Symbols from the Ice: Plants as Food and Forms
THE COMPELLING IMAGES OF NATURE in the caves of southern Europe are our species’ earliest surviving works of imaginative representation. The galloping horses and rippling bison created by Palaeolithic artists up to 40,000 years ago are very evidently themselves, but also seem to stand for elusive abstract notions: symbolic forms, the energy of movement and creation, perhaps a world beyond the physical. What is curious, given the way that plant representations were to proliferate in future millennia, is how sparse images of the vegetable world are, and how vague. Most of the creatures painted on cave walls or engraved on bones are instantly recognisable as animals. There are a handful of images, too, that have a vaguely branching plant-like quality. But I have only seen one image that is a convincing picture of a specific, potentially identifiable flower. On a bone found in Fontarnaud Cave in the Gironde and dating from about 15,000 BC, a twig bearing four bell-like blooms rises up like a miniature maypole in front of a reindeer antler. The flowers are lantern like, pinched and cut into a V at the lip, with their stalks projecting alternately up the stem. It’s a passable impression of a sprig of bilberry, or crowberry, or one of their ericaceous relatives that grew abundantly on the late ice age tundra. Foliage and fruit were food for the reindeer, which, in turn, were food for the local hunter-gatherers. If this is a deliberate juxtaposition, it’s a clever and symmetrical one – prey animal and prey’s forage – except for one complicating feature. When I looked at a close-up photograph of the carving, I spotted something I hadn’t seen before. Near the point at which the each bloom grades into the stalk there is a small curved line, like a breve or a closed eyelid. When I focused on it, the ‘flowers’ suddenly flipped, like the shapes in M. C. Escher’s optical illusions. They became birds’ heads and necks, or maybe a notional impression of young, suckling animals. The flower as feeder as well as food. Had the artist made a kind of visual pun, or a metaphorical image about the circularity of the food chain?
Palaeolithic artists used metaphors freely. Dark pubic triangles represented women, and probably the idea of creation. Carvers used the natural curves in cave walls to highlight the rounded bellies of animals – rock paunches hinting at fodder consumed, or calves to come – and to give them the illusion of movement in flickering light. This stands for that. The long habit of seeing resemblances and analogies has been a defining feature of our species since the dawning of the modern mind in the caves, 40,000 years ago. I can’t help looking for metaphors in ice age art, any more than its creators could resist inserting them. So I may be translating this conjunction quite wrongly. Perhaps it is just the result of one artist filling in the bare space on another carver’s bone. Perhaps it is another kind of metaphor altogether, an image of sleep maybe, or not a metaphor at all but a sophisticated doodle, unconnected to the world’s greenery.
But Palaeolithic cave artists seemed chiefly to find vegetation visually unstimulating or short on meaning, despite the ubiquity of plants in their lives and landscapes. In the painted subterranean galleries of southern Europe you can only see plant forms by wishful thinking, conjuring up, say, a schematic tree from a few random scratch marks and ochre smudges. Cave art is overwhelmingly devoted to animals, but their habitat is invisible. Lascaux’s bison walk on air. The wild Tarpan ponies in the extraordinary, 35,000-year-old ‘Horse Panel’ in Chauvet Cave flare nostrils, pout and whinny, but never graze. There are plenty of food animals – deer, bison, mammoths – but no food plants. There are also fish and foxes, cave bears, predatory big cats, whales and seals, a tiny grasshopper, and three splendid owls from Trois Frères (Ariège), whose expressions have the same inscrutable wisdom conventionally given to owls in modern times. The flair with which these creatures’ vitality and shifting moods are captured makes it plain what caught the artists’ attention, and you wonder why their own kind didn’t inspire the same empathy. There are a few female figures engraved in caves and on artefacts, but they are mostly orotund symbols of pregnancy, tropes of pure fertility, and they lack the faces and individuality of the animal portraits. Plants don’t seem to belong to the same cosmos.
