A growing body of scholarship is concerned with the recognition of a close association between ancient rock art and shamanism. Such an acknowledgment is based in part upon study of communities producing rupestrinel art in areas of the world - southern Africa and northern Australia, for instance - which belong to a long-lived tradition of carving the rocks, sometimes traced back from the present thousands of years into the past. Carving rocks was clearly a highly significant act for the societies that produced and consumed the images produced, whether or not the imagery should always be perceived as religious or even symbolic. In any case, as argued by the archaeologist and rock-art scholar Richard Bradley, it is probably a mistake to try to divorce secular from sacred function for rock imagery. Indeed, it may be appropriate to regard certain rock-art sites as sanctuaries and that natural locations, places that were left entirely unmodified might be among the most significant to the people who visited them, because the imagery carved or painted on the rock surfaces interacted with physical space that was untouched, virginal and therefore belonged entirely to the spirit forces residing within, around and, perhaps, created by them. What is of fundamental importance is the recognition that context is a crucial factor in considering the significance of rock art: the art belongs to the landscape in which it is situated.

Also some of the human/animal images known as therianthropes can plausibly be construed as shamanic trance-images, although there remain other possible explanations. What is interesting is that these nightmare creatures, whilst rare, are present right from the earliest art known c. 32,000 years ago at Höhlenstein-Stadel in Bavaria and at Chauvet Cave in the Ardèche, and recur in the Italian Neolithic cult-caves. The latter seem to display two principal themes: secrecy and hunting. It is a commonplace that control of game is of vital importance to hunter-gatherer communities. In this context, the role of a shaman may sometimes have involved a soul-journey, through the veil of the cave wall, into the world of spirits. It may seem surprising, therefore, that hunting was important in Neolithic Italy where the hunter-gatherer lifestyle had been superseded, for the most part, by a predominantly agricultural economic system. However, it would appear that hunting possessed high-status associations, in much the way that the playing of golf in western civilization is often perceived (and conducted) as an élite, and excluding, activity.

Relationships with animals are particularly important because shape-shifting into a range of animal forms is characteristic of the practice of shamanism. Moreover, it is normal for the subject to identify with a particular species of animal -such as the San with the eland. In this context, therefore, the occurrence of a range of, particularly megafaunal, remains in the Gravettian ceremonial graves, or with the interments in the later Mesolithic cemeteries of northwestern Europe, should be significant. However, it would be wrong to propound a simple monothetic explanation for an historical and social context in which mythos and logos existed side by side and supplied parallel and equally valid truths as the search engines of the prehistoric societies involved. Several possibilities present themselves in the context of explaining aspects of grave furniture and burial practice. These include the protection of the body from disturbance by carnivores, the protection of the living from disturbance by the undead, and the selection of the bones of particularly the larger herbivores reflecting the species with which the dead (when living) or their communities had had a close relationship, perhaps as shamanic helpers.

Half-human, half-animal beings are endemic to the Bronze Age rupestrine art of Scandinavia, and to the coeval and later imagery carved on the rocks in the Camonica Valley and elsewhere in the western Alps.  They are also recurrent in Iron Age and Roman-period images, whether as stone statues and reliefs or small bronze figurines. It is clearly unacceptable to try and impose any kind of unified cosmovisual structure on such an enormous range of space and time. But it may be possible to suggest that underlying the production of therianthropic representations may be the desire to exhibit boundary-crossing, or boundary-denial, by means of shape-shifting. The same may be true of the evidence for gender-crossing. The notion of shape-shifting or transmogrification may be associated with many different layers of meaning, but it fits well within a scenario of the’two-spirit’ ritualist or shaman, whose liminal state between earthworld and the domain of the spirits shows itself in terms of an unstable, unfixed individual who regularly ‘travels’ between the dimensions of the cosmos.

The issue of the seclusion of ritual sites, generally caves or rockshelters, is rarely addressed head-on in Palaeolithic studies. In part, this is because there may be doubt about both the level of the Palaeolithic floor and the location or form of the original Palaeolithic entrance. The latter may well have been altered by natural recession of the external rock face, a process heightened by the intensity of the Last Glacial Maximum c. 20,000 years ago.

The content and range of the art at any one location may be controlled by the particular history of that site and by the mythologies  which informed its sanctity. Myths form part of the ancestral memory of any preliterate community and are handed down orally, changing over time in the process of re-telling. One of the devices of such oral tradition, as an aid to memory, is the invention of monsters. We cannot know with confidence in any one case, therefore, whether therianthropes represent a shape-shifting shaman or a character from myth. One  example of how  a site may continue, but with the belief system which underpins it changing, is given by stories of the emergence of saints from fissures in cave walls in the western Iberian sites leading to the Christianization of the site. Once again, the issue of boundary-transgression is central to the argument about the possible identification of shamanistic activity.

Caves are an important category, as are rivers, especially rapids, and deep pools. But we may look also at bogs where, during the Iron Age in northern Europe, they appear habitually to have been used as terra inculta, wild, uncultivated spaces, no-man‘s land, edgy places that led to the underworld and had to be propitiated by holy men and women. It may even be that some of these priests died and were deposited in these inhospitable but numinous places, whether as voluntary or unwilling sacrificial victims.  Chanting, drumming, dancing, sensory or sleep-deprivation, or control of breathing may all be involved in the inducement of trance. Psychotropic drugs are also regularly used by shamans in Amazonian communities in attempts to reach other worlds. This latter practice is by no means universal but it has been possible to identify hallucinogenic substances in later prehistoric and Roman-period contexts that are suggestive of their association with ritual activity.  Thus, the presence of cannabis in the Hallstatt chieftain’s tomb at Hochdorf in Germany in the sixth century BC, or the residue of artemisia trapped in the spout of a vessel deposited in the Doctor‘s Grave at Stanway in Essex in the earlier first century AD, might be linked to the lives or deaths of these individuals. More suggestive still are the body was regarded as empty. The purpose was to prevent the shaman‘s spirit from returning to her or his own body.  This believe is still very present in Asia today, hence cremation.

