13. Art or Magic? First, outline figures predominate. When animals or other objects are depicted often only the occluding bounds of the object are depicted. Even among solid chromatic images occluding bounds are outlined by scratching, engraving, and application of contrastive coloring. Charcoal sketches have been found under subsequent applications of pigments at Niaux (Clottes, Menu, & Walter, 1990a,b). This characteristic of outlining and the simplicity of the many of the images produces an effect of a cartoon-like economy. The cartoon-like quality is enhance by another common feature, the use of caricature or exaggeration of distinctive features of the objects depicted. Paleolithic images of animals are all but invariably depicted in profile, at least the major components such as head, neck, torso, and legs are in profile. However, these profiles also frequently have a "twisted" perspective in which horns, antlers, tusks, feet, and sometimes ears are presented in perspectives that deviate from over-all profile presentation in varying degrees. In both mobiliary and parietal graphics the images and designs often either incorporate, modify, or accommodate natural contours, breaks, and edges in the supporting medium. Graphics, whether animals or symbols, appear to be executed as discrete, stand-alone, images and, I will argue, they are so thoroughly componential that even the parts may frequently stand alone. With rare and questionable exceptions there is a notable absence of context, either environmental or narrative.

Cro-Magnon drew paintings on cave walls Cro-Magnon drew paintings on cave walls. He used brown, yellow, dark red, and coal black. They drew stick figures for hunters. Cave Paintings Bowmen and Deer

Ancient people wanted to survive danger and to have luck in hunting So they invited spirits to help. People shaped the spirits as animals and each animal had special powers. They drew the wild animals they hunted for. The shaman led the magic rituals. People believed that a shaman could talk to spirits.

Paleolithic Cave Paintings The Lascaux cave paintings were painted between 15,000BC- 10,000BC. The Lascaux cave paintings were discovered on Thursday, in 1940, by two French teenagers and their dog which also and was trapped in the cave. The news of the discovery quickly spread and many villagers came to see it themselves. Soon archaeologists visited the site as well.

Altamira cave in Spain

Prehistoric Architecture Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument located in the English county of Wiltshire. Archaeologists had believed that the iconic stone monument was erected around 2500 BC, as described in the chronology below, although this has since been advanced to 2400- 2200 BC Stonehenge is one of the most remarkable and certainly the best- known Neolithic monument. A henge is a circle of huge stones. With enormous stones rising as high as 17 feet and weighing as much as 50 tons, Stonehenge is indeed a massive henge.

“VENUS” or FEMALE FIGURINES Female figures represent fertility. They are sometimes faceless. Stylized "Venus" figurines carved in ivory, Aurignacian-Gravettian (c. 24,800 BC). From Dolní Vestonice, Mikulov, Moravia, Czechoslovakia. In the Moravian Museum, Brno, Czechoslovakia. Height (left) 8.3 cm and (right) 8.6 cm. By courtesy of the Czechoslovak News Agency, Prague She also exhibits, in ways that are at once appealing (to most women, perhaps) and threatening (to most men, perhaps), a physical and sexual self that seems unrestrained, unfettered by cultural taboos and social conventions. She is an image of "natural" femaleness, of uninhibited female power, which "civilization", in the figure of the Classical Venus, later sought to curtail and bring under control. To identify the Willendorf figurine as "Venus", then, was a rich, male joke that neatly linked the primitive and the female with the uncivilized and at the same time, through implicit contrast with the Classical Venus, served as a reassuring example to the patriarchal culture of the extent to which the female and female sexuality had been overcome and women effectively subjugated by the male-dominated civilizing process. There is also a sex/gender conflict; between female and feminine. From a patriarchal western cultural point of view, the Classical Venus is both sexually female and also feminine in terms of gender. According to current theory, while sex is biological, the product of nature, gender is to be understood as social, the product of nurture or culture. The "Venus" of Willendorf is visibly biologically female, but she is not feminine; the name "Venus" imposes upon her a gendered femininity that she does not have, so again she fails.

“VENUS” of Willendorf The most famous early image of a human, a woman, is the so-called "Venus" of Willendorf, found in 1908 by the archaeologist Josef Szombathy in an Aurignacian loess deposit near the town of Willendorf in Austria and now in the Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna. The statuette was carved from a particular type of oolitic limestone not found in the region and so must have been brought to the area from another location. When first discovered the "Venus" of Willendorf was thought to date to approximately 15,000 to 10,000 BCE, or more or less to the same period as the cave paintings at Lascaux in France. In the 1970s the date was revised back to 25,000-20,000 BCE, and then in the 1980s it was revised again to c. 30,000-25,000 BCE Carbon 14 chronology of the Central European Upper Paleolithic, however, now indicates a date for the "Venus" of Willendorf of around 24,000-22,000 BCE (26-24,000 B.P.). Her great age and exaggerated female forms have established the "Venus" of Willendorf as an icon of prehistoric art. As the discipline of art history underwent a paradigm shift during the 1960s away from discussing art objects that were characteristic of an age to selecting art objects that represented the highest artistic accomplishments of the age, no matter how unique and extraordinary, the "Venus" of Willendorf quickly achieved a singular status. Although she was already being included in books devoted to Stone Age art published in the 1920s, it is not until the 1960s that the statuette begins to appear in the introductory art history books where she quickly displaced other previously used examples of Paleolithic art. Being both female and nude, she fitted perfectly into the patriarchal construction of the history of art that has tended to emphasize the more derogatory depictions of women in art through the ages. As the earliest known representation, she became the "first" woman, acquiring an Ur-Eve identity that focused suitably, from a patriarchal point of view, on the fascinating yet grotesque reality of the female body and its bulging vegetable nature; an impersonal composition of sexually-charged swollen shapes; an embodiment of overflowing fertility, of mindless fecundity, of eternal sex, the woman from which all women descend.

Ways of magic Fetishism: belief of an object which has supernatural power. Totemism: human belief of the origin from a certain animal, or plant. Shamanism: Shamans are able interact with the spirit world and channel these transcendental energies into this world .