Yet they were indispensable parts of Palaeolithic life. Hunter-gatherers were just that, gatherers as well as hunters. They foraged for berries and roots. They would have understood how the migration of their food animals was governed by the growth spurts of tundra vegetation. They worked expertly in wood, once trees had begun to return to the landscape in the wake of the retreating ice. Remains of wooden bowls, tools, shelters, even cave-painter’s ladders, have been found in sites dating from the end of the Palaeolithic, circa 12,000 BC. The foragers may even have been making happenstance experiments in cultivation. Evidence of cereals, such as oats and barley, has been found in sites in Greece and Egypt. Concentrated clusters of grass pollen grains have been excavated in Lascaux, suggesting hay was gathered by the armful, perhaps for bedding. The evocative scent of drying grass may have drifted through the dreams of early artists, but not through their work.
Utility rarely seems to have been an overriding consideration in these first artists’ choices of subject. Non-food animals are pictured just as frequently as prey species, and the animals featured on the cave walls are rarely those whose stripped bones, the remains of dinner, are found on the floor. As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has famously suggested, the painters’ subjects were not so much good to eat as ‘good to think’. Perhaps this is one reason why plants so rarely feature. They can’t be ‘thought’ in the same way as sentient creatures. They have no obvious animus or spirit. Their life cycles don’t follow the comprehensible pattern of pregnancy, birth and death which all animals share. In the big bisons in Chauvet Cave – drawn with a few simple strokes that give them the bulk and energy of Picasso’s bulls – you are seeing a creature whose power and thunder and fecundity have been felt in the bone by the artist. It is hard to imagine any clump of green tissue, however culturally significant, nourishing such fellow feeling.
My friend, biologist and painter Tony Hopkins, spent twenty years sketching rock art round the world. This is no longer regarded as a reliable recording technique, given the seductive opportunities it allows for fanciful interpretation. But the process of creating impressions of the images, forming reproductions of the pictures his fellow artists made tens of thousands of years ago, has given him a privileged insight into what might have been in their minds. Beyond a few comparatively recent Australian Aboriginal paintings of gourds and yams, Tony has seen no truly ancient representations of plants. His own interpretation of this, he tells me, is ‘that most cultures saw plants as being part of the landscape, the same as mountains and rivers. This does not mean that they didn’t think they had “spirits”. But plants were not part of the palette of iconography. I think this might be because people could not see themselves in the plants, but could see themselves (or could see their shamans) transmuted into animals. Perhaps this implies that people did not think plants were “alive”.’ Or perhaps took them for granted, as predictable ‘givens’, like their habitat, or cloud formations, or their own bodies, also rarely represented in their art. Yet the absence of plants from rock art doesn’t necessarily mean they were absent from the imaginative world of the Palaeolithic. They may have had meanings that were not easily accessible to representation, in the manner of scents which can be described only by similes or by reference to other scents.
Theories about the ‘meaning’ or, even more riskily, the ‘purpose’ of cave art have flourished since the first examples were uncovered in the late nineteenth century, and tend to echo the contemporary zeitgeist. The Victorians, smarting at the way this sophisticated art undermined the presumptions of civilisation, dismissed it as a collection of doodles, or the work of unconsciously gifted copyists. In the early part of the twentieth century, ethnographers with colonial models of ‘primitive’ cultures put the pictures down as hunting cartoons, narratives of the chase, field guides to the most desirable quarry. Or perhaps as magical aids to hunting, an envisioning and therefore ‘capturing’ (a word we still use about pictorial likenesses) of prey. In the psychedelic mood of the 1960s and 70s, there were theories which linked the images to altered states of consciousness and shamanic drug-driven rituals. Spears were spotted everywhere, as were genitalia (particularly dark pubic triangles, the pan-global symbol of generative power) and the pictures were interpreted in some quarters as Palaeolithic pornography, celebrations of sex and violence. In the late twentieth century French structuralists concentrated their attention on the overall arrangement of the pictures inside caves. Bison confronting horse, for example, has been interpreted as a masculine–feminine opposition, and a clue to the structure of Palaeolithic belief systems. The location of paintings in very remote parts of the caves may suggest that they were positioned close to a metaphorical portal to the animals’ spirit world.
