by Nigel Spivey
13 A Bushman dance at a village near Tsumkwe, northwest Namibia, in the summer of 2004.
It is in such situations that a shaman can go into an ‘altered state of consciousness’. Physically, this manifests itself in various ways: loss of balance, stomach cramps, hyperventilation and nosebleeds. Mentally, it can lead to hallucinations, the intense visionary experience of travelling out of body into strange yet convincing places. No one could draw or paint while in the midst of this sort of emotional seizure. But revealing or recalling what had come into vision during an altered state of consciousness … that would be truly marvellous, and proof, as it were, of the shaman’s special status.
For several decades now, David Lewis-Williams has argued the case that the thousands of Bushman images left in the Drakensberg are best explained as ‘shamanic’: directly derived from the hallucinatory experiences of shamans while in an altered state of consciousness.There are, to begin with, clear signs that physiological effects of the trance dance are depicted: figures doubled up with abdominal spasms; figures with red lines (blood) streaming from their noses.The marked elongation of many figures may reflect the reported sensation of being stretched.
Rock surfaces, such as the Game Pass Shelter, became interfaces between reality and the spirit world, on which the imagery of the trance was recorded and displayed. To call these interfaces ‘membranes’ is not inappropriate. Figures of animals might emerge from cracks in the stone (as they do), and placing a hand upon the stone, too, might give some sense of its potent access to the domain of spirits and ancestors.
No summary matches the eloquence with which Lewis-Williams has pursued and published this theory: we may simply state here that many experts worldwide accept it. Anthropologically, it is not an isolated or eccentric phenomenon. Parallels can be drawn, for instance, between the Bushman shamans and those among various indigenous tribes of North America, such as the Yokuts and Numic of California, whose use of hallucinogenic substances can be traced in petroglyphs (rock markings) left in sites of sacred significance. Evidence also suggests that shamans or ‘clever men’ among the Aboriginal communities of northern Australia played a particular role in creating the millennia-old imagery of that region. European colonists may have dismissed it all as so much mumbo-jumbo, although they were happy to accept stories (and images) of a man who could cure lepers with his touch and undergo an agonizing death without dying.
What, however, has this to do with the cave-paintings of Europe in the Upper Palaeolithic period?
THE NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL MODEL
Readers may already have guessed the next move in the Lewis-Williams argument. It is not to suggest that Bushmen, Native Americans and Australian Aborigines are culturally comparable to people of the Stone Age, but to point out that all anatomically modern humans – including those of the Palaeolithic – share a brain that is hard-wired (preprogrammed) in a certain way.What occurs within this brain when we enter an altered state of consciousness is therefore predictable – a common human experience, as likely to have the same visual and visible effects today as it would have done 35,000 years ago.
There are many ways of inducing the altered state of consciousness: drugs, dancing, darkness, exhaustion, hunger, meditation, migraine and schizophrenia are among them. In the Western tradition it is by no means confined to hippies and a fashion for the mind-expanding substance known as LSD. Opium takers of the Romantic period, notably the English writers Thomas De Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, were generous in providing verbal descriptions of their visions. And in our own times scientists have discovered simple procedures of sensory deprivation that enable research into the brain’s function when it comes to ‘seeing things’.The research goes on, but already it is clear that the human nervous system exhibits certain features of response that can be generalized – providing, for archaeologists, a so-called neuropsychological model for explaining the very beginnings of symbolic representation.
Migraine sufferers do not need to be reminded of the fact that, even in a completely darkened room, and with their eyes firmly shut, they are persecuted by flashing lights. It is a common symptom of an altered state of consciousness: the sensation of brightness, often framed in kaleidoscopic patterns – dots, lozenges, blocks, appearing in multiple units as networks, tessellations and suchlike.These patterns may be construed as certain objects in the world – a spider’s web, or a honeycomb. In addition, the subject of an altered state of consciousness may feel that he or she is airborne, or in water, or plunging through some vortex or tunnel. Patterns slide one into another, and shapes are fluently transformed; in some hypnagogic (half-asleep) or dreaming moods we may see animals appear: to follow Shakespeare’s phrasing, we will think a cloud to be very like a whale, or mistake a bush for a bear.
What characterizes all these sensations is how vivid they are.The nightmare victim wakes with a scream; the LSD addict maims himself terribly, convinced that his fingers are extending over the windowsill and on to the road outside. No external reality is there. Our reaction is entirely to what we see without any direct perception of the world around us. Such images have been termed as entoptic, ‘within the eye’.
The Lewis-Williams hypothesis, then, is not just that Palaeolithic cave-painting was shamanic or shamanistic in origin. It is even more momentous; suggesting that the human knack of representational imagery was itself initially triggered by this neuropsychological process. In other words, the Palaeolithic painters were not making observations of the world around them; they were transferring on to cave walls the images they already had behind their eyes.They were displaying what had come to them in an altered state of consciousness; recollecting powerful visions; trying to recapture what they had seen in their hallucinations – even when these had flashed by as a series of abstract patterns (Fig. 14).
