Neolithic art, part 4: Religion and art

It is tempting to imagine Paleolithic artists contemplating the images they created and beginning an intellectual journey towards conceiving creator gods who made humans, like humans made figurines.

The Neolithic sees the beginnings of religion in the form we recognise today. As we are dealing with prehistory, there are no writings to preserve the beliefs of that time, so we are limited to what we may infer from archaeological evidence, but there is no question that religion had profound implications for art.

Organised religion, as opposed to whatever Paleolithic societies practiced, is built on the resources of a more advanced economy, with prescribed scriptures and rituals, and a hierarchy of specialist priests. Come the rise of civilisation, religion took on the role of helping to justify the disproportionate wealth and power of the nobility by ascribing their status to divine edict. In return, the priest caste could enjoy being part of the elite, with considerable material rewards.

But religion is of course also one of the means by which human beings, when they know no better, try to explain the world around them — such as the belief that there are supramundane, intelligent powers that determined the destiny of human beings. Religion was a way of trying to meet some of our prehistoric needs: it provided an explanation for the animals and natural forces around which human life revolved, but for which no scientific account was yet possible. These explanations were, inevitably, anthropomorphised; that is, humans found meaning by relating external forces to what they were most intimately familar with. Therefore, as Marx wrote, “Man makes religion, religion does not make man.”[1]

Rituals, whatever their specific purpose, occur in all human societies and serve to unite a group of humans within a common sense of identity. There is a relationship between ritual and art that is as true of modern ceremonials as it was of Neolithic rites. They are not identical, but they are inseparable. Ritual enlists the arts in the forms of elaborate costumes and head-dresses, body-painting, the use of decorations like feathers, beads and gems, evocative language, music, displays of groups of people in formations, dances, revered objects made of rare and precious materials, and so on. In the construction of the temples and tombs that provided settings for these rituals, religion calls upon the most monumental of the arts: architecture. These methods drew attention to the ritual as an event that was out of ordinary, or super-natural. A huge proportion of the creative labour expended by society was, and to a lesser extent still is, for a religious, semi-religious or superficially religious purpose.

A brief note on Marxism and religion

As a materialist philosophy, Marxism points out that no evidence for the existence of supernatural beings has ever been produced. There are compelling materialist explanations for the processes of the universe.[2] None of these theories are, or can ever be, complete, but they provide a framework for understanding the physical laws of nature and the evolution of living creatures. Given that human consciousness cannot be separated from the human body, an afterlife cannot exist. Humans need ways of addressing their fears, giving life meaning, and explaining the nature of our relationship to the world — and religion provides that for millions of people — but they deserve better than illusions and falsehoods.

Marx is famous for describing religion as the ‘opium of the people’, but it is worth reading the whole passage:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.[3]

Marx knew that religion was nonsense, but he also knew that it was not the main enemy, and that it was the means, albeit illusory, by which oppressed people found meaning and solace. To free the poor from these illusions required a fundamental change in the structure of society; the enemy is not religion but the alienated society that fosters it.

The correct attitude towards religious people and institutions was summed up by Lenin, who was often scathing about religion, when he wrote:

Religion must be declared a private affair... Religion must be of no concern to the state, and religious societies must have no connection with governmental authority. Everyone must be absolutely free to profess any religion he pleases, or no religion whatever, i.e., to be an atheist, which every socialist is, as a rule. Discrimination among citizens on account of their religious convictions is wholly intolerable.[4]

Thus the Stalinist approach of banning and oppressing religious practice is quite wrong. Lenin also argued however that the party, as opposed to the state, should agitate against religion. It is in no one’s interest to live according to a lie — and the vanguard of the working class above all should not be seduced by it.

From Paleolithic magic to Neolithic religion

We know that at least some Paleolithic societies buried their dead (this is even true of Neanderthals, though in their case there is no evidence of associated ritual.) Skeletons found at Qafzeh in modern-day Israel, dated to around 100,000 years ago, had been stained with red ochre; it is hard to see why skeletons would be modified in this way if not for some ritual purpose. Max Raphael amongst others proposed that Paleolithic society practised totemism, in which an animal is worshipped as a representative of the social group. Alternatively, David Lewis-Williams proposed that Paleolithic rock art originated in shamanism, and the trances of shamans as they saw both revered animals and abstract forms in their hallucinations.

Shaman from contemporary Papua New Guinea. Photo: Kira Salak.

The truth is that we know next to nothing about Paleolithic ideas about the supernatural. They are impossible to extract from flint tools, animal bones, and indeed from the art, and would not have been uniform across the entire world for thousands of years. The ideas associated with the activities for which we have evidence are unknowable. The most persuasive theory, encouraged by ethnographic precedent (itself a very unreliable guide), is that Paleolithic spirituality centred upon the spirits of animals and human ancestors. It was probably sensuous and immediate — practitioners knew intimately the animals that dominated their art: saw them, observed their behaviours and seasonal movements, tracked them, and tore open their bodies after the kill. It may therefore have been monistic, i.e. it saw a unity in all aspects of nature.

