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The Big Melt
Lecture at Peabody examines artwork, modernization of early man
Cave painting of a bison, Altamira, Spain. Credit: Pedro A. Saura/AP
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What happened when the ice began melting and man started living his life after the Ice Age? Art and innovation, says Lawrence Straus has been a professor of anthropology for nearly 35 years at the University of New Mexico. Straus will give a lecture entitled Hunters and Artists of Late Ice Age Europe: The Magdalenian World at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology on Thursday March 11, 2010 at 5:30 PM, followed by a free public reception.
Ground-breaking was the theme of the time, not only as man ventured from the safety of southern France and regions of Iberia back into northern France, England, Switzerland, the Low Countries and Germany, eventually reaching the Baltic, but they were also making leaps and bounds on the technological front. People of the Magdalenian period (about 20,500 to 13,500 years ago) produced elaborate tools such as spear throwers, bows-and-arrows, nets, needles, harpoons and stone-boiling. Also being developed were the art skills of man. Many of the finest and most well known examples of cave-drawings known to the world are from this time. Their variation in geographical location is wide: Altamira, Tito Bustillo, Ekain, Las Monedas, Covaciella in Cantabrian Spain; and Niaux, Les Trois-Frères, Le Tuc d’Audoubert in the French Pyrenées.
Straus attests that this variation in location also led to a variation in regional ecologies, major game species and thus human settlement-subsistence strategies. All are evidenced in the art and innovative weapons and tools of the time. His lecture will take place in the Geological Lecture Hall and will be followed by a free public reception. For more information, please visit www.peabody.harvard.edu.