A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [17]
It is an appreciation not just of the animal world – these people know how to make the most of the rocks and minerals. This little sculpture is the result of four separate stone technologies. First, the tip of the tusk was severed with a chopping tool; then the contours of the animals were whittled with a stone knife and scraper. Then the whole thing was polished using a powdered iron oxide mixed with water, probably buffed up with a chamois leather, and finally the markings on the bodies and the details of the eyes were carefully incised with a stone engraving tool. In execution as well as in conception, this is a very complex work of art. It shows all the qualities of precise observation and skilled execution that you would look for in any great artist.
Why would you go to such trouble to make an object with no practical purpose? Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, sees a deep meaning in all this:
You can feel that somebody’s making this who was projecting themselves with huge imaginative generosity into the world around, and saw and felt in their bones that rhythm. In the art of this period you see human beings trying to enter fully into the flow of life, so that they become part of the whole process of animal life that’s going on around them, in a way which isn’t just about managing the animal world, or guaranteeing them success in hunting. I think it’s more than that. It’s really a desire to get inside and almost to be at home in the world at a deeper level, and that’s actually a very religious impulse, to be at home in the world. We sometimes tend to identify religion with not being at home in the world, as if the real stuff were elsewhere in Heaven; and yet if you look at religious origins, at a lot of the mainstream themes in the great world religions, it’s the other way round – it’s how to live here and now and how to be part of that flow of life.
This carving of the two swimming reindeer had no practical function, only form. Was it an image made just for its beauty? Or does it have a different purpose? By representing something, by making a picture or a sculpture of it, you give it life by a kind of magical power, and you assert your relation to it in a world that you’re able not just to experience, but to imagine.
It may be that much of the art made around the world at the time of the latest Ice Age did indeed have a religious dimension, although we can now only guess at any ritual use. But this art sits in a tradition still very much alive today, an evolving religious consciousness that shapes many human societies. Objects like this sculpture of swimming reindeer take us into the minds and imaginations of people far removed from us, but very like us – into a world that they could not see but that they immediately understood.
5
Clovis Spear Point
Stone spearhead, found in Arizona, USA
11000 BC
Imagine. You’re in a green landscape studded with trees and bushes. You’re working in a team of hunters quietly stalking a herd of mammoths. One of the mammoths, you hope, is going to be your supper. You’re clutching a light spear with a sharp, pointed stone at the end of it. You get closer – you hurl your spear – and it misses. The mammoth you wanted to kill snaps the shaft under its foot. That spear is useless now. You take another one and move on – and you leave behind on the ground something that’s not just a killing tool that failed, but an object that’s going to become a message across time. Thousands of years after the mammoth trod on your spear, later humans will find that pointed stone spearhead and know you were here.
Things that are thrown away or lost tell us as much about the past as many of those carefully preserved for posterity. Mundane everyday items, discarded long ago as rubbish, can tell some of the most important stories of all in human history – in this case, how modern humans took over