PALEOLITHIC PERIOD (30,000 - 10,000 BCE)
ochre or hematite   to create the images
How people lived?Early human lived in caves,
and were hunters and gatherers.
Type of art in the period?Cave paintings and
carved small figurines from stones
Materials used in the art?They use
combinations of minerals, ochers, burn bone,
charcoal mixed into water, blood. They also
used basic stones, lime stones, ivory and bones.
Subject of arts?Painting- an ancient bull Horses
Fish (rare) Rhinoceroses and bison, also ibex
goats, hyenas, turtles, people human hands
marks that represent a calendar.
Sculpture- Woman and human with animal
head.
Why they were made?
Like all prehistoric art, the purpose of these
paintings and sculptures remains obscure.
Theories for painting:
=Traditional view that they were used to
Ensure a successful hunt
= Ancestral animal worship
= Shamanism: a religion based on the idea that
the forces of nature can be contacted
= trance like state to reach another state of
consciousness
Theories for Sculptures:
= female-centered religion
= A female-dominated society
Hypothesis that the figurines were created as
self-portraits of actual women
Example of paleolithic arts
Altamira (circa 18,000 BCE) is a cave in
northern Spain famous for its Upper Paleolithic
cave paintings featuring drawings and
polychrome rock paintings of wild mammals
and human hands.
The artists used polychrome   charcoal and
Venus of Willendorf
These figures are all quite small, between 4 and
25 cm tall, and carved mainly in steatite,
limestone, bone, or ivory.
These sculptures are collectively described as
“Venus” figurines in reference to the Roman
goddess of beauty, as early historians assumed
they represented an ideal of beauty from the
time
Mesolithic Period (10,000–8000 BCE)
BACKGROUND
The ice began retreating and life got a little
easier.
The Mesolithic Period, or Middle Stone Age, is
an archaeological term describing specific
cultures that fall between the Paleolithic and
the Neolithic Periods.
The Mesolithic period (which lasted longer in
northern Europe than it did in the Middle East)
saw painting move out of the caves and onto
rocks
example of mesolithic arts
Dance of the Cogul Found in El Cogul, Catalonia,
Spain.It is an example of the depiction of
movement in static art.
The Man of Bicorporf The Man of Bicorp
holding onto lianas to gather honey from a
beehive as depicted on an 8000-year-old cave
painting near Valencia, Spain.
Neolithic Period (8000–3000 BCE
BACKGROUND Art in the Neolithic Near East
owes its existence to developments in
agriculture, architecture, and other areas
TYPE OF ART IN THIS PERIOD?
Neolithic societies produced female and animal
statues, engravings , and elaborate pottery
decoration.