An audience of about sixty people were able to welcome Paul Bahn to talk to us at our first live lecture in the Village Hall since last March. Paul Bahn is an expert on Prehistoric Art rock art world-wide, and the lecture was about “New Advances in Ice Age Art”. Paul is a British archaeologist, translator, writer and broadcaster who has published extensively on a range of archaeological topics, with particular interest in prehistoric art. Paul led the team which discovered the first Ice Age cave art in Britain in 2003.
Dating from c40,000 to 12,000 years ago, Ice Age Art continues to be found every year in the form of both portable objects and images on cave walls and on rocks in the open air. Paul gave a very interesting lecture on the art that has been discovered, often in the most inaccessible places, in various countries such as France, Spain, Russia, Egypt, Mongolia and rather surprisingly the discovery of an early human occupation site in Florida. He showed many wonderful slides of drawings of mammoths and other prehistoric animals and birds, as well as many drawings of human females.
Paul also talked about the portable art that has been found and showed how the use of the natural rock shape was used in the drawings. Apparently Neanderthals, who were once believed incapable of any kind of art work, appear to have made some of Europe’s oldest art and were artists with complex beliefs.
Having presented a selection of the most recent discoveries, many of which are still unknown to the general public and a few still unpublished, Paul said that one never finishes studying decorated caves and that there is no market for this priceless artwork.
Kathy Goodfellow