Prehistoric Art as Prehistoric Culture

The diverse papers in this volume, published in honour of Professor de Balbin, cover a wide variety of the decorated caves which traditionally defined Palaeolithic art, as well as the open-air art of the period, a subject in which he has done pioneering work at Siega Verde and elsewhere.

Professor Rodrigo de Balbin has played a major role in advancing our knowledge of Palaeolithic art, and the occasion of his retirement provides an excellent opportunity to assess the value of prehistoric art studies as a factor in the study of the culture of those human groups which produced this imagery. The diverse papers in this volume, published in Professor de Balbin’s honour, cover a wide variety of the decorated caves which traditionally defined Palaeolithic art, as well as the open-air art of the period, a subject in which he has done pioneering work at Siega Verde and elsewhere. The result is a new and more realistic assessment of the social and symbolic framework of human groups from 40,000 BP onwards.

Prehistoric Art as Prehistoric Culture (Primitiva Bueno-Ramirez and Paul Bahn)
'Science' versus Archaeology: Palaeolithic Rock Art at the beginning of the 21st century (Jose-Javier Alcolea-Gonzalez and Cesar Gonzalez-Sainz)
Raman spectroscopy of prehistoric pictorial materials (Antonio Hernanz)
Prehistoric rock art and non-invasive analysis. Rouffignac as a case study (Patrick Paillet)
Reasoning processes in prehistoric art interpretation (Sophie A. de Beaune)
Are hand stencils in European cave art older than we think? An evaluation of the existing data and their potential implications (Paul Pettitt, Pablo Arias, Marcos Garcia-Diez, Dirk Hoffmann, Alfredo Maximiano Castillejo, Roberto Ontanon-Peredo, Alistair Pike and Joao Zilhao)
Regional ontologies in the Early Upper Palaeolithic: the place of mammoth and cave lion in the 'belief world' (Glaubenswelt) of the Swabian Aurignacian (Shumon T. Hussain and Harald Floss)
Aurignacian art in the caves and rock-shelters of Aquitaine (France) (Brigitte and Gilles Delluc)
Fuente del Trucho, Huesca (Spain): Reading interaction in Palaeolithic art (Pilar Utrilla and Manuel Bea)
Open-air Ice Age art: the history and reluctant acceptance of an unexpected phenomenon (Paul G. Bahn)
Decorated sites and habitat: social appropriation of territories (Denis Vialou)
Deep caves, ritual and graphic expression: a critical review of the archaeological evidence on hypogean human activity during the Upper Palaeolithic/Magdalenian (Pablo Arias)
Magdalenian settlement-subsistence systems in Cantabrian Spain: contributions from El Miron Cave (Lawrence G. Straus, Manuel Gonzalez Morales, Ana B. Marin-Arroyo and Lisa M. Fontes)
The Upper Palaeolithic rock art of Portugal in its Iberian context (Andre Tomas Santos, Maria de Jesus Sanches and Joana Castro Teixeira)
Old panels and new readings. La Pileta and pre-Solutrean graphics in Southern Iberia (Miguel Cortes Sanchez, Maria D. Simon Vallejo, Ruben Parrilla Giraldez, and Lydia Calle Roman)
Palaeolithic art in the Iberian Mediterranean region. Characteristics and territorial variation (Valentin Villaverde)
Small seeds for big debates: Past and present contributions to Palaeoart studies from North-eastern Iberia (Jose Maria Fullola, Ines Domingo, Didac Roman, Maria Pilar Garcia-Arguelles, Marcos Garcia-Diez and Jorge Nadal)
Throwing light on the hidden corners. New data on Palaeolithic art from NW Iberia (Ramon Fabregas Valcarce, Arturo de Lombera-Hermida, Ramon Vinas Vallverdu, Xose Pedro Rodriguez-Alvarez, and Sofia Soares Figueiredo)

Primitiva Bueno Ramírez, Professor of Prehistory at the University of Alcalá, is a specialist in megaliths. She has field experience in Europe’s most emblematic monuments, where the performance of death included decorated walls, coloured corpses, steles, statues and menhirs, as well as figurines. She has taken an interest in reconstructing these processes beyond architectural typologies, to provide evidence on identity, gender, provenance, burial garments and shared iconographies on both a small and large scale.

• Edited by Primitiva Bueno-Ramírez
• Edited by Paul Bahn