The arts of the prehistory and the cultural dynamics of societies before writing – PREHART

Artistic creativity and use of symbols appear as a fundamental need for the social life. The oldest archaeologically demonstrated symbolic activity is linked to the first anatomically modern man (Homo sapiens sapiens). The scientific objective of our project entitled “The Arts of Prehistory and the Cultural Dynamics of Societies before Writing” is a better understanding of the relations between art and society in different contexts, based on actual cases issued from fieldworks of the participants. These works are dealing with all chronological periods (from Upper Palaeolithic to sub-actual times), all types of arts (from monumental rock art to portable art and ornaments), and various types of societies (nomadic or semi-nomadic hunters-gatherers, sedentary pastoralists and farmers). For the first time, a study will tackle prehistoric art on a very large diachronic and geographic scale, in a cooperative manner, in order to discover specificities in each rock art and to highlight simultaneously their structural similarities. The art of caves and rock shelters during the European Upper Palaeolithic, the Spanish Levantine art, Bronze age art from Mont Bego and Mongolia, rock arts from Sahara, Chad, Namibia, Australia, etc. will provide a large set of unpublished data, sufficiently varied to address essential questions such as the creative act in its context (identification of expertise peculiar to an artist or to a group, painting techniques, “operational sequence”), the place of art in society as “cultural marker” (dynamics of exchange between groups, phenomena of diffusion and borrowing, diachrony) or as “territorial marker” (cultural identity of local groups) and allow us to consider rock art as a structured system of communication, obeying to codes, and to apply automatic procedures of treatment of symbolic data. The relation between image and language and the question of the appearance of figurative art will be addressed with the collaboration of linguists and neuropsychologists.