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Back in the Ice Age, humans armed with stone-tipped spears roamed plains and forests hunting cave bears, saber toothed tigers, and wooly rhinos. But they came into contact with more peaceable animals too, such as aurochs, the ancestors of today’s oxen, elks with enormous antlers, and even penguins, who then lived along the Mediterranean Sea. Mastodon was a popular menu item all across North America.
Even though Ice Age mammals disappeared around 10,000 years ago, the people who saw them alive have left us pictures of these strange beasts in their beautiful and haunting cave drawings. Created by prehistoric artists working deep in hidden caverns, archeologists think these images were intended to magically ensure good hunting. The earliest known drawings, discovered in Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc in France in 1994, go back 30,000 years; other primitive art galleries like Lascaux and Altamira have been studied for decades.
In the Prehistoric Cave Paintings program students will learn what is known about early man and the artwork he created. They’ll look at and sample the materials cave artists used, like iron ore, manganese, and ocher, which were ground to a powder and mixed with sticky animal fat to create earth-toned paints, then make similar pigments using modern-day materials. They’ll try stone-age techniques for applying colors using their fingers, sticks, bits of fur or plants and sticks of charcoal for drawing.
After studying how cave artists used line and shading to show details like hair and muscle, and overlapping figures or slightly turned to indicate depth, students will try making their own drawings using these elements to make their artwork lively and three-dimensional. Several student artists can work at once on a large piece of rough paper to practice making their images of herds of galloping horses or hunters confronting a cave bear.
In a longer program, students can work individually or in groups to carve and paint a “cave wall” from a slab of Styrofoam. Then, like early cave artists, they can let the shape of the surface suggest a creature, using knobs and outcroppings in the “rock” to make the animals stand out. At the end of the program, students and teachers can help decide how to display their paper or Styrofoam cave paintings, whether on the walls of a darkened closet, inside a series of interconnected refrigerator boxes, or connected to a frame made of plastic pipes or other materials to make a shell or cavern.
Copyright © 2007 Kathy Ceceri