Blog #8 Making Sense

It is part of human nature to make sense of anything beyond our comprehension, when something is unexplainable we search for an explanation to gain understanding. Prehistoric art is an excellent example of humans trying to make sense. The art, which clearly meant something to our ancestors, has lost its meaning to us through the years. Yet modern scientists see it as a link to the past, a way to understand who the human race used to be and how it has gotten to where it is today.
Making sense when looking at the past can be misleading, there is so much information that archaeologists and anthropologists will never know, and there is never a way to be one hundred percent sure that what they think happened, actually ever happened. The cave paintings are the perfect example of this problem. No matter how much people study them, or how they interpret them, the problem is it is still just their interpretation, without actually speaking to the artists it is virtually impossible to be sure that the proper understanding of their work has been determined. It makes it even harder to determine what the true meanings behind the cave paintings when we take into account the fact that there is no actual social context to any of the images. It is like we discussed in class on Wednesday, different works of art makes sense to us because we know the context of what it means. An example of this would be the statues on wall street of the Bull and the Bear. We know that these animals are being used as a representation of the different markets on the stock exchange, but to someone from another country what would they see? Just a couple of statues depicting animals. It is the same with the cave paintings, without that social context to suggest the meaning behind the paintings, our interpretations of them, our attempts to "make sense" of them can never be truly valid.

Blog #7: The First Humans view of their place in the world

In The Cave Painters, Curtis mentions how the paintings might not just be a reflection of how the Cro-Magnons saw the animals around them but how they see themselves, in regards to the rest of the world. According to the text the most common animals that appeared in the cave paintings were horses and bison, where as other animals such as fish and birds find no place, if not for some exceptions, on the walls on the caves. This raises the question, as Curtis mentions of why draw some animals and not others? Why are the animals they do choose to draw significant to them? It would be easy to assume they are drawing what they know, what animals are important to the way they live, yet if that were true fish would be a far more common occurrence than they are. Also aside from a lack of various animals on the cave walls, there is also a lack of any humans existing on the walls as well, apart from stick figures every one in a while. Curtis asserts in the first chapter how this may be a sign that the humans believed themselves to be insignificant to the world in comparison to animals. That the first humans truly believed it was an animals world and that they would just have to do what they could to survive in it. In this aspect I agree with Curtis, based on the knowledge gained of this art so far, I would have to say it does seem to show that the humans felt they were second to the animals. If they had seen themselves as equals or even as higher beings than the animals around them, than they would have depicted themselves in a more sophisticated manor. A manor of drawing that they had already proven they could achieve, through the very detailed depictions of the animals they had painted.

Blog #6

Personally I feel that when studying prehistoric art, it is much more valuable to learn the meaning behind the art and try to glean a perspective of not only the thought process behind the work, but also a sense of who the people were and the way they lived. This being said I would place myself in the second school, I feel that a lot more can be learned about these prehistoric people if they are looked at from the right perspective. The downside to the second school however is that even when trying to find a vivid living past in these works of art there is no way to establish any findings as fact, because there is no way to prove what we think happened actually happened. Where as school number one is all based on fact, finding the time an art work is done, but not why it was done, and if I could choose, I would want to know why.