Rock Art and Cave Art

So I think we have a couple of fun ones this week. So the first one I would love to write about is rock art and cave art. There are many examples of rock art and cave art around the world. I’m just going to do a couple of places in the US and one in France. The cave art in France that I think is the most interesting is Lascaux. It is this very fascinating cave system that has so many different paintings in it. I first learned about Lascaux from an anthropology class I took at Front Range Community College. Something that has stuck with me about it is the fact that these paintings could be the result of drugs, or it could be the result of it needing to be a right of passage, or it could be some sort of shamanistic thing where if you draw/paint the thing it will allow for the thing to be killed. The same could be said about rock art too but with the addition that it tells stories and warnings for others. So I kinda love the idea that it could be all of those things.

People were going into these caves for the last 350,000 years. That is so crazy that art has been around for so long. And who really knows what these art forms really meant back then. It could have just been a way of saying that someone was there and able to do things like that. It is a shame though they had to stop access to this site though because they had allegedly found unwanted graffiti and other reasons, so they wanted to preserve it as much as possible. Another thing is that art isn’t just painting it can also be etching, scratching, and others.

In the Great Plains itself has many options to look at too.

So these last two photos are important to the Shoshone Native Americans. They are supposed to tell stories about Wokai Mumbic and Pa Weip. I guess I just really think these pieces of art are so interesting because they show us about the past and its stuff we have to figure out and it is just so interesting that this has been going on for so long.

I got the photos and information from the Lascaux website and Dr. Jason La Belle. https://archeologie.culture.fr/lascaux/en/visit-cave/salle-taureaux