The Aesthetics of Surfaces. New research on hand stencils in French and Spanish cave art from experimentation to observation
Date: 25.01.2013
Speaker: Prof. Paul Pettitt, University of Durham
Hand stencils and prints – long assumed to belong to the European Mid Upper Palaeolithic – have been the subject of largely redundant study since the 1960s, with questions rarely addressing issues other than the apparent gender of their producers and why on a number of cases fingers appear to be missing. It is now possible to view them in a completely different light. Beginning with insights derived from experimental replication of stencils I move on to recent observational work on stencils in Spanish and French caves, developing an approach which emphasises their context rather than morphology. Following this and a critique of their chronology, I place a more nuanced view of this ‘art’ form in the context of an emerging picture of the development of Palaeolithic ‘cave art’ in general.