Neolithic Cave Art: Art History Unit Lesson 1

This week, we have started our unit on art history, which will start with some of the first known art ever and end with the art of the modern era. We will have "hands-on" history lessons by making the art of major time periods and a wide variety of cultures. 

Our first project involved a look at some of the earliest known paintings from the cave at Lascaux, France which are about 20,000 years old. We learned that the neolithic people of that time lived in caves, hunted deer, and painted animals for storytelling and possibly even for hunting practice. These people also used stone tools and fire to help them survive. 

We saw several famous images from Lascaux, two of which are shown below:

The Chinese Horse at Lascaux, France

We became "art detectives" and went looking for the artwork we saw in our lesson on a virtual tour of the cave on the internet, which we watched on a high-resolution Mac monitor. This computer generated tour gives a three-dimensional view of the paintings at Lascaux. This technology helped us to see where these paintings were located inside the cave, which we discovered were very high up near the top of the walls. Several students offered ideas for how the artists did this: one suggested they climbed the rock, another suggested that they used stone spears that they would stake in the walls of the cave to reach the top, and several talked about the idea of a primitive ladder that may have been used.

After our time in the cave, we went to tables and created our own cave art. Some students crumbled their paper to create a rock-like texture. We drew one of the animals we saw in the cave: a bull (or auroch), a deer, bird, buffalo, or horse using oil pastel in the colors of the cave paintings: black, red, orange, white, and brown. We then "thought like a neolithic person" and drew some symbols and shapes for storytelling in the background. Finally, Mrs. Taylor helped us leave our cave artist signature by painting and spraying a reverse handprint on our art (this also created a really nice resist effect).