The Neolithic farmer was confronted by bigger, invisible forces — such as the rhythm over seasons across a year — which were more in need of abstraction. With the cultivation of fields of crops and investment in animals, Neolithic humans had something to lose, and were more aware than ever of flood and famine, of disease and war. Unsurprisingly they sought ways to extend their control over their fate. Hauser characterised the roots of Neolithic religion this way:

Not until [the Neolithic person] begins to breed plants and cattle does he also begin to feel that his fate is directed by powers endowed by reason and with the ability to determine human destiny. With the awareness of man’s dependence on good and bad weather, on rain and sunshine, lightning and hail, plague and famine, on the fertility and infertility of the earth and abundance or meagreness of litters, arises the conception of all kinds of demons and spirits — beneficent and malignant — distributing blessings and curses, and the idea of the unknown and mysterious, of the higher powers, of huge, supramundane and numinous forces beyond human control.[5]

Hauser draws a very firm line between ‘Paleolithic magic’ and ‘Neolithic animism’. The first is single and concrete in texture, the latter dualistic and abstract. “That is the main reason why Paleolithic art reproduces things true to life and reality, whilst Neolithic art opposes a stylised and idealised superworld to ordinary empirical reality.” This is too rigid a division. We can see a continuity between the spiritual art objects of both the Old and the New Stone Ages, just as there may be a continuity of animistic beliefs, i.e. that animals, plants or even rocks and rivers may possess souls and need to be placated with offerings to win favours. The spiral form of the dialectic reminds us that old forms live on inside the new.

However, in the Neolithic a change does occur which is based upon the increased resources of society. Making parallels, perhaps, between their own small acts of creation and those of beings more powerful than themselves, they conceived of spirits who intervened in their affairs, and in a supernatural world which included a place for themselves after death. The planting of crops invited the parallel concept of fertility gods. Where the Paleolithic hunter depended upon his senses, upon his immediate world, in order to survive, the Neolithic farmer depended upon organisation and long-term forces. As a peasant he required stability and this led to conservatism: his art, as his life, was regulated and disliked change.

To placate the spirit world Neolithic farmers developed forms of worship with a new level of sophistication, and with worship came the cultural need for religious idols, temples, symbols and rituals. The behaviour of these spirits or deities could supposedly be influenced by human action — performing the correct ritual would encourage deities to behave in a way that favoured our own needs, such as bringing rain during a dry season, healing a sick relative, and so on. Humans in other words were looking for ways to materially influence natural forces over which, in reality, they had no control at all. The arts were enlisted in these entreaties.

Neolithic religion and art

As we touched upon in the previous article, this was realised in a variety of ways. In megalithic structures we have evidence that Neolithic societies were prepared to invest enormous amounts of labour, using only basic tools, to dig out, drag and carve huge blocks of stone to erect tombs and temples.

Stonehenge in the United Kingdom, probably the most famous of Neolithic religious sites. The Neolithic Revolution came late to the Britons — Stonehenge is dated to around 3000–2500 BCE, a good two millennia after Mesopotamian peoples were creating the first civilisations.

Built along the Atlantic coast of Western Europe from Portugal to Sweden, these tombs usually form a single burial chamber, covered with a mound of earth with one entrance passage, and hold the remains of several people. They were often laid out according to geometric designs based upon circles, rectangles and triangles, implying that humans saw a relationship between the human and the divine sense of order. The items buried with the entombed are strong evidence of a belief in an afterlife — why bury valuable jewellery, weapons and other objects with the dead if they were not useful to them in another world?

The supernatural world that governed the afterlife was also populated by deities. The proliferation of images of ‘fertile’ women, which originates in the Paleolithic and continues into the Neolithic, has prompted suggestions that there was a female deity generically termed the ‘Earth Mother’ or ‘Mother Goddess’.[6] Without written documents this is extremely difficult to confirm, but the sheer number of female images compared to male is beyond doubt. Early writings include references to such beings as the Sumerian fertility goddess Ninhursag, or the Gaia goddess mentioned by Hesiod in his Theogeny, which have roots in earlier belief systems. During the Neolithic, deities such as these become responsible for crops and harvests.

That deities so often took the form of a human — and when in the form of an animal, the sun, the moon etc, the behaviours of a human — is instructive. A deity will only respond to offerings and entreaties if he or she has the human trait of being susceptible to flattery. This was our habit of anthropomorphising: natural processes become identified with non-human forces, but those forces could only be understood by us through beings whose motivations and behaviours resembled our own. Hence Engels’ description of religion as “that fantastic reflection of human things in the human mind”.[7]

Fishlike figurine from Lepenski Vir, which may represent a half-fish, half-human god. Photo: Mazbln

Prehistoric beliefs still do not quite constitute religion in its modern sense, with its written scriptures, hieratic priesthood, anointed leaders, and so on. Writing by definition did not exist in prehistory and there were not enough resources to sustain parasitic priestly institutions. But in the Neolithic Revolution the foundations are laid. Some archaeologists believe that the Biblical myth of Eden, for example, is a folk memory of our hunting and gathering past, and equate the tearful expulsion of Adam and Eve to sweat in the fields as the social cost of the discovery of agriculture.

Religion was humans’ attempt to make sense of, and thereby take further control of, their environment, at a time when science was too under-developed to provide answers. Prehistoric animists would not have seen magic as a system of belief so much as a system of what (they thought) they knew about how things worked: art, religion and science would have been one and the same. It is obvious that offerings to non-existent beings cannot have made the least difference to whether a harvest succeeded or not, whether a woman had a successful childbirth, etc. Gordon Childe’s view was that this represented a great waste of social resources. For example, the stones used in the second phase of building Stonehenge, some weighing up to 4 tonnes, were dragged or rolled 240 miles from the Preseli mountains in south-west Wales, and the raising of each stone on the site would have required 5–600 people. But the labour expended for the sake of religion created a great repository of art — indeed, religion was to become one of the main ideological conduits through which creative labour would be channelled.

The most important lesson is that the developments in Neolithic religion and art grew from the fundamental changes in material conditions brought about by the agricultural revolution. Sedentary populations with greater reserves of labour erected not just villages but tombs and temples. The social surplus product allowed for specialists skilled in making a huge range of utilitarian/aesthetic objects, and for ‘full-time’ religious practitioners. The scale of Neolithic societies’ supernatural concerns grew larger. Religion became more systematised, organised, and materially well-resourced.

