The politicisation of prehistory

When earth’s geological history began to be researched by Europeans in the 19th century, the knowledge opened, in the words of the art historian Maria Stavrinaki, an “abyss” of time. Greece and Rome had been the traditional focus point of historical studies since the late 18th century, but in the following generations, scholars understood that human history stretched back many thousands of years beyond that. Prehistoric art was both significantly older and, aesthetically, radically different from classical antiquity. This distance and difference made prehistoric humanity a foil for modern utopic fantasies of how to organise society. My research asks how archaeological discoveries, modern artworks and prehistoric forgeries all functioned to materialise fantasies of the past and hopes for the future.

Prehistoric art first began to be studied in earnest around 1900. Mobiliary art – objects small enough that you can hold them in your hand – dating from the Upper Palaeolithic (circa 40,000-20,000 BC) had been discovered in the 19th century, but few people had found it worthwhile to speculate about their meaning or importance in early society. Prehistoric humans were often imagined as living an almost animal-like existence and, consequently, these artworks were generally interpreted as spontaneous, almost instinctive products that had little in common with art as cultural expression.

When spectacular painted caves like those of Altamira in Spain were discovered in the 1860s, many scholars rejected the idea that such large-scale and complex images could have been conceived by a prehistoric human. As more evidence for the caves’ age accumulated in the early 20th century, scholars began to reconsider descriptions of our early ancestors. Parietal (ie, cave) art was taken as evidence that our early ancestors had philosophised about nature and animals, interpersonal relationships, and death and birth well before they established farming and sedentary living.

From the 1920s onwards, artists began to look to prehistoric art for inspiration. This decade saw the discoveries of many so-called Venus statuettes – small statuettes of women produced during the last ice age – such as the so-called Venus of Dolní Věstonice. These soft, feminine shapes looked radically different from the muscular bodies of Greek and Roman statues that had long been held up as artistic models and representatives of an ideal culture, and scholars speculated that they testified to a different standing of women among early humans – and therefore that, to an ancient Roman, both prehistoric society and modernity would seem equally alien. Archaeologists emphasised the contrast with Greco-Roman antiquity by referring to the works as “Venus” – although there is no conclusive evidence that these statuettes depict goddesses.

In the aftermath of the First World War, the idea of history as continual progress came under increasing scrutiny. In response, it became attractive to conceive of prehistoric art as the mysterious heritage of a society that thought differently about power, nature, and technology. The lack of written sources allowed a certain liberty to projecting utopian visions back onto the deep past. Were these artworks produced by a proto-communist, maybe even matriarchal societies? The Minoan culture of bronze age Knossos on Crete (excavated between 1905-1931) was one site often held up as evidence that early European culture had been pacifist and goddess worshipping (cf. Gere 2009).

Modern European artists such as Hans Arp, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth took inspiration from prehistoric artworks. The ICA’s second ever exhibition in 1948 was called ‘40,000 Years of Modern Art’ (the first being ‘40 Years of Modern Art’). Of the exhibition, the Institute’s founder Herbert Read said that “there are conditions in modern life which have produced effects only to be seen in primitive epochs”. Stavrinaki has mapped out a widespread artistic and philosophical discourse that reflected on affinities between life in prehistory and the early 20th century. She argues that the world wars, and especially the atom bomb, invited a comparison between humanity’s beginning and its possible end. Prehistory became a surprisingly modern past.

The popularity of modernist artworks that borrowed the language of archaeology not only expressed itself in the contemporary art market; it also fuelled a forgery industry in the market for antiquities. The cover of the catalogue for “40,000 Years” shows a Giacometti sculpture next to a Cycladic statuette produced on the Greek islands between 3,300-1,100 BCE. The enormous popularity of these statuettes – abetted by the challenges of dating stone as opposed to organic materials – led to a flood of forgeries and illicit excavations. By some estimates, more than half of Cycladic figurines on display around the world do not have a confirmed provenance. In Britain, the so-called Grimes Grave Goddess, discovered in a neolithic flint mine in 1939, became something of a celebrity object among artists and scholars, not least since the statuette seemed to testify to a ritual practice among miners, who implored a ‘great goddess’ to protect them in their work. Archaeologist Jennifer Wexler has reported on the suspicious circumstances around the discovery and noted how the object looks like the Palaeolithic ‘Venuses’ produced tens of thousands of years before the mine was active. Similar forgeries were addressed to the scientific community. Art historian Jutta Teutenberg has written about how the Piltdown Man – a forgery not of an object, but of an entire human – was held up in the 1920s as the ‘missing link’ between apes and humans as part of an effort to turn the attention of young people after the war towards productive interests.

When forgeries are discovered, museums are often quick to remove them from displays and catalogues, which makes it difficult to track down and even more difficult to research. Perhaps it helps to think of these objects – neither prehistoric artefacts, nor quite modern artworks – quite literally as products of their time, produced in a response to a wish to imagine alternative heritages and possible futures.

Frederika Tevebring is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Classics at King's College London.