Evidence of ritual violence is present from the Palaeolithic onwards. A victim of Upper Palaeolithic violence, is the horse, defined in the soft clay of the cave wall, and then repeatedly stabbed, at Montespan in the Haute-Garonne. This is part of thefresque de la chass (the hunting fresco) which portrays a frieze of similarly stabbed horses.  Excessive and ritualized violence, both ante- and post-mortem, can be identified in the human remains of the European Iron Age and later. The multiple spear-attack on a body from one of the Garton Slack cemeteries in East Yorkshire bears a remarkable resemblance-in outward form at least- to the earlier images just mentioned. Several of the bog bodies were subjected to repeated and exaggerated violence both in life and as the causes of death: Lindow man was hit so hard on the head that his skull was fractured; he was garrotted and his throat cut. The Huldremose woman from Denmark had several injuries before death; and the young girl from Yde in Drenthe was stabbed in the neck before being strangled. Many of these bog victims were young, at the threshold of adulthood, a state that, in some traditional cultures, was so charged with energy that adolescent children were considered to have especially powerful shamanistic acuity.  Another factor that may be significant about the Iron Age marsh bodies is that several suffered from physical disabilities: the Yde girl had such advanced scoliosis (curvature of the spine) that she must have lurched violently as she walked, and she was tiny. A number of the Gravettian burials were similarly affected: for example, the central ‘female’ from the Dolni Vèstonice triple grave, the Barma Grande triple burial, and the adult male from the so-called shaman‘s grave at Brno.6It has been suggested also, in the case of the Ligurian burials, that above-average height may have been a factor in the selection of men for ceremonial cave burial.? It is possible that people may have been marked out as special, nurtured from babyhood and become seers because they were different; their handicap, or size, certainly seems to have been a factor in the selection of some as ritual murder victims.

We have said many times that shamanism involved public performance. We can offer Palaeolithic flutes, from the Aurignacian on, and even a drumstick found with the Gravettian burial at Brno. Like most firework parties, the exploding Gravettian figurines of DolnI Vèstonice must have added some fun to life. Perhaps the Paviland ivory rods were used to divine the will of the spirit-world or were part of a medicine bundle. The Upper Palaeolithic caves offer not only some evidence, albeit not well dated, of initiation rites possibly accompanied by dancing, but also of the location of wall art in areas where there were particularly resonant calcite draperies. Perhaps these were played to imitate animal noises, whilst the controlled movement of flickering oil lamps and brushwood torches made the beasts on the walls come to life: altogether a sort of Palaeolithic son et lumière.

One of the most graphic examples of ritual violence is:

The little group of naked bronze dancers from Neuvy-en-Sullias, used as ritual tools at the very cusp between the end of the Iron Age and the Roman occupation of Gaul, must have been involved in ideas of performance. The Hallstatt chieftain, buried with pomp and ceremony at Hochdorf, was laid on a couch whose back was decorated with pairs of dancers opposed in sacred combat, perhaps to symbolize the fight for the dead man‘s soul.

Pictorial representation of humans in cave art tends to be sketchy or schematic. But there are the half-human, half-animal creatures , the exaggerated antlers on stags, the geometric shapes, such as nets, labyrinths and collections of dots, the beings that disappear into or emerge from cracks in the rock surface, that merge into circles or that appear as dismembered or skeletonized bodies and the images that appear to be stacked one on top of the other. All these, together with other shapes and forms, can be identified in regions as far apart as Namibia and Arnhem Land in northern Australia and from southern France to Central Asia. Some date to the remote past, others (particularly in North America, northern and central Asia and Australia) to living memory. The figures may represent shamans: their disc-bodies seem to depict either the sun or as shaman‘s drum.

The notion of a triplistic universe, its layers - vertical or horizontal - permeable by shamans, is a widespread, recurrent cosmological concept. It is therefore quite possible that triadic iconography (see left below) is associated with such a world-view.

One divine being popular in Gallo-British contexts is Mercury, a god who, in his persona as winged messenger and Mercury is not infrequently depicted in Gallo-Roman contexts as a triple-faced image.  One site in Walsingham in Norfolk includes several representations of Mercury together with a curious bronze image of a person wearing a triple-horned cap (see second from left). The link between Mercury and shamanism is further supported by a little bronze image of the god found with a host of other figurines in a pot with late Roman coins at Southbroom in Wiltshire. The traditional Roman Mercury usually carries emblems that form part of a stock set of motifs, including a moneybag and a caduceus (herald‘s staff) or, sometimes, an offering-plate. But on the Wiltshire figure, the purse is inverted so that it resembles a rattle and in his other hand he holds a mirror(see third from left); both these attributes would fit well within a shamanistic context: the rattle perhaps - like the shamanic drum - symbolic of the repetitive sound used to induce trance and summon the spirits, as testified by the rattle‘s significance in North American shamanism.

 

Home