Nowadays most archaeologists are wary of grandiose, overarching theories about the meaning of cave art. Indeed, simply to ask what they ‘mean’, as if there were a solitary purpose and a single artistic ‘language’ in the Palaeolithic, smacks of a kind of patronisation, a reluctance to credit people who are manifestly already using their imaginations expressively with the same rich muddle of beliefs and feelings that have always lain behind creative art. We will never know for certain why ice age people made images, or chose the subjects they did. Jill Cook, senior curator in prehistory at the British Museum, put the dilemmas (and some of the wilder theories) of interpretation in perspective when she described an exquisite sculpture of a water bird found in a cave in southern Germany. It is only two inches long, but perfectly streamlined, as if caught in the act of diving. It may, she says, be a ‘spiritual symbol connecting the upper, middle and lower worlds of the cosmos … Alternatively it may be an image of a small meal and a bag of useful feathers.’
From the simple act of looking at the pictures, one thing is indisputable: their creators were artists, in exactly the sense we understand today. Their work vivaciously displays all the emotions associated with the acts of image making and image viewing: wonder, love, fear, amusement, a celebration of life, a satisfaction in the business of creation. The first reaction of most lay viewers of Palaeolithic art isn’t one of anthropological interrogation but of recognition, plus a delighted astonishment that these remote ancestors saw and created in ways that are so comprehensible to us. Art was born 40,000 years ago, in John Berger’s phrase ‘like a foal that can walk straight away’. This isn’t a matter of imposing modern sensibilities on ‘primitive’ intelligences. The Palaeolithic mind was the modern mind in embryo. That defining movement towards self-awareness, when the mind shifted, became conscious of itself and of the fact of consciousness; and an image in the memory, the mind’s eye, meshed with the shadows on the rock, was also an aesthetic event. It meant that nature could be seen detached from itself, across space and time, and that choices could be made about how it was represented and seen.
In 2013 Jill Cook curated Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind – a spellbinding exhibition in the British Museum of what is called ‘portative’ art, in contrast to ‘parietal’ or cave-wall art. The Palaeolithics scratched images on ox shoulder blades and mammoth tusks and interesting pebbles. They engraved deer on deer antlers, used the curves in animal bones to suggest perspective. Just occasionally they scraped out plant-like forms – a twiggy fork, a suspicion of a leaf. Some of these portable pieces might have been magical, carried to bring good luck on the hunt. A few have been found with the bones of their owners, as if they were tributes or grave goods. But the majority seem more light hearted, with the look of art made for whimsy or pleasure, and may have been the work of different community members, less specialist workers than the ones who fashioned the set pieces inside the caves. Palaeolithic bone whittlers made toys, trinkets, tiny vignettes. One engraved a whale with a look of sublime serenity on a fragment of whale ivory. Another, about 15,000 years ago, cut a small figure of a ptarmigan into a bleached reindeer antler, a white bird in a snowbound and plantless void. In France, at about the same time, a hunter with a sense of vision and plenty of time to spare made what was essentially the first animation projector. It is a small bone roundel laboriously shaved down to just 0.1 inches in thickness, a monumental task. On one side is an engraving of an auroch’s cow, on the other her calf, whose outline beautifully catches the sagginess of young bovines. In the centre of the disc is a hole through which a thong was threaded, so that the disc can be twirled and the mother and calf made to perform a dance of transformation. It is a kind of Stone Age flick book, an ancestor of nineteenth-century moving-image machines. Most extraordinary is the oldest wind instrument in the world, a 35,000-year-old flute cut from the wing bone of a griffon vulture. Experiments with replicas show that the way the holes are positioned make them exactly reproduce the top notes in the modern diatonic scale.