Neolithic religious art was not of course ‘art’ in the modern sense of an ‘art object’ created by ‘an artist’ for aesthetic contemplation and sale on the market. These products of creative labour served a collective purpose — even, in their creators’ view, a utilitarian one.

Human creative labour, like all human action, cannot be divorced from its social and historical context. Rather than take this for granted, we shall examine the relationship between society and art in the next few articles.

Further reading

Classical Marxist texts on religion in general:

Marx and Engels on Religion section at the Marxist Internet Archive
Lenin, Socialism and Religion (1905)
Lenin, The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion (1909)

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[1] Marx, Introduction to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843–4).
[2] The glaring omission to this is the question of why this matter and these processes came to exist in the first place. However the existence of an unsolved problem does not justify leaping to supernatural explanations.
[3] Marx, Critique of Hegel‘s Philosophy of Law (1844).
[4] Lenin, Socialism and Religion (1905).
[5] Hauser, Chapter 2 of The Social History of Art, vol. 1 (1951).
[6] Some archaeologists, in particular Marija Gimbutas, have taken the ‘goddess’ theory further to propose that in prehistory women were worshipped and dominated society. A belief in prehistoric matriarchy has even been ascribed to Engels, whereas The Origin of the Family states that women were relative equals, supreme only in the household; lines of descent went through the female line, yet matrilineality is not the same thing as matriarchy. The theory has more to do with wishful thinking by some feminists than reality, as the evidence is unconvincing. Under a subsistence economy it is unlikely that any group could consistently exert authority at the expense of others.
[7] Friedrich Engels, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man (1876).

Neolithic art, part 3: New directions for art

The Neolithic Revolution meant that people had to organise their lives in completely new ways. We began spending our entire lives in one place. We had to organise our lives around an agricultural rhythm and calendar, taking long-term care of our crops and animals. We needed more sophisticated social organisation to divide labour, both of food production and of other emerging specialisms, to resolve internal disputes among large populations, and to defend our settlements against hostile tribes that coveted our new-found resources. The appearance of specialists such as priests meant that our lives were governed by more elaborate forms of mythology and ritual. The natural processes around us and upon which our new way of life depended — the seasons, floods, the stars — had to be understood in a new way.

These new social forms combined with new materials and ideas to change the direction of art.

New ideas

In Neolithic art we see a movement away from paleolithic naturalism towards abstraction, and an increased emphasis upon geometry and symbols. Here is Arnold Hauser:

Instead of representations true to nature, with loving and patient care devoted to the details of the object, from now on we find everywhere schematic and conventional signs, indicating rather than reproducing the object, like hieroglyphs. Instead of the concreteness of actual living experience, art now tries to hold fast the idea, the concept, the inner substance of things — to create symbols rather than likenesses of the object.[1]

5200-year old entrance stone featuring spiral patterns at the Neolithic site of Newgrange, Ireland.

Hauser’s generalisations can be too crude, and that is true of this dichotomy. There are plenty of geometric symbols in Paleolithic art, just as there are ‘representations true to nature’ in the Neolithic. Examples of the former are the abstract symbols engraved or painted onto rock surfaces; examples of the latter are the extraordinarily lifelike animal-head sculptures discovered at Çatalhöyük. There is no merit whatsoever in making one’s Marxism rigid and uncompromising, like a fan rooting for their football team. A theory is judged upon its ability to accommodate reality. Marxism allows for all the immense richness, contradictions and complexity of real life — we must never abandon dialectics by trying to force reality to ‘fit’ our theory.

What we can do, however, is look for broad patterns, and the change of style in the Neolithic shows a shift of emphasis. Where Paleolithic hunters depended upon their immediate sensuous world in order to survive, Neolithic cultivators depended upon organisation, natural rhythms and religion; as farmers they required stability from politics and predictability from nature, and tended to conservatism. In the Neolithic therefore, stylisation tended to be more systematic. Human experience now had to be interpreted through a sense of natural and social order. As Hauser put it:

The uniform conception of art of the period dominated by the geometric style corresponds to an equally uniform sociological characteristic, which exerts a determining influence on this whole age, despite individual variations, namely the tendency towards a homogeneous organisation of economy, towards an autocratic form of government and a hieratic outlook in the whole of society, an outlook dominated by cultus and religion.

Such ideological changes were accompanied by the advance of abstract thinking in daily life. In Paleolithic times one might not measure things at all, or do so according to some personally convenient scale such as the width of one’s hand. With the increasing socialisation of labour and tasks like the weighing out of grain, such variable measures were no longer enough. We needed standards of measurement, and these then supplied conventions for our awareness and handling of mass and space, much as writing would supply conventions for communicating ideas.

There are countless examples of this rationalised, conventionalised tendency, although it is only a tendency. It can be seen in petroglyphs (from the Greek petros meaning ‘stone’ and glyphein meaning ‘to carve’), symbols carved into rock that begin to appear on the border of the Upper Paleolithic and to proliferate in the Neolithic; in the geometric spiral patterns on European megaliths such as those of Newgrange or Gavrinis in Brittany; or on the world’s first known mural, the 11,000 year-old wall painting from the Neolithic settlement of Djade al-Mughara in modern-day Syria. Architecture, which massively rose in importance and sophistication with the advent of sedentary life, necessitated a more precise understanding of mathematics and geometry. Pictographs appeared that were the precursors of writing systems.

The conventionalised style was to persist throughout the early civilisations, most famously perhaps in the art of Egypt, and only subsided with the cultural maturity of ancient Greece.

