Paleolithic Paint Job Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Paleolithic Paint Job - Essay Example He states that cave art archaeologists have used objective inquiry to understand the meaning of the paintings and have also used statistical analysis in testing their hypothesis of the art. He describes Lorblanchets approach as subjective and experimental who thinks that preliminary theory is not essential when experimenting. Lorblanchet does not know what he will by becoming a paleolithic painter but believes that there is something to learn from it. He states that Lorblanchet wants to understand how early artists did their paintings and his work fits a new trend of the cave art archaeology. He describes the paintings of both Lorblanchet and another French archaeologist as having little variations from each other. French prehistorian Abbà © Henri Breuil started the scholarly study of the Ice Age art in the 1920s. Abbà © Henri Breuil saw the Ice Age as a way of hunting magic and his conclusions were inspired by the Arunta aborigines in central Australia. The Arunta painted images k angaroos and other prey on rock faces as a symbol of plenty supply of prey. He states that archaeologists slowly began doubting the credibility of the hunting magic theory in explaining prehistoric cave art and the hypothesis was later thrown in the 1960s Andrà © Leroi-Gourhan who was a French prehistorian. Leroi-Gourhan saw that the distribution of the images showed a division of the world and separated males from females. The distribution of images included Stags appearing in doorways, ibex on the cave periphery and bison, horses, oxen, and mammoths appeared in the main chambers. Leroi-Gourhan saw the male-female duality as suffusing the myth of the upper Paleolithic people. Roger lewin states that archaeologists use diverse approaches and are paying attention to the context of the art. He quotes Margaret Conkey, an archaeologist from the University of California in Berkeley who argues that one has to understand the social context of art for them to understand its meaning.