ANTH 1003 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Ebay, National Historic Preservation Act Of 1966, Blombos Cave
Document Summary
Shows how it"s increasingly hard to understand things archaeologically. Gets increasingly harder to understand as it goes down. Example of stone tool that maybe has aesthetic appeal- that can be potentially symbolic. The earliest possibilities (of modern humans) 200,000 bp. Cave sight in india (mark on cave made by humans) A shell found in java seems to have marks (marks made by humans) Two stones with grooves that are seemingly made by humans as well. The question of intentionality (can we demonstrate that these marks are intentional?) Cave depictions made with pigment certainly made to represent something. A lot of these examples mentioned above come far after the earliest emergence of modern humans. Maybe brains had not caught up with the bodies. Maybe they had symbolic ability but it was not the kind of symbolic behavior that preserved archaeologically (dance, wood carvings, leaves etc. ) Maybe concept of art did not yet exist.