New materials, new forms

“A new artistic form,” wrote Trotsky, “taken in a large historic way, is born in reply to new needs.”[2] As well as new ideas, the economic advances of the Neolithic Revolution also meant the appearance both of new art forms and of new varieties of old ones. This was a great time of inventions: the axe (not to be confused with the Paleolithic ‘handaxe’), the mill-stone, the loom, the plough, bricks, spinning and much more. New materials such as pottery, metals, plaster and gems were introduced into the language of artists.

Pottery. One of the most ubiquitous new materials was pottery. The earliest known ceramic objects are figurines fired during the Paleolithic, but the first known pottery was created around the time of the transition to farming. Whereas mobile hunter-gatherers have no need for pottery, farmers who collect surpluses need to be able to store them; they also required jugs, kitchen dishes and a whole range of domestic objects that mobile hunter-gatherers simply did not need. The social surplus could support professional potters who, exempt from food production, could concentrate upon perfecting their skills. Once we were making pottery vessels, we immediately began to form and decorate them according to aesthetic as well as practical criteria.

The plasticity of clay enabled artists to create all manner of forms, both to suit particular uses and to satisfy their own imaginations, even moulding them into the shapes of animals. Neolithic pottery tends to be decorated with geometric forms such as spirals, zigzags and polygons.

Example of Jōmon pottery, Japan, c. 10–8000 BCE. The markings left by cords around the top create a kind of abstract design, and give the culture its name.

The earliest known examples of pottery belong to the Jōmon culture in Japan, which arose around 10,000 BCE; it dates from the same time in China; but it was a major industry in most Neolithic cultures. Neolithic potters went beyond pinchpots by building up pots with clay coils, and advanced the art of pottery through the invention, at uncertain time and place, of the potter’s wheel.

Pottery is a fine example of human beings taking a naturally occurring material — in this case, clay dug from the earth — and transforming it through creative labour. In Neolithic hands, clay is changed through skilled handling, mixing with other materials, knowledge of temperatures, natural laws and properties, and the technology of oven-firing into a product both utilitarian and aesthetic.

So significant was this form to Neolithic culture that archaeologists have defined many societies by their pottery, attaching to them dry names like the ‘Funnelbeaker Culture’ and the ‘Linearbandkeramik’. Childe waxes downright lyrical about the art:

Building up a pot was a supreme instance of creation by man. The lump of clay was perfectly plastic; man could mould it as he would. In making a tool of stone or bone he was always limited by the shape and size of the original material; he could only take bits away from it. No such limitations restrict the activity of the potter. She can form her lump as she wishes; she can go on adding to it without any doubts as to the solidity of the joins. In thinking of ‘creation’, the free activity of the potter in ‘making form where there was no form’ constantly recurs to man’s mind; the similes of the Bible taken from the potter’s craft illustrate the point.[3]

Architecture. Another form taken in a new direction was architecture. Structures were built in the Paleolithic, but they were mostly limited to the shelters that tribes carried with them as they travelled — the mammoth-bone houses like those at Mezhirich in the Ukraine were exceptional. Permanently settled communities however have different needs and capabilities, and developed the architectural skills to build complex structures in wood, wattle and daub, stone and brick. Every dwelling tended to follow the same conventions of design.

The remains of the Neolithic town of Mehrgarh in present-day Pakistan, dated to around 7000 BCE. Mehrgarh is the earliest Neolithic site in southern Asia, and is seen as a precursor to the later Indus Valley or Harappan civilisation. It has a striking geometric layout.

Houses in these early towns were packed tightly together, and usually had flat roofs because heavy rainfall in the Near East was uncommon. When these houses fell into disuse or disrepair, they were levelled and new houses were built on top, creating high mounds known as tells (from the Arabic for ‘mound’ or ‘hill’). Archaeologists can dig down into these tells and discover layer after layer of village history.

Other important sites yielding evidence of Neolithic building include the lakeside village at Obermeilen in Switzerland, Vinča in the Balkans, and Skara Brae in the Orkney Islands.

As has been discussed, Paleolithic parietal art is highly unlikely to have been decorative in purpose. By contrast, Neolithic houses like those at Çatalhöyük were often decorated with murals. These would have had symbolic content, but they would not have been as intimately concerned with the social life of the group as we suspect Paleolithic parietal art to have been. In societies with surplus resources, art was being used to a greater extent for ornamentation and decoration.

Architecture also provided fixed centres of attraction for religion and a rich combination of artifacts, ritual, music, etc. At Çatalhöyük were found beads, carpets, pottery, jewellery, textiles, carvings, plastered and painted heads, and more — towns and their complex social life concentrated cultural objects like never before. At its peak, Çatalhöyük had 7000 inhabitants. Today we think of a town of 7000 inhabitants as tiny, but in its time a settlement of hundreds of mud-brick dwellings and temples with plastered interiors and painted walls, teeming with herders and farmers, and trading in new goods like obsidian, would have been extraordinary [4]. The social and material wealth of Çatalhöyük fed into an artistic wealth.

A striking feature of Neolithic construction was the appearance of megaliths (from the Ancient Greek megas meaning great, and lithos meaning stone).

Standing stones from the megalithic site at Carnac in France, probably erected around 3300 BCE. Photo: Snjeschok.

These were structures or monuments made from interlocking large stones without any use of mortar, ranging from standing stones or menhir to burial chambers. This tradition continued until the Bronze Age, giving us such sites as Carnac in Brittany and Stonehenge in England. The creation of such structures required collective effort, organisation and ideological conviction on a scale probably unattainable by hunter-gatherers: the tombs in particular imply a ritual and respectful approach to the dead characteristic of organised religion. The stones are often carved with stylised or geometric designs like zigzags and spirals, whose meaning is now lost.