The acceptance of this model does not reduce all other cave-painting theories to nonsense. In societies where shamans are or were esteemed as authorities – including not only the Bushmen and other groups already mentioned, but also the Inuit or ‘Eskimos’ of Canada, tribes of Amazonian South America, and nomadic societies of Siberia, where the term ‘shaman’ originates – shamans claim power from and over animals.The trance dance of the Bushmen may celebrate a successful hunt, or serve to bring good fortune to an imminent expedition; either way, then, a measure of ‘hunting magic’ is implied by the shaman’s central role. From shamanic lore, too, it is evident that certain animals can be invested with extraordinary power and significance. (For the Bushmen, the eland has such special status.) Siberian shamans would say that their souls were entrusted to animal guardians, or claim some personal familiar or daemon in four-legged form. So it may be right to suppose that certain animals possess symbolic value, full of luck and fertility, regardless of whether they feature as regular prey. But can we claim that shamans existed in prehistory?
14 Abstract cave markings in the Cueva de la Pileta, Andalucia, Spain, c.25,000 BC. Such markings are typical of entoptic patterns generated within the mind during an altered state of consciousness.
‘Let me tell you how I became a lion. It was a good dance several years ago … I felt the pull of the fire … and danced while staring at it … I saw the fire become very large … I saw a lion in it. I trembled when I looked at it.Then the lion opened its mouth and swallowed me.The next thing I remember seeing was the lion spitting out another lion.That other lion was me. I felt the energy of the lion and roared with great authority.The power scared the people.’
The recorded experience of a modern Bushman shaman while in an altered state of consciousness may directly illuminate, by analogy, several three-dimensional images discovered in the Jura region, the mountainous borderland between Switzerland and France.They evidently served as pendants or amulets, and their form is therianthropic – with the bodies of humans and the heads of lions (Fig. 15).The material from which they were made is of an animal source – the tusk of a mammoth. At the risk of being over-fanciful, we might say that the
images were ‘spat out’ from the mammoth.
A number of caves contain paintings or engravings that seem to show hybrids of humans and animals, or human figures with animal masks and attributes. At Chauvet, for example, there is depicted a composite creature made up of a bison’s head and body, and a pair of human legs. Is this some kind of minotaur or, as the discoverers of the cave preferred to call it, a sorcerer? Abbé Breuil had used the same term for an antlered, furry figure with human legs and feet among the images in a recess of the cave complex known as Les Trois Frères, in the French Pyrenees. Since it is well documented that much shamanic practice worldwide expresses itself in just such animal guise, the temptation to suppose that shamans operated in Palaeolithic Europe is hard to resist.
Hard to resist, and hard to prove. Conceptually, however, shamanism offers a persuasive route towards the neuropsychological model.The image of a lion-man was fashioned because it had been vividly imagined during an altered state of consciousness. The onus is upon sceptics to produce a more plausible alternative explanation. So far, none has been forthcoming.
FROM ART TO AGRICULTURE
The cave-paintings at Altamira were once disbelieved because they seemed too ‘early’. In turn, archaeologists who accepted the earliness of such cave-paintings were faced with a problem of succession. In Europe, at least, the practice of painting in caves apparently came to an end about 12,000 years ago.We know that the emergence, several thousand years later, of the great civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, was accompanied by an increasing use of, even reliance upon, the symbolic resource of images: this book makes further reference to that process in due course (see, for example, page 61). But in the meantime, what happened to the human ability to create images?
Until recently, there was no satisfactory answer to that question. It was possible, admittedly, to claim that in some parts of the world – notably Australia – the habits of representation that commenced about 40,000 years ago never lapsed. But this was impossible to prove. In terms of archaeologically stratified evidence, a definite gap existed, between the end of the Old Stone Age (the Palaeolithic) and the early phases of the New Stone Age (the Neolithic).Then a certain hilltop in southern Turkey disclosed its secret.
The Turkish-Kurdish town of Urfa (or Sanliurfa), near the Syrian border, is touristically billed as ‘historic’. Here Abraham, the patriarch of the second millennium BC, venerated by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, is supposed to have sojourned on his way from the city of Ur to the land of Canaan. But it now transpires that religious activity around Urfa pre-dates Abraham by thousands of years.
An archaeological survey in the 1960s observed in the hills around Urfa a particular site where several knolls of reddish earth arose from a limestone plateau.These knolls, and the rocky area nearby, were covered in the debris of flint-knapping – the flakes and chips of flint left by the prehistoric manufacture of tools and weapons. Some large man-made slabs of stone were also noticed, but assumed to be of much later date than the Neolithic debris. No further investigation was carried out until 1994, when Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute visited the site and established that the knolls were not natural, but part of an artificial hill, heaped as a prominent mark in the local landscape.With experience of other sites in this ancient area of Upper Mesopotamia, Schmidt was immediately able to classify the site as a tepe or mound, datable to the early Neolithic phase before the use of ceramics (sometimes referred to as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic). He also suspected that the limestone slabs on this hill – henceforth known as Göbekli Tepe – belonged to some large prehistoric structure.
