Art before writing, on every inhabited continent: why prehistoric people made images and objects, what they made them from, and how archaeologists and art historians piece together their meaning. Covers all eleven required works, from the Apollo 11 stones to Stonehenge.
Art existed worldwide before writing and shares a concern with the natural world and people's place in it. Prehistory is divided into the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic, shaped by ice ages, a drying Sahara and land bridges. Early art accompanied survival: food, settlement, status and burial. Many cultures tracked stable phenomena from solstices to local stone, clay and jade.
Major media first appeared on different continents, with Africa and Asia leading: ceramics, painting and incised designs on rock, figurines and megalithic architecture. The first art (about 77,000 years ago) was rock painting and carved ocher. Asia gave jade working and the earliest ceramics; Lapita potters carried incised designs across the Pacific; Europe and the Americas made figures, cave paintings and monuments.
Knowledge of prehistoric art comes from collaboration with scientists. Excavation and carbon-14 dating reveal connections, but few works survive, so explanations stay partly conjecture. Ethnographic analogy and the history of religion (shamanism) support theories. Stratigraphic archaeology (since about 1900) records exactly where everything is found; function is inferred from tools, food and survival.