In North America, we see the building of mounds by pre-Columbian Native Americans, in an area ranging from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys and Mexico. These were made of earth and took a variety of sizes and shapes, often with buildings on top, and their range of purposes included burials, temples and fortifications — the purpose of many remains unclear. They were created by agricultural, complex societies that flourished centuries before the arrival of Europeans. One of the most significant sites is Cahokia in Illinois.

Sculpture. The characteristic sculptures of the Neolithic are, as in the Paleolithic, stylised female figures — male figures are rare — although other objects and animals also occur. They were made from clay or carved from stone, and were often incised or painted. Archaeologists generally explain them in a context of fertility and childbirth because the great majority of human figurines are female, with a strong emphasis on the breasts, hips and genitals. A figure of a woman flanked by two lionesses from Çatalhöyük was found in a grain bin, inviting speculation that she was intended to encourage or protect the harvest; the presence of such figurines in temples such as Ħaġar Qim also suggests they had a magical or ritual purpose. Although we can infer this from their form and location, it is actually very difficult to prove conclusively: after the reductive interpretations of the past, modern archaeology tries to remain open to a multiplicity of meanings.

A variation on the religious theme can be seen in the remarkable skulls found at ancient Jericho dated to around 7–6000 BCE — the oldest known images of the dead. These are actual human skulls that have been remodelled after death with another Neolithic invention, plaster, and their eyes restored with cowrie shells. This invites speculation they were a response to a conception of the afterlife: an attempt to restore or preserve some aspect of the dead.

However, in the Neolithic a new kind of sculpture also appears.

Neolithic figurines found at Cernavoda in Romania, created by the Hamangian culture in very roughly 4000 BCE. The left-hand figure, known as ‘The Thinker’, is male, the right-hand is a ‘Sitting Woman’.

Figures such as the Hamangian ‘Thinker’, one of the finest sculptures known to us from the period, can less obviously be connected to ritual. And the same culture even produced model houses with miniature occupants, which we suspect were, quite simply, toys.

Other forms. Further examples of new forms included weaving, furniture and household utensils (carving), urns for preserving the remains of the dead, mirrors of polished obsidian, and tools of ivory, stone and flint with highly wrought carved handles. More developed religions led to the building of temples, images of household gods, ritual song and dance, and more — we will discuss religious forms in the next article.

Exchange

Agricultural societies, with their food surpluses, specialist labour and more sophisticated products now had a modest capacity to produce goods for trade. Exchange of items took place in the Paleolithic too, but the new productive forces increased its scale. The Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel noted:

With the neolithic revolution, the development of agriculture and the formation of permanent surpluses create the possibility of permanent exchange with peoples who have not yet acquired such surpluses, and exchange enters a new phase. Exchanges are no longer restricted to a few rare products which are the specialities of certain regions. They henceforth embrace all the products of a whole region; local markets make their appearance. Each tribe or each village continues to provide for its own needs to a large extent, but none is any longer entirely independent of a supply of foreign products.[5]

To handle exchange, a particular group of specialists gradually arose — merchants. One popular commodity was obsidian, a glassy volcanic rock which can be used to make blades as sharp as scalpels. Obsidian could be quarried at the Hasan Dag volcano and was found in Jericho a thousand miles away. Such finds provide evidence for the existence of long-distance trade.

As well as providing new materials for art, trade performed another significant cultural function — it exposed societies to alternative cultural forms. Childe observed:

Complete economic self-sufficiency was nowhere attained. Everywhere intercourse between adjacent social groups is attested to the archaeologist by an interchange of objects. Such might result from accidental contacts between herdsmen and hunters… from formal visits, from the practice of seeking a wife outside one’s own village (exogamy), and so on. It might lead up to a sort of irregular trade through which objects might travel great distances…

The point is that such trade was not an integral part of the community’s economic life; the articles it brought were in some sense luxuries, non-essentials. Yet the intercourse thus attested was of vital importance to human progress; it provided channels whereby ideas from one society might reach another, whereby foreign materials might be compared; whereby, in fact, culture itself might be diffused.[6]

Human societies are very rarely isolated or monolithic. They exist in relationships, in a constant state of movement. One of the reasons why cultures can be difficult to define is that they overlap one another, influence one another, borrow where it pleases them. Even societies that may appear to be in stasis, like the Aborigines who continue a hunter-gatherer lifestyle 60,000 years after humans first reached Australia, are in a constant development of some kind. This is why modern Aborigines, as has been noted before, are unable to explain the meanings of the art of their prehistoric forebears, despite a virtually unchanging mode of production.

Fluid interchanges between societies are feared by some, especially by the political right, but they are an inevitable fact of human existence, and we would be wiser to celebrate them.

Conclusion

Readers may notice that I have not referred here to the artist’s ‘personal vision’. A Marxist analysis must accept the totality of a work of art, and this includes highly personal, subjective factors as well as social-historical ones. The difficulty in the Neolithic period is that the subjective factors are simply unknown to us. There is no record of how particular Neolithic artists felt about their work or how their personal experiences influenced it. There are not even records of their names, or whether they were male or female.

At the same time, art was surely not conceived by Neolithic people as an individualist pursuit. The remains of Neolithic towns show us, with their almost identical dwellings, that there was not yet a drastic shift from egalitarianism. In Neolithic communities, the arts of pottery-making, mural painting and so on are collective activities — the work created is stylistically extremely similar, because the artists would have worked together to long-established cultural conventions, not in the inspired isolation beloved of the Romantics. This is why archaeologists can talk in terms of ‘cultures’: defined by assemblages of material with common style in a particular time and place.

