GLOBAL PREHISTORY
30,000 BCE - 500 BCE

Cultural Influences

• Globally, the earliest peoples were small groups of hunter-gatherers, whose paramount concern was sheer survival, which resulted in the creation of practical objects. From earliest times, these practical tools were accompanied by objects of unknown purpose—ritual and symbolic works perhaps intended to encourage the availability of flora and fauna food sources. Art making was associated with activities such as food production (hunting, gathering, agriculture, animal husbandry) and patterns of behavior, such as settlement, demonstration of status, and burial. For example, places of gathering or settlement and/or objects found in such places may be painted and/or incised with imagery related to their use

• In many world regions—including those not in direct contact with one another—art shows humans' awareness of fundamental, stable phenomena, from the macrocosmic (e.g., astronomical cycles, such as equinoxes and solstices) to the microcosmic (e.g., exploitation of permanent materials available in local environments, such as stone, hardened clay, and jade). 

Materials & Techniques

• Humans established Paleolithic communities in West, Central, South, Southeast, and East Asia between 70,000 and 40,000 BCE. Paleolithic and Neolithic cave paintings featuring animal imagery are found across Asia, including in the mountains of Central Asia and Iran and in rock shelters throughout central India. In prehistoric China, ritual objects were created in jade, beginning a 5,000-year tradition of working with the precious medium. Ritual, tomb, and memorializing arts are found across Neolithic Asia, including impressive funerary steles from Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Asia's greatest contribution to early world art is in ceramic technology, with some of the earliest pieces (dating to 10,500 BCE) produced by the Jomon culture in Japan. Even earlier pottery continues to be found, particularly in China. Ceramics were also produced in Iran beginning in the eighth millennium BCE, and refined vessel forms arose from the adoption of the potter's wheel in the fourth millennium BCE.

• Paleolithic and Neolithic Europe's artistic statements were made in small human figural sculptures (central Europe), cave paintings (France and Spain), and outdoor, monumental stone assemblages (British Isles). These provide glimpses into the beginnings of ritual life (15,000 BCE) as people tried to influence and integrate with the natural cycles of the cosmos and promote both human and animal fertility. These works establish the dynamic interplay of naturalism and abstraction found throughout art's history.

• On the American continent, from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego, indigenous peoples who had recently migrated from Asia (before 10,000 BCE) first made sculptures from animal bone and later from clay, with animals and sacred humans as dominant subject matter. Similar to European expressions, ancient American art adapts animal images to the natural contours of the chosen materials and features fecund females. The fact that female figurines may also display unusual or supernatural characteristics suggests the importance of shamanic religion brought from Asia very early in human history.  

Theories & Interpretations

• The function of artistic expression prior to written records is inferred from evidence of technology and survival strategies and based on the relationship of tools and their function (whether task-related or expressive), available food sources, the rise of sophisticated culture, and humans' capacity to shape and manage the environment. Basic art historical methods can be applied to prehistoric art by comparing works of art, imagery, materials, and techniques to identify patterns (such as a prevalence of transformational animal human iconography), then ethnographic approaches can be used to propose hypotheses (e.g., that certain iconography is shamanic in nature). Cross-cultural comparisons can help establish wider generalizations (e.g., that South African, Asian, and indigenous American peoples all participated in rock/cave expressions of a visionary aesthetic). In this way, the apparent paucity of evidence can be mitigated, and theories can be proposed, tested, refined, and potentially rejected by conflicting evidence or new information, as in other periods of art history and in other disciplines.