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Science & technologyApr 23rd 2022 edition

Light entertainment
Why 15,000-year-old art might have been displayed in firelight

Markings on prehistoric art hint at an early attempt at animation

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Apr 23rd 2022

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THE BRITISH MUSEUM has in its care more than 8m artefacts. Visitors
can see a mere 80,000 of them or so on display at any one time.
Partly that is a blunt matter of space and variety. Few museums can
display all they have and many cycle through their collections to
give visitors new experiences on successive visits. But it is also
about context. Curators have plenty of prehistoric objects in the
basement that they know to be significant and interesting, even if
they do not know what those objects were for.

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Artefacts are dug up over the course of centuries by teams with
varying skills or commitment to book-keeping. Objects end up in
archives, entirely shorn of their context. For finds whose purpose or
beauty is not readily apparent, or for those that do not fit neatly
into an archaeological tale that explains that purpose, eternal
repose in the basement is likely.

That is why results from Andy Needham and colleagues at the
University of York and the University of Durham, published this week
in the journal PLOS ONE, may prove to be so valuable. The team
believes, tentatively, that it has discovered evidence of a fireside
art gallery from 15,000 years ago.

They started by hauling up 54 carvings that had languished for
decades in the British Museum's vaults. First excavated in the 1860s
at Montastruc in France, near Toulouse, these "plaquettes"--flat,
mostly limestone slabs about the size of a postcard--were made by the
Magdalenian people. This seemingly art-minded culture spread
throughout western Europe between roughly 23,000 and 14,000 years
ago. The Montastruc slabs feature carved depictions of then-common
local wildlife, such as the ibex and cattle-like aurochs.

While cataloguing the plaquettes' appearance, Dr Needham was struck
by how many of them had pink edges. This "rubefaction" occurs when
iron impurities within limestone begin to oxidise; it happens at
temperatures of around 200degC, approximately the heat felt at the edge
of a wood fire. Much hotter than that, and the material would turn
grey.

The pinkness suggested a few possibilities. Perhaps the plaquettes
had ended up buried and later fires had burned above them. Or they
might have outlived their aesthetic appeal and experienced second
lives as cooking stones. Or, more intriguingly, perhaps they were
deliberately set near to fires for purely cultural reasons. That
thought would be interesting enough to chew over, but the researchers
have gone one hypothesis further: that the fire was more than mere
illumination and its flickerings acted to provide a primitive
animation to the plaquettes' carvings.

That idea is reminiscent of findings at Chauvet cave, a site from
more than 30,000 years ago deeper in south-east France. The limestone
walls there host perhaps the most stunning cave paintings of animals
in existence. That the beasts were painted one over another, some
with as many as eight legs, suggests humanity's early artistic
attempts at depicting motion. Those walls also show signs of
rubefaction.

Trial by...what else?

It was then time for the team to get their hands dirty. They
fashioned their own sets of limestone plaquettes, burying some
beneath fires, using others as cooking stones and illuminating some
with nearby firelight. What created the best match to patterns on the
museum artefacts was placing the replicas around a fire.

Suppose the purpose was a fireside art gallery. What, the team
wondered, might those prehistoric people have seen among the
carvings? Subjecting the British Museum's treasures to the rigours of
flame-based experimentation would not do, so the team took to their
computers. They made a simulation of a hearth as would have been
constructed by the Magdalenians, set light to a virtual fire and then
subjected precise, 3D models of the plaquettes to the resulting
light. The results were strikingly vivid, even from artefacts whose
initial brilliant-white carvings had long since faded. "This might
have been a very powerful, visceral experience, seeing animals jump
off the rock," Dr Needham says.

That is informed guesswork. The meticulous and multidisciplinary
methods of the new work are worthy of praise, says Gilles Tosello, a
member of the scientific team that has studied the Chauvet caves. So,
too, is the attempt to bring new context to old objects--especially,
Dr Tosello says, objects obtained from a 19th-century dig that was
excavated using what would now be seen as primitive methods. But he
is cautious about guessing what people long ago would have seen, or
sought.

Yet this is what archaeologists and curators must do: attempt to fill
in the blanks when no new data are expected to roll in. Dr Needham
hopes that similar techniques could be applied to finds from other
sites, perhaps shedding more light, as it were, on past cultures--and
rescuing a few more overlooked artefacts from the basements of
museums. #

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This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the
print edition under the headline "Light entertainment"

Reuse this contentThe Trust Project

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