This modest volume may be considered the ultimate statement of Jean Clottes’s long, prolific, and remarkable career involving investigations into rock art. It may appear disarmingly casual in its discussion of the philosophical underpinnings of how we can know anything about rock art of the past, for, thankfully, absent are the polysyllabic obscurities of ontologies, epistemologies, and hermeneutics. Instead, we are presented with down-to-earth basics: ethnographic analogy, contexts, behavioral commonalities, unusual efforts or training, and probabilities that archaeologists must deal with.
Clottes has served as the Director for Prehistoric Antiquities in the Midi-Pyrénée region and as the principal investigator in the archaeological investigations in Chauvet Cave, Cosquer Cave, Le Placard, Enlène, and the Réseau Clastres in Niaux—all of which are of the greatest importance for cave art studies. Unlike most of his other colleagues, Clottes has gone on to undertake his own ethnographic studies of traditional art in India (Clottes and Dubey-Pathak, Des Images Pour les Dieux, 2013). In addition, he has traveled over six continents to document and deepen his ethnographic and archaeological understanding of rock art. This book is nothing short of remarkable and unparalleled in the academic rock art community.
While many of the issues he addresses may seem fairly basic for North American prehistorians, especially the role of shamanic worldview in the creation and content of prehistoric rock art, it is important to realize that this book was originally written for a popular French and European audience that has sometimes attacked his views with vitriol. In North America, it should come as no surprise to most scholars dealing with prehistoric religion that the environment is generally considered populated with spirits that can become immanent and transform themselves, or that the world is usually divided into a three-tiered universe (the sky, the earth's surface, and the underworld). Clottes is at pains to establish this; yet these characteristics have been well established since Mircea Eliade (The Sacred and the Profane, 1959) published extensively on the topic of traditional religion—an author surprisingly given only a passing nod of acknowledgment. Clottes has somewhat modified his earlier emphasis on shamanism as the main instrument for the creation of art to a more basic emphasis on shamanistic worldviews as being reflected in cave art, although still including shamans as agents in rock art.
The book is divided into three sections, the first of which provides a history of cave art interpretations, as well as a general orientation to the basic issues and a discussion of inferences about prehistoric art. “Art” and “spirituality” are defined in ways that enable Clottes to claim that art “is incontestably an indicator of spirituality” (p. 28)—perhaps a bit of hyperbole, as is Clottes’s recasting of Homo sapiens as Homo spiritualis. These and other sweeping statements that might appeal to popular readers (e.g., aspects that occur “throughout the entire world” or that “will forever remain beyond our grasp”) distract the academic reader from some of the more valuable insights that Clottes has winnowed from his experiences.
The second section is a first-person account of Clottes’s many ethnoarchaeological experiences and investigations. While readers may wonder at first whether Clottes is being critical enough of claims, practices, or interpretations of modern shamans, who are frequently known for their cultural borrowings from modern media, or who greedily seek government funding as a condition for repainting rockshelters (employing untrained boys and girls!), he does later discuss these problems in section three. Certainly, all the experiences he documents were worth recording. The most compelling examples he describes come from Tuva and Khakassia. Overall, there are enough cross-cultural recurring themes from shamans to make some of his connections to Paleolithic art seem likely. I particularly enjoyed discussions on the meaning of handprints and cave walls/crevices as means of contacting spirits.
The third section develops the interpretive framework for understanding art, including the immanence of spirits in nature, the sexuality of caves, patterns in the art (the “spectacular” versus more private aspects), the gender of the artists or ritual participants, the episodic use of caves, destruction or superposition of images, material indications of attempts to contact spirit essences in caves, the training of specialist artists, the magico-religious nature of cave art, and the underlying shamanic view of the world in the art. These discussions are all convincingly supported in my view, and few can now doubt that a shamanic-type of religion was present in Upper Paleolithic societies. I would add only that consideration of cave art as the product of secret societies would add yet deeper insights into the cave art phenomenon and would be consonant with Clottes’s interpretations (see Hayden, Shamans, Sorcerers, and Saints: The Prehistory of Religion, 2003). One surprise was the statement that “everyone agrees about the mental capacities of the Neanderthals, which . . . . surely included spirituality” (p. 33). I seriously doubt that such a consensus exists.
This is a book that needs to be read by anyone interested in cave art or prehistoric art in general. The fundamental conclusions are well grounded, and it documents a remarkable intellectual journey by a remarkable prehistorian.