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[1] Hauser, The Social History of Art, vol. 1 (1951).
[2] Leon Trotsky, Chapter 5 of Literature and Revolution (1924).
[3] Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (1936).
[4] And yet the residents of Çatalhöyük felt no need for streets. Over the centuries the dwellings became so tightly-packed that one had to enter through the roofs.
[5] Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory (1962). Mandel was a leader of the Fourth International. His book Late Capitalism (1976) was a major contribution to the updating of Marxist economics to modern conditions.
[6] Childe, op. cit.

Neolithic art, part 2: From hunter-gatherers to farmers

Paleolithic humans had wandered the landscape seizing whatever food came to hand: foraging for berries and nuts, or hunting wild animals. When food was short we had to decamp and move elsewhere. Some writers like to look nostalgically upon this ‘golden age’ but this is not the Marxist position. Even if we did have leisure time and relatively secure food sources, our poverty degraded us as human beings, because it did not allow us to develop our full human potential.

By 11,000 years ago humans had spread to most regions of the planet, but every community across the world shared basically the same mode of production. By a ‘mode of production’ Marxists mean the method of producing the necessities of life. We have discussed briefly Engels’ theory of a period of ‘primitive communism’: this period was dominated, at first, by hunting and gathering.

However, over time humans acquired, through perfection of technique, the beginnings of a social surplus product — this term, derived from Marx’s Mehrprodukt or ‘excess product’, refers to whatever is produced in addition to the amount necessary to support the members of a given society. In the Stone Age context this meant a permanent reserve of food over and above what we needed simply to subsist. This breathing space meant that plants and animals, instead of being consumed immediately, could be nurtured for long-term food use, which in turn made possible systematic animal husbandry and agriculture. These two techniques, which for a long time must have existed side by side with the hunter-gatherer economy, were the motors of the Neolithic Revolution.

In an brief introduction like this, generalisations are inevitable, but there is no smooth transition from one system to another, a unilinear model that applies to all cultures. Some cultures develop certain Neolithic innovations during the Paleolithic, others never make the transition at all. Marxists recognise that reality is a rich mixture of processes, which combine and contradict in all sorts of ways.

Why did it happen?

Why humans moved into agriculture is disputed by archaeologists, perhaps because the precise causes varied in different parts of the world. But we can identify a number of likely key factors [1].

Around 12,000 years ago, the Pleistocene epoch came to an end, giving way to the Holocene in which we still live today. Rising global temperatures saw a rise in sea-levels — creating for example the Bering Straits, the probable means for human colonisation of the Americas — a corresponding reduction in land area, and the growth of dense forest across former open plains. Whether as a result of climate change or over-zealous hunting (or both), a number of large game animals, most famously the mammoth, became extinct.

A drier climate and increasing forestation meant falling numbers of game animals. Forestation made hunting more difficult, as forest animals tended to be smaller and live in smaller groups. At the same time, a greater abundance of naturally growing cereals made crop harvesting more productive: in fertile areas there was less need to wander in search of food.

In addition, our population was expanding as a result of the improvements made during the Paleolithic. We turned to the hugely more productive methods of agriculture because we had no other way of supporting a population already augmented by better organisation, tools and technique.

In some parts of the world, hunting and gathering remained a viable way of life, but in others there was no other choice: agriculture was our answer to the problem of how to feed ourselves in new conditions.

How did it happen?

There was of course no point at which humans decided that they needed more food production and so needed to invent agriculture. Agriculture was the outcome of a long, slow process of experimentation, accident, and gathering of knowledge about the natural processes that surrounded us. The dividing line between the harvesting of natural crops and deliberate planting is a very difficult one for scientists to draw.

From centuries of harvesting wild food plants — barley and wheat in the Middle East, rice in China, corn in South America — we acquired the tools and techniques required to process and cultivate them. We learned that those plants had a pattern of growth that could be exploited for our benefit. Cultivating crops encouraged us to settle in one place, usually near a source of water. We learned that goats, sheep and pigs, instead of being killed instantly for meat, could be kept near these settlements for when we needed them. Domesticated animals provided us with milk, butter, meat — each animal thus yielded far more calories overall than if we ate it straight away — and also fertiliser for crops.

In time we learned how to store and preserve surplus food as a resource for winter or other times of scarcity. Our mastery of agriculture was furthered by the discovery of irrigation, the use of animals to carry loads and pull ploughs, and the practise of letting land lie fallow. By observation, experiment and practice, we were learning more and more about nature’s resources and taking them under human control.

Even hunting and gathering can involve a certain management of the land. But collecting fruit, fishing, and hunting the animals one found to hand was still relatively passive compared to the hugely more productive use of labour, whereby we could extract more calories per acre, and support 10–100 times as many people per acre, than before. Humanity had invented a new mode of production.

At first this mode of production existed side by side with hunting and gathering, and it did not fully mature until the advent of class society around 5000 years ago. (For this reason, Marxism considers the Neolithic broadly as still belonging to ‘primitive communism’.) The spread of the Neolithic Revolution across human cultures was uneven: some societies came to it independently, others copied it, and some were aware of agriculture but felt no need to adopt it. Nonetheless across humanity as a whole there was an immense shift from the old economy to the new. Although its actual historical unfolding was complex in its details, the broad pattern of development is clear.

The very earliest evidence for food production comes from the Levant and is associated with the Natufian culture from around 12,000 BCE, which practised hunting and gathering side by side with agriculture. Besides agricultural tools such as sickles and grinding stones, there are semi-permanent settlements and signs of formalised group burials. This took place inside the region known as the ‘Fertile Crescent’ [2] in the heart of the Middle East. The abundance of wild species of plant and animal in this region, such as naturally growing cereal crops, probably accounts for the success of agriculture there: humans just needed to take the step from merely gathering these abundant natural resources to cultivating them.

