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Submitted by vicky on Thursday, 15 April 2004 Page Views: 725
Type: Cup and Ring marks / Rock Art Internal Links: External Links: Archaeologists believe that 13,000-year-old cave paintings in Nottinghamshire were part of a continent-wide culture writes Sean Clarke of The Guardian. The people who created the first surviving art in Britain were committed Europeans, belonging to a common culture spanning France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, according to the man who discovered the cave art in Creswell Crags, Nottinghamshire.
And the essential preoccupations of this single market in ice-age art, it seems, were hunting and naked dancing girls.
The discovery of 13,000-year-old rock paintings in Nottinghamshire last year rewrote ice-age history in Britain. Today, archaeologists from all over Europe are in Creswell to discuss how the finds form part of a continent-wide culture known as the Magdalenian.
Paul Pettitt, of Sheffield University's archaeology department, said: "The Magdalenian era was the last time that Europe was unified in a real sense and on a grand scale."
According to Mr Pettitt, the artists behind the Creswell paintings would have spent summers in the area feasting on migrating reindeer, but the winters on lowlands which now form the North sea or in the Netherlands or central Rhine areas.
They would have kept in close contact, possibly through yearly meetings, with people in the middle Rhine, the Ardennes forest and the Dordogne. At the time it was possible to walk from Nottinghamshire to the Dordogne.
"The importance of art for the Magdalenians is clear," said Mr Pettitt. "It helped to reaffirm their common cultural affiliation."
The Creswell paintings share characteristics with contemporary art at sites such as Altamira in Spain and Lascaux in France.
Of particular interest is a depiction of an ibex, an animal now only to be found in Europe in the Pyrenees. "Not one ice-age ibex bone has been found in Britain. The nearest ibex remains [from the period] were found in Belgium and mid-Germany," said Mr Pettitt. He said the most likely explanation is that Magdalenians saw ibexes elsewhere and painted them in Creswell as a reminder.
Other shapes found at Creswell were initially thought to be long-necked birds. "Looked at another way," said Mr Pettitt, "You see a naked women in profile, with jutting out buttocks and raised arms. It appears to be a picture of women doing a dance in which they thrust out their derrières. It's stylistically very similar to continental examples, and seems to demonstrate that Creswellians are singing and dancing in the same way as on the continent."
Modern Europeans do not normally have access to Creswell's Church Hole cave, partly in an effort to protect a colony of bats which lives there.
Modern Creswellians, though, have special reason to thank their arty predecessors. The cave complex and attendant museum - where visitors can see iron-age stone tools found in the caves - now attract 28,000 visitors a year, bringing much needed income to the former mining village. The museum trust has submitted a £4m bid to the lottery heritage fund to improve access to the site.
Jon Humble, inspector of ancient monuments for English Heritage, called it "the best and most successful example of an archaeology-led project for social and economic regeneration anywhere in the UK".
For Mr Pettitt, its significance is simpler. "It settles an old argument about whether ice-age Britons were isolated on the periphery or in contact with the rest of Europe," he said.
More images of the cave art in Creswell can be seen on the Creswell website
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