innovative ways in which this relationship can be considered. In particular, I explore the possibility of interpreting animal images as representations of individuals, rather than just of species. Focusing on a number of pieces of rock art and portable images, and examining other kinds of activities (animal butchery, body adornment, treatment of human corpses, etc.) from the Middle Magdalenian (19,000– 16,000 cal BP), I seek to demonstrate how the concept of the “individual” offers a number of interpretive possibilities beyond the traditional category of “species”. I argue that the focus on the head and face can reflect this interest in individualized animals. I also highlight the existence of practical techniques employed to create a relationship between human and animal individuals. Keywords Magdalenian . Individuals . Species . Animals . Bones . Depictions
Introduction Studying prehistory necessarily implies questioning the relationship between humans and (other) animals. The field of prehistory itself first developed around questions concerning the contemporaneity—which was not immediately clear to scientists—of human cultures and certain extinct animal species. In the early nineteenth century, when palaeontology first considered the existence of mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and cave bears in Western Europe, it was generally with the idea that it involved an
* Clément Birouste clement.birouste@univ–tlse2.fr
1
Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, UMR TRACES 5608, Maison de la Recherche, 5, Allées Antonio Machado, 31058 Toulouse Cedex 9, France
Birouste
extinct fauna that had existed at a strictly separate time period from modern-day humanity and our current animal species, due to universal catastrophes.1 During the 1860s, undeniable evidence gradually built up of the coexistence of humans and these extinct species (Richard 1992; Groenen 1994; Coye 1997), both thanks to the discovery of cut marks on the bones of extinct species, which appeared to have been made by human tools for food and technical purposes (Lartet 1860), and the discovery of depictions of extinct animals, often engraved on the bones of precisely these animal species (Lartet and Christy 1864). This discovery of varying kinds of concrete relationships between humans and certain animal species irrevocably proved the existence of an unprecedented era in humanity: prehistory. It is following on from these questions regarding the many different aspects of the relationship between humans and animals that I propose this article, which conside
Data Loading...