The ‘Fertile Crescent’. Map created by NormanEinstein (Wikimedia Commons)

More systematic agriculture is believed to have emerged in Syria and Iraq around 9000 BCE (making the Middle East the probable original ‘cradle of civilisation’). It developed quite independently in China around 7000 BCE, in Mesoamerica around 5000 BCE in Mexico and Peru, and in the east of what is now the United States around 2500 BCE. Other independent developments, such as in sub-Saharan Africa, are possible.

The social consequences of the Neolithic Revolution

After hundreds of thousands of years of hunting and gathering, depending upon what nature provided and with limited populations, we could now plan in advance, keep stores, support specialists and build communities.

“Increase of wealth,” wrote Gordon Childe, “is usually accompanied by increase of population.”[3] Hunter-gatherer social groups were small. Subsistence conditions meant that our rates of childbirth were constrained by the number of children we could physically carry until they were old enough to walk. Also, social groups struggled to support members who made no contribution to its income; such groups would sometimes even commit infanticide rather than have extra mouths to feed and endanger the group as a whole. The social surplus product, however, meant that people who once would have died, or even been killed, could now be supported. From living in roaming bands, we developed systems of clans or tribes occupying a defined area of commonly-owned land. These were still based upon kinship, either of one group of broad relatedly persons or several in a loose confederation. As productivity increased, population could grow exponentially. The world’s human population, estimated at around 10 million at the close of the Paleolithic, soared to over 100 million over a span of a few thousand years.

The creation of food surpluses also made possible a more advanced division of labour in which some members of the social group could be spared, at least partially, from food production to devote themselves to improving technique. This made possible further innovations, both social and technological, and was later to allow full-time specialists such as priests, millers, bureaucrats, weavers, kings... and artists.

It is likely that in areas where wild crops were abundant, such as the Fertile Crescent, humans built permanent settlements next to those food sources even before they began to cultivate them. There is no strict demarcation between ‘roaming’ hunter-gatherers and ‘sedentary’ agriculturalists: some hunter-gatherers may have been relatively sedentary, and some agriculturalists will have moved on when the land they were working became exhausted. But in general, it was the combination of higher population and people spared from food production that led to the establishment of the first real towns, and from those evolved the first city-based states. One of the earliest towns known to archaeology is Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, Turkey, dating to around 7000 BCE. Home to several thousand people, it consisted of mud-brick houses, and the site yielded murals and clay figurines as well as evidence of plant cultivation. Another was built on the river Danube at Lepenski Vir. Built by a culture that peaked around 5000 BCE, this was a town of 59 houses of wood and stone, each with plastered floors and a hearth and carefully planned to form a geometric pattern. A cemetery, village square and religious idols provide evidence of a more complex social and cultural structure than the Paleolithic.

Floor of a house at Lepenski Vir. From the flickr account of dimitrij

The Neolithic saw the transition away from a technology based principally upon stone. Humans were more free to satisfy their extraordinary curiosity and to experiment with natural materials. Farming and rearing animals required new inventions such as the grinding stone, hoe and plough, and provided us with materials such as leather and wool. We realised that we could use the technique of ceramics, discovered in the Paleolithic, to make pottery with which to store our surplus food. By putting stones into fires by accident or design, we discovered metals — copper, tin, and then, by mixing the two together, bronze. These were excellent materials for tools, and for historians they signal the end of the Stone Age. Pottery and metals also proved to be excellent new materials for creating art.

The great ‘mistake’?

Society had become far more productive, but there were disadvantages to the new way of life. Large sedentary populations created new problems around sanitation, and living side by side with animals exposed us to diseases such as smallpox and influenza. Stocks of surplus food, tools and other objects made us liable to violence from other groups that coveted them — thus introducing war into human experience. In a seeming paradox, the amount of work required of each person increased, and the average level of nourishment went down, probably because the big increase of population outpaced the new levels of productivity. For reasons we shall consider later, the shift to agriculture also created sexism and despotism. This prompted Jared Diamond to ask if the Neolithic Revolution were not ‘the worst mistake in the history of the human race’![4]

Engels’ analysis of the change is also, in one sense, very bleak. After describing ‘primitive communist’ society, he goes on:

The power of this primitive community had to be broken, and it was broken. But it was broken by influences which from the very start appear as a degradation, a fall from the simple moral greatness of the old gentile society. The lowest interests — base greed, brutal appetites, sordid avarice, selfish robbery of the common wealth — inaugurate the new, civilised, class society. It is by the vilest means — theft, violence, fraud, treason — that the old classless gentile society is undermined and overthrown. And the new society itself, during all the two and a half thousand years of its existence, has never been anything else but the development of the small minority at the expense of the great exploited and oppressed majority; today it is so more than ever before.[5]

The transition to a new mode of production released all manner of evils from Pandora’s mythical box. Yet the ‘primitive communist’ mode of production had to be overthrown in order for human society to progress — I will return to the question of progress, and how it relates to art, in another article. By 7000 BCE farming already dominated in the Middle East. The great compensating factor for the problems introduced by the Neolithic Revolution was that the increase in material wealth provided the basis for civilisation.

Listen to an excellent summary of the Neolithic Revolution on YouTube: part 1 and part 2 (both 10 mins).

 

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[1] These and other issues on the Neolithic Revolution are dissected in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (1998) — a valuable source for this blog post — which offers a powerful materialist explanation for the emergence of agriculture and why the uneven development of human societies is environmental, not racial, in origin.
[2] It may seem surprising to us that the ‘Fertile Crescent’ should be so called, as today we know it as an arid region. But archaeologists have confirmed that in Neolithic times, this was fertile, forested land. It was centuries of human exploitation that reduced great tracts of it to semi-desert.
[3] Gordon Childe, The Dawn of Civilisation (1925).
[4] Jared Diamond, The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (first published in Discover magazine, 1987).
[5] Friedrich Engels, Chapter 3 of The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884).

