Art, crafts and Paleolithic art

This article initially examines the foundations of our modern under-standing of Paleolithic art. Taking the period 1860–1905 into account, I show that the depiction of Paleolithic art elaborated by Western archaeologists at that time was largely based on the projection of categories used to characterize craft at the end of the nineteenth century with prehistoric art. As I depict in the final section of the article, the weakening of evolutionism and the recognition of the complexity of primitive societies at the turn of the century provoked a new definition of Paleolithic art, which included cave paintings. KEY WORDS craft ● fine arts ● Paleolithic art ● progress ● upper-middle class ■ THE INVENTION OF PRIMITIVE SOCIET Y When we try to go back in time so far from us, how may difficulties stop us! Most of the monuments (remains) have disappeared, and even those that remain have been damaged, defiled by the prejudices of following ages. at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on May 16, 2016jsa.sagepub.comDownloaded from 120 Journal of Social Archaeology 6(1) Unable to explain the origins of society, but refusing to ignore it, we have represented ancient barbarism with reference to modern civilization. (Michelet, 1827: 173; emphasis added). In this extract from the introduction to the first French edition of Vico’s Scienza nouva, Jules Michelet anticipated two fashionable ideas from the end of the twentieth century. First, Michelet suggested that primitive society is a European representation or, in Adam Kuper’s words, a Western inven-tion (Kuper, 1988). In recent years, several anthropological and prehistori-cal works have suggested that primitive society is not an inert fact of nature, but rather is a historical representation constructed by archaeologists an