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Authors: Neil Oliver
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artists used the contours
of the living rock to give their work the appearance of three dimensions.
The Upper Palaeolithic cave art of Europe was a tradition that lasted for perhaps 20,000 years and it will always be rightly described as primitive. But it is upon those anonymous artists’
shoulders – giants’ shoulders – that later masters like Picasso were able to stand. The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: ‘After Altamira, all is decadence.’
For the longest time it was believed, particularly by French and Spanish archaeologists and palaeontologists, that no such artistic talent had permeated as far as Britain. Surely any vagabonds
who had reached so far into the frozen wilderness could only have evolved a culture so starved and so pared back to the basics of survival, it could never have supported anything as sophisticated
as art? For much of the twentieth century this assumption was borne out by the absence of suitable discoveries here.
Until the twenty-first century, the only bona-fide artwork known from Creswellian Britain was the etching of a horse head on a sliver of rib bone. Despite its size (just two or three inches in
length) it is still a wonder to behold. A whole sequence of thoughts – the thoughts of an Ice Age artist – are there on the bone along with the horse. He or she had first to select theraw material and then, in the manner of a canvas, the surface of the bone was cleaned and polished in readiness for the making of the image itself. With just a few perfectly
judged and executed lines, the likeness of a galloping horse has been made to leap into life, whole and breathing. The hairs of the mane stand erect like hackles raised in fear or excitement; the
nostrils are flared as though by effort, the eyes wide and blazing. Despite the lack of space, the artist has even managed to suggest the animal’s plunging forelegs.
At some point after completing it, the artist deliberately defaced the work – by scratching across it a series of lines and then snapping the bone in two. Perhaps it was dissatisfaction
with the finished piece, or an attempt to influence future events. Either way, to hold that artwork is to hold some few moments, some of the thinking of a person who lived in Britain more than
13,500 years ago.
Sliver of a thing that it is, the horse head rib bone makes a person wonder what else the artist achieved. How much of his or her portfolio has been destroyed by bad luck and time? Imagine some
Europe-wide catastrophe in the sixteenth century had destroyed every last work by Michelangelo, so that only a single crumpled scrap of paper survived, bearing a sketch made of a handful of lines.
Imagine that was all we had of him. Then apply the same thought to whoever sketched that galloping horse while the Ice Age waxed and waned. What became of his Sistine Chapel, and his David?
That little treasure from so-called Robin Hood’s Cave, within the Creswell Crags, was for long the sum total of Palaeolithic art in Britain. Then in April 2003 archaeologists and cave art
specialists Paul Bahn, Paul Pettitt and Sergio Ripoll began surveying the caves’ interiors.
From outside the caves look almost too good to be true. Facing each other across the floor of a wide, limestone gorge – self-contained residences cut into both cliff faces so that each
cave’s inhabitants had neighbours either side and across the way as well – Creswell Crags appears for all the world like a prehistoric Coronation Street. It is easy to imagine lives
lived there long ago, the smell of fires, the sounds of voices as people went about their business.
The caves were first occupied by Neanderthal people 40–50,000 years ago and then again by Cro-Magnons around the time of the end of the last Ice Age; and given that the tip of the ice
sheet terminated just 30 miles north of Sheffield these are closer to the sharp end than any other known sites of human habitation in Britain.
The caves have
of the living rock to give their work the appearance of three dimensions.
The Upper Palaeolithic cave art of Europe was a tradition that lasted for perhaps 20,000 years and it will always be rightly described as primitive. But it is upon those anonymous artists’
shoulders – giants’ shoulders – that later masters like Picasso were able to stand. The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: ‘After Altamira, all is decadence.’
For the longest time it was believed, particularly by French and Spanish archaeologists and palaeontologists, that no such artistic talent had permeated as far as Britain. Surely any vagabonds
who had reached so far into the frozen wilderness could only have evolved a culture so starved and so pared back to the basics of survival, it could never have supported anything as sophisticated
as art? For much of the twentieth century this assumption was borne out by the absence of suitable discoveries here.
Until the twenty-first century, the only bona-fide artwork known from Creswellian Britain was the etching of a horse head on a sliver of rib bone. Despite its size (just two or three inches in
length) it is still a wonder to behold. A whole sequence of thoughts – the thoughts of an Ice Age artist – are there on the bone along with the horse. He or she had first to select theraw material and then, in the manner of a canvas, the surface of the bone was cleaned and polished in readiness for the making of the image itself. With just a few perfectly
judged and executed lines, the likeness of a galloping horse has been made to leap into life, whole and breathing. The hairs of the mane stand erect like hackles raised in fear or excitement; the
nostrils are flared as though by effort, the eyes wide and blazing. Despite the lack of space, the artist has even managed to suggest the animal’s plunging forelegs.
At some point after completing it, the artist deliberately defaced the work – by scratching across it a series of lines and then snapping the bone in two. Perhaps it was dissatisfaction
with the finished piece, or an attempt to influence future events. Either way, to hold that artwork is to hold some few moments, some of the thinking of a person who lived in Britain more than
13,500 years ago.
Sliver of a thing that it is, the horse head rib bone makes a person wonder what else the artist achieved. How much of his or her portfolio has been destroyed by bad luck and time? Imagine some
Europe-wide catastrophe in the sixteenth century had destroyed every last work by Michelangelo, so that only a single crumpled scrap of paper survived, bearing a sketch made of a handful of lines.
Imagine that was all we had of him. Then apply the same thought to whoever sketched that galloping horse while the Ice Age waxed and waned. What became of his Sistine Chapel, and his David?
That little treasure from so-called Robin Hood’s Cave, within the Creswell Crags, was for long the sum total of Palaeolithic art in Britain. Then in April 2003 archaeologists and cave art
specialists Paul Bahn, Paul Pettitt and Sergio Ripoll began surveying the caves’ interiors.
From outside the caves look almost too good to be true. Facing each other across the floor of a wide, limestone gorge – self-contained residences cut into both cliff faces so that each
cave’s inhabitants had neighbours either side and across the way as well – Creswell Crags appears for all the world like a prehistoric Coronation Street. It is easy to imagine lives
lived there long ago, the smell of fires, the sounds of voices as people went about their business.
The caves were first occupied by Neanderthal people 40–50,000 years ago and then again by Cro-Magnons around the time of the end of the last Ice Age; and given that the tip of the ice
sheet terminated just 30 miles north of Sheffield these are closer to the sharp end than any other known sites of human habitation in Britain.
The caves have
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