Art History For Dummies. Jesse Bryant Wilder
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Living in the New Stone Age: Çatalhöyük, Göbekli Tepe, and Skara Brae
One of the oldest New Stone Age settlements was at Çatalhöyük in Anatolia (modern Turkey). It thrived from around 6500 BC to 5650 BC. Interestingly, the people of Çatalhöyük appear to have had no fortifications or war gods — they seem to have been a truly peaceful people. They mastered textiles, basketry, and simple pottery (the potter’s wheel hadn’t been invented yet), and built rectangular, mud-brick homes with doors in the roofs (they climbed into their houses from the top like sailors entering a submarine). Other characteristics of their houses include
Multipurpose features: Each house had two or more elevated, multipurpose platforms, one of which was always painted red. The platform served as a table, workbench, bed, and bier (a bed for corpses — in this case, skeletons). Çatalhöyük inhabitants let vultures eat the flesh off their dead before burying them. That must’ve put a damper on funeral attendance.
Decoration: Some of the rooms in Çatalhöyük homes included paintings and sculptures. Çatalhöyük paintings frequently feature stick-form men who are usually hunting; hardly any women appear in the paintings. But the female figure shows up in Çatalhöyük sculptures with Woman of Willendorf features and dimensions (see “Flirting with Fertility Goddesses” earlier in this chapter), apparently as a fertility symbol or earth mother.
Göbekli Tepe (which means “belly hill”), a Neolithic temple or sanctuary, is an even earlier Neolithic structure in southeastern Anatolia, erected between 9500 and 8000 BC. The roughly 22-acre complex is built with elaborately carved megaliths (huge stones some over 16 feet high and weighing up to 10 tons) arranged in layered, circular formations connected by walls of small, stacked stones. But no signs of settlement exist around Göbekli Tepe, suggesting that those who created it were still hunter-gatherers. The site challenges the old assumption that humans built permanent settlements before they constructed temples. Göbekli Tepe suggests that man made places of worship predate the first villages.
In Skara Brae, a later Neolithic community (around 3000 BC) in the northerly Orkney Islands of Scotland, the homes included a fireplace, stone tanks (possibly used for storing live fish, because they were a seafaring folk), and built-in stone furniture (beds, chairs, tables, and shelves). The only art we have from Skara Brae are the simple designs carved into the stone pottery and some of the stone beds.
Cracking the mystery of the megaliths and menhirs
The most startling examples of New Stone Age architecture are the mysterious megaliths of Brittany and England.
Describing a megalith
A megalithic structure is a simple or complex arrangement of stones standing upright like dominoes. Some appear to be stark, open-air temples built by mammoth-sized men. Others look like graveyards with hundreds of headstones sprouting out of the earth. Types of megalith construction include
Post-and-lintel systems: In this arrangement, the post part is made up of the upright stones, and the lintel is the horizontal slab on top. Some megalith structures did serve as tombs, either for one person or several people. Many megalithic tombs look like giant stone tables with two uprights supporting a massive horizontal slab laid across them. The post-and-lintel system is one of humankind’s first architectural advances. Sometimes the tombs are covered with small rocks and dirt, forming a grave mound over the horizontal.
Menhirs: Topless megaliths — solitary upright slabs — appear in two types of formations: circular patterns known as cromlechs and cemetery-like rows called alignments. Prehistoric peoples scattered fields of menhirs throughout Brittany in western France between 4250 BC and 3750 BC. Despite their appearance, alignments weren’t graveyards. They seem to have been astronomical observatories and sites for sun worship (not the kind that requires an SPF 15). The largest alignment is in Carnac, Brittany, where 3,000 menhirs stand in 2-mile-long rows. The menhirs appear to gradually grow as you move from east to west. Stones on the eastern side are 3 feet high, while on the western end they’re over 13 feet high. The alignment corresponds to the rising and setting sun. Today, no one knows how this prehistoric observatory worked.
Singling out Stonehenge
The greatest megalithic structure is the circle of stone slabs known as Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain in England. Stonehenge was erected between 2550 BC and 1600 BC in at least four stages. It was once believed to be a Druid (Celtic priest) temple. We now think that this elaborate network of stones was used to predict solstices and eclipses, vital knowledge for people dependent on the growing season.
From a distance, Stonehenge looks like an unfinished dominoes game played by giants. On closer inspection, it consists of a series of concentric circles and circular shapes:
An inner horseshoe of five sets of gray sandstone is grouped in a post-and-lintel arrangement.
An outer circle of 20-foot-high gray sandstones, called sarsen stones, is topped by lintels. Each sarsen stone weighs up to 50 tons. The lintels are connected, forming a continuous circle.
A roughly 1,000-foot trench and embankment encircle the megaliths. This arrangement of circles within circles still baffles people today.
Until 1500 BC, a circle of bluestones stood between the sarsen stones and the horseshoe. The only available bluestone comes from Wales, 150 miles away. Stonehenge builders believed that bluestone possessed special properties, probably magical ones — otherwise, they wouldn’t have hauled them such a long distance. In 1500 BC, the last generation of Stonehenge builders moved the bluestones inside the horseshoe; researchers today have no idea why.
Prehistoric builders also smoothed the inside faces of the stone posts and lintels and tapered the posts at the top so that the bellies or midsections of the posts appear to bulge. Even more impressive, they “drilled” holes in the lintels and cut cone-shaped pegs into the posts so that the posts and lintels would fit together snuggly in a mortise and tenon joint like Lincoln Logs. The designers also curved the outer lintels so each would form an arc, enhancing the circular appearance of the outer ring.
So what’s the purpose of this network of stones? Was it a temple, a place of human sacrifice, or a stone calendar? The function of Stonehenge is still a mystery, but recent investigations show that it could have been used to accurately predict the phases of the moon, solstices, and eclipses.
Chapter 5
Fickle Gods, Warrior Art, and the Birth of Writing: Mesopotamian Art
IN THIS CHAPTER
And Terah took Abram his son … and they went forth … from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan [modern Lebanon, Palestine, and Israel]… .
—GENESIS