Neolithic art, part 1: Children of the Neolithic Revolution

The relative consistency of Paleolithic art across continents and millennia demonstrates how similar human concerns were across the prehistoric world, and the reason it did not change is simple — the course of human development was slow, and no major change in the structure of society took place that made us see ourselves and the world differently. It is in the later Stone Age that we see, after thousands of years, the first significant change in art. This change was the result of the biggest ever transformation in human society — the Neolithic Revolution.

The Neolithic era, or New Stone Age (from the Greek neos, ‘new’ and lithos, ‘stone’) succeeded the Paleolithic around 11,000 years ago [1]. It is more a description of technology and social behaviours than a precise dating system. The key difference between the Old and the New Stone Ages is the development of agriculture and the domestication of animals. As we shall see, it was impossible for art to remain unaffected by such a profound transformation in social conditions.

The beginning and end of the Neolithic era cannot be dated precisely, because the very concept of a ‘Neolithic era’ is a construct designed to help us study patterns of development, and depends upon our interpretation of those patterns. It also varies because the agricultural and technological advances represented by this stage of human society appear at different rates in different parts of the world, making it a phase of development rather than a fixed time period — the Maoris were still using Neolithic tools in the year 1800. But broadly we can say that the Neolithic is the final phase of the Stone Age, spanning the period between the Paleolithic and the rise of the first great civilisations. The next significant period is defined by the widespread use of advanced metalworking: in copper, in bronze and then in iron. In the near East, the working of bronze dates to around 3300 BCE, in India to 3000 BCE and in Europe to 2500 BCE. Around this time the city states of ancient Mesopotamia are established, and the invention of writing signals the end of prehistory.

The term ‘Neolithic Revolution’ was coined by Vere Gordon Childe [2], the great Australian archaeologist whose books on the development of civilisation, heavily influenced by Marxism, were among the most important and influential archaeological works of the twentieth century. Childe’s view was that the discovery of agriculture and animal husbandry represented an immense qualitative leap from hunting and gathering into a new, higher stage of society [3]. This view is uncontroversial among Marxists and I will use his term here. He also proposed a subsequent ‘Urban Revolution’ — also broadly accepted — to mark the transition to civilisation, based in towns and characterised by a state, writing, class society, long-distance trade and so on. His scheme is similar to Engels’, who proposed a progression from ‘savagery’ (the primitive communism of hunter-gatherers) to ‘barbarism’ (the Neolithic era) and then to ‘civilisation’ (dating from the establishment of the first city-states)[4].

Childe’s concept of Neolithic and Urban ‘revolutions’ has been criticised by some archaeologists, who point out that the advances made during the Neolithic were incremental. Certainly they were incremental, and several millennia do not seem to coincide with the common view of a revolution as an abrupt transformation — but this is to misunderstand the issue. It is not a question of how long in absolute figures the process took but of how long it took relative to the overall timescale of human development and, more importantly, of the significance of the qualitative change. The 6000-year period between the first agriculture and the first city states is a fraction of the 2 million-year hunter-gatherer history of human species from Homo habilis to our own. Even a non-dialectician should be able to recognise that the process which introduced the makers of stone tools to cities and the modern world is a revolution by any standards. Without it, none of the subsequent advances, such as the more famous Industrial Revolution, could have happened.

Some societies never advanced beyond Stone Age technology. Agriculture developed independently in several parts of the world, but elsewhere, as in Aboriginal Australia, people either saw no need, or did not possess the necessary animal and plant resources, to advance beyond a hunter-gatherer economy.The indigenous peoples of South America, for example, had not progressed to metallurgy before the Europeans arrived in the fifteenth century, leading to the impotent contest of wooden weapons against steel armour. This was not, contrary to racist arguments, because those people were less intelligent or inventive than Europeans, but down to geography, the available natural resources and other material factors, explained in detail by Jared Diamond in his excellent book Guns, Germs and Steel.

The Neolithic world planted the seeds of many great civilisations, such as the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians in the Middle East, the Kushites and Egyptians in Africa, the Indus valley people in southern Asia, and the Huang He valley civilisation in China. It is not my intention to explore each civilisation individually, or to provide a complete chronology. For such information, readers may reach for the latest textbooks. Rather, I am interested in explaining principal issues and decisive stages of development in art and what dialectical materialism can offer towards its interpretation.

Before we can explore the art of this period, we need to understand the seismic shifts brought about in human economic and social life, and the relationship between such shifts and art. To begin, we shall explore the change in our material circumstances initiated by the agricultural revolution.

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[1] Between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic archaeologists sometimes place a period known as the ‘Mesolithic’ or Middle Stone Age. This is characterised by very small tools called microliths and a semi-sedentary economy where hunting and gathering existed alongside the first animal husbandry and early agricultural techniques. For this blog I don’t consider it important to consider the Mesolithic separately.
[2] See Vere Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (1936). He is normally known simply as Gordon Childe. Childe’s method and data weren’t perfect, but his work put history and archaeology upon a firm materialist basis.
[3] I wrote in an earlier article that ‘Marxists have no time for utopian hankerings after a “golden age”.’ Marxists believe in progress — the constant expansion in human productivity and the movement towards reason and a fully-realised humanity — because of the immense improvements it brings to the living standards of human beings. The challenge is to make the benefits of progress available to all: after 500 years of capitalism, one billion people in the world still do not have access to a glass of clean drinking water.
[4] See Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884).