Prehistoric Aesthetics

An Ontology of Stone Age Art from the Lower Palaeolithic until the Neolithic
This book redefines prehistoric art, arguing that true aesthetic autonomy first appeared in prehistory. Combining archaeology with philosophical aesthetics, it analyses Palaeolithic tools, cave art, and Neolithic imagery to propose a new framework linking prehistoric and modern artistic experience.

Prehistoric Aesthetics provides a new definition of the concept of prehistoric art. It argues that the autonomy of art and the aesthetic can be extended beyond modernity, and reworks the Western tradition of philosophical aesthetics towards a prehistoric aesthetics. Whereas it is normally modern Western art that is considered to be an autonomous type of art, which is coupled to an autonomous aesthetic experience, the book argues that it is in prehistoric art that the true autonomous condition of art and aesthetics manifested itself. A new research strategy is developed in which the fields of prehistoric archaeology and theoretical archaeology are integrated with the fields of philosophical aesthetics and metaphysics. This is related to current theoretical developments in archaeology, in which we see a turn towards ontological questions. The study examines three different types of prehistoric art: the hand axe and stone bola of the Lower/Middle Palaeolithic, the cave art of the Franco-Cantabrian area, and the rock art and small sculptural objects of the Neolithic of Britain/Ireland. A new type of aesthetic autonomy and aesthetic experience is constructed for animism through the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead, Immanuel Kant, and Theodor Adorno. The book proposes a new definition of prehistoric art that takes the form of a theoretical statement on the relation between prehistoric and modern/contemporary art. This means that the book is not only a study in prehistoric art and aesthetics, but also provides a model of how to compare prehistoric and modern/contemporary art with one another.

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