Jill Cook mounted these pieces in small glass booths, so that as you gazed at them you saw the reactions of the viewers opposite you: engrossment, recognition, tears; many complex expressions of loss and rediscovery. The poet Kathleen Jamie was there, and wrote about this shared sense of time dissolving: ‘Perhaps because we were Palaeolithic for such an age, the artworks we see before us are deeply, if strangely, familiar. We peer and half remember.’ Kathleen and I agreed afterwards that we felt something strangely akin to homesickness in front of these extraordinary miniatures made by our ancestors, and that gathering together in a circle round these enclosed images touched some deep memory of those evenings round the cave fires.
Yet there were no plant portraits in the exhibition, despite the fact that it is on portable pieces that most of the meagre collection of early images appear. When Paul Bahn and Joyce Tyldesley reviewed all images in the European Palaeolithic era that might possibly represent or reference plants they found just sixty-eight, and of these fifty-eight were portative. Compared to the dazzling artistry of the animal portraits (probably created by an elite class of full-time painters and engravers), the exterior images are naive. Half a dozen or so are crudely naturalistic. On a baton carved from reindeer antler there are three stalks of an aquatic plant, possibly a water milfoil. A pebble from the Grottes de Cougnac near Gourdon is engraved with what is clearly a monocotyledon (the large section of plants that includes grasses and lilies). The finders suggest it might be a tulip, but the little cluster of pearl shapes above the thickly sheathed leaves look to me more like an orchid, or a lily of the valley in bud. The most gracious – and accurate – is a spray of what is almost certainly a willow, carved on a reindeer shoulder blade. The leaves are alternate, and there is a side twig that tracks the swelling at the head of the bone, a classic Palaeolithic trope. There is even a stick-beast impression from the Ariège of what is probably a deer or cow browsing low foliage, but mystifyingly interpreted by the French structural anthropologist Alexander Marshack as ‘a man in the midst of stylised reeds or rushes’. And then there is the puzzle of the bilberry-reindeer collage.
Most of the rest are little more than variations on simple leaf or twig forms. Branching patterns appear often, as radiating ribs in a leaf, or a series of forks. Structuralist interpreters are reluctant to take these images at face value. The simple fork, the basic binary division, the turning of one into two, is a universal pattern in nature, as it is in the structure of thought. The bifurcating twigs may be fertility symbols, or then again feathers, or fins. All have been the subject of intense study by Marshack or his colleagues. Arl Leroi-Gourhan translates a simple engraving of a small twiggy plant with roots as a female oval symbol supporting a branching male symbol. Inverted V shapes on a carved rib from the Dordogne are interpreted as either tree buttresses or symbols of female ‘entry points’ (they may be both – splayed and buttressed roots are commonly seen as vaginal symbols by surviving hunter-gatherer communities in Amazonia) and the monkish hominids walking past them as men carrying sticks on their shoulders. According to who is interpreting the drawings, stick images may represent harpoons, ‘male elements’, or just plain sticks. Here and there on other bones and pebbles are clusters of small cruciform or star shapes. Marianne Delcourt-Vlaeminck interprets these as schematic flowers, but they may be stars, or sparks, or those optical flashes known as phosphenes that are often experienced in the dark, and especially during moments of awareness heightened by dance or drugs.
Much of the structuralist deciphering of this slender collection of plant images seems to me as fanciful as glimpsing pictures in the embers of a fire. Sixty-eight roughly scratched images, a minute fraction of what must have been created over a time span of more than 10,000 years, are not remotely sufficient evidence to tease out a lexicon of Palaeolithic foliate symbols. In the absence of any solid proof either way, I’d like to suggest a more inclusive and equally plausible account of their origins, which for me makes these early moderns feel more like the ancestors they were. The rank-and-file hunter-gatherers have