To Hunt or to Paint: Animals and Art in the Upper Palaeolithic

Abstract

Recent studies of hunter-gatherer rock art have focused on placing the art in its local cultural context by drawing on information concerning the social structure and mythology of the group concerned. This approach is difficult, if not impossible, for the art of prehistoric hunter-gatherers for whom such information is either absent or highly speculative. Consequently the article suggests that progress can be made by concentrating on the ecological context of their art. As an example the article tackles one of the most intriguing features of Upper Palaeolithic art: the discrepancy between the frequency of animal species represented in the art, and those in the faunal assemblages. While red deer and reindeer dominate in the latter, the most frequently depicted species are bison and horse. I suggest that this pattern arises since the art relates to the tracking and killing of individual animals, by hunters working in small groups or by themselves, while the faunal assemblages are dominated by the remains from mass red deer and reindeer slaughters made by large scale co-operative action. I propose that during the later Upper Palaeolithic the fluctuations in the yields from such mass kills increased substantially and this in turn decreased the predictive ability of the hunters. Consequently at times of particularly low yields, the hunters turned from co-operative hunting to the stalking and killing of individual animals and the art functioned to facilitate the required information flows. This proposition is verified by the use of computer simulation to demonstrate the increase in yield fluctuations that accompanied intensification, be reference to archaeological data as evidence that these did indeed occur, and by aspects of the imagery within the art itself.