ART 198 - HISTORY OF WORLD CERAMICS

Among the earliest examples surviving of formed clay, these bison, discovered in the caves of the French Pyrénées, live to tell a tale of how early people used clay to record and literally shape the world in which they lived. Miraculously surviving the millennia without having been fired, these raw clay effigies speak of a time when survival depended on the ability to hunt and capture large animals such as the bison for food and for the warmth of its fur. Almost life size, these figures are thought to represent a form of 'sympathetic magic,' by which the act of their creation was meant to either make a successful hunt more likely, or to symbolically 'replace' the animal that would be hunted with this representation. The marks of the artist's hand and the tools used to draw the details of the face and mane are still clearly visible. Objects such as these clearly show that man was using clay for artistic expression long before the actual firing of clay was discovered. The walls of these caves also are covered with drawings of bison and other game animals, marked in carbon from the fires, as well as the earth minerals such as iron oxide and manganese, showing that these ceramic coloring materials that we still use today were known to our earliest ancestors. It is commonly thought that ceramics evolved in tandem with agriculture and this is certainly true if we think of ceramic vessels, but note here, that the preliminary discoveries that would later make fired ceramic pottery possible were already in place during the Paleolithic, before the advent of agriculture.

Clay bison from the cave of Tuc d'Audobert, Haute Pyrénées 10,000 BCE