15 A lion-man statuette from Hohlestein-Stadel, south west Germany, c.32–30,000 BC, possibly used as a pendant or an amulet.
16 (top) Aerial view of a stone circle at Göbekli Tepe, Turkey, c.9000 BC.
17 Animal detail – probably a fox – from Göbekli Tepe.
Digging into the mound not only confirmed Schmidt’s intuitions, but revealed a dimension of Pre-Pottery Neolithic that no one expected.
The excavations at Göbekli Tepe are ongoing, with scope for more surprises. What has come to light so far is a series of walled enclosures, of which about 20 are built around massive stone pillars set in a circle (Fig. 16).Two separate pillars occupy the centres of these circles. Each of the pillars is fashioned out of solid rock into a T-shape about 7 metres (23 feet) tall. Rectangular carved doorways once provided marked or tunnelled access to the enclosures, and in the floor of one circle a small inset basin has been found, with an attached channel – possibly, as the excavator suggests, for the collection of blood. Food was consumed here, as indicated by many animal bones, but nowhere on the hillside are there signs of domestic habitation. So this was not, it seems, a place where people lived, but rather a special assembly point – some kind of sanctuary in the mountains that attracted people from a radius of settlements some 80 kilometres (50 miles) or further afield.
Like other prehistoric monuments, such as Stonehenge in Britain and the menhirs of France, Göbekli Tepe retains an enigmatic sense of unfathomed ritual significance. But not only is it much earlier than Stonehenge – by 7000 years – it is also much different in one key respect.The well-trimmed pillars of Göbekli Tepe are not just megaliths (big stones).They are decorated – embellished with images either engraved on to the surface or else picked out in shallow relief (Fig. 17).
It may come as no surprise that the principal subjects of this decoration are, once again, animals. Foxes and snakes dominate the repertoire, but gazelle, aurochs, wild boar, wild ass, cranes and a lion also feature. Spiders, too, are shown. In addition one block carries the image of a woman squatting in a sexual posture, though this may be of later date.
The pillars themselves appear schematically anthropomorphic or human-shaped, the shaft standing for legs and torso, the T-bar equating to shoulders and head. Carved arms are added to one of them, as if to confirm the intention.This in turn encourages the presumption that the images serve to harness forms of wildlife whose power belongs to these pillar-figures, or perhaps protects them.The foxes bare their teeth, the tusks of the boar are pronounced, and the snakes have been identified as venom-loaded vipers.
The possibility that the decoration of the pillars at Göbekli Tepe is shamanic has been seriously considered by the excavators. But, as they point out, the scale of structural enterprise at this site points to a society in which ritual was mediated not so much by shamans as by ‘true priests’.The images, after all, were the ultimate phase, or finishing touches at least, to what had been a massive collective effort. At a small distance away from the main ‘temple’ area is the natural limestone amphitheatre from which the pillars were quarried. In the upper reaches of this quarry there is a marked cavity left by the removal of one T-shaped pillar much larger than any so far brought to light at the site; and right next to this space is a stone of similar size abandoned in a cracked and therefore unfinished state. Had it been successfully removed from the bedrock, it would have measured some 6 metres (20 feet), and weighed about 50 tonnes. To shift it across to the mound would have required the combined traction power of about 500 people.
Given that the mound itself is man-made, built from thousands of tonnes of earth and rock brought up from the plain below, we are bound to speculate that the measure of human organization required to build Göbekli Tepe was some way towards that required to build the Egyptian pyramids. Göbekli Tepe, in the words of its excavators, therefore stands at ‘the dawn of a new world, a world with powerful rulers and a complex, stratified, hierarchical society’.
So this is a major revelation from current archaeology; and unlike the first ‘reveal’ of Altamira, it causes true wonder, not disbelief. And for those who like to regard art as an optional luxury in life, a pastime to be indulged only when the necessary business of survival and subsistence has been completed, Göbekli Tepe offers a particular challenge – with which we shall conclude.
For more than ha
lf a century, archaeologists have agreed that farming – the keeping of domesticated animals and the cultivation of crops – began in the Near East during the early Neolithic period, c. 9000 BC. Sheep and goats were the principal animals featuring in this agricultural revolution, while wheat and barley were the principal crops. Key sites providing evidence for animal enclosures and domesticated grains include Jarmo, in northern Iraq; Çatalhöyük, in western Turkey; and Jericho, in Palestine.The Jordan valley and the reaches of Upper Mesopotamia have also yielded specific clues regarding the transition from nomadic hunting and gathering to settled farming.The debate then arises about which came first: a demographic shift to settled communities, leading to a reliance upon farming for food, or the intensive exploitation of certain livestock and cereals, leading to settled communities?