David Lewis-Williams Quotes
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I argue that the first image-makers were acting rationally in the specific social circumstances ... they were not driven by ‘aesthetics’.
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Some researchers believe that dreaming is what happens when sensory input to the brain is greatly diminished: the brain then ‘freewheels’, synapses firing more or less at random, and the brain tries to make sense of the resultant stream of images.
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Improved memory made possible the long-term recollection of dreams and visions and the construction of those recollections into a spirit world.
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The elaborately executed art on the ceiling in the Altamira cave did not fit current notions of Palaeolithic ‘savagery’; it was too ‘advanced’ for the period.
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Certainly, the sensory deprivation afforded by the remote, silent and totally dark chambers, such as the Diverticule of the Felines in Lascaux and the Horse’s Tail in Altamira, induces altered states of consciousness.
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The first point to notice is that the Transition cannot be explained by climatic change alone: human change was not the direct result of marked environmental change. The crucial period did see a colder climate peaking at about 35,000 years ago, but Neanderthals had survived previous climatic instability.
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Art was not simply a foregone conclusion, the final link in a causal chain. It was not the inevitable outcome of an evolving ‘aesthetic sense’, as some writers suggest.
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A shaman’s activities as a sorcerer, or his own conscious act of entry into the supernatural world, were a kind of “killing”.
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The very idea of Palaeolithic art was deeply disturbing. Was not art one of the great achievements of high civilizations?
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I believe it is reasonable to assume that higher-order consciousness developed neurologically in Africa before the second wave of emigration to the Middle East and Europe.
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The Upper Palaeolithic figures known as ‘wounded men’ occur at Cougnac and Pech Merle, two sites in the Quercy district of France.
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Primary consciousness is a kind of ‘remembered present’…
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Higher-order consciousness] involves the ability to construct a socially based selfhood, to model the world in terms of the past and the future, and to be directly aware.
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To understand the ‘wounded men’ of Upper Palaeolithic art, I now consider somatic hallucinations; these include attenuation of the body and limbs, polymelia (having extra limbs or digits), and, the one on which I focus, pricking and stabbing sensations.
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It is the task of San shamans to activate their supernatural potency, to cause it to ‘boil’ up their spines until it explodes in their heads and takes them off to the spirit realms – that is, they enter a state of trance at the far end of the intensified trajectory.
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I suggest that the type of consciousness – not merely the degree of intelligence – that Neanderthals possessed was different in important respects from that of Upper Palaeolithic people, and that this distinction precluded, for the Neanderthals, both image-making and elaborate burial.
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In Lascaux and other sites, hoofs are depicted to show their underside, or hoofprint.
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Shamans submit to death in order to serve their communities.
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I now argue that entry into Upper Palaeolithic caves was probably seen as virtually indistinguishable from entry into the mental vortex that leads to the experiences and hallucinations of deep trance.
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A lack of methodology in Upper Palaeolithic art research has led to confusion of priorities.
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The economic base of a social formation, the infrastructure, includes the social relations of production the produce the material necessities of life. In doing so, it produces the superstructure, that is, ideology, belief, religion, and juridical controls.
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For the makers, the paintings and engravings were visions, not representations of visions.
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Under certain social circumstances, which may have varied from time to time and place to place, certain people (shamans) saw a relationship between the small, three-dimensional, projected mental images that they experienced at the far end of the intensified spectrum and fragments of animals that lay around their hearths.
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The picture of change in human society that emerges from this recent research throws new light on that aspect of the Transition that has been called the ‘Upper Palaeolithic Revolution’ and the ‘Creative Explosion’ – that time when recognizably modern skeletons, behaviour and art seem to have appeared in western Europe as a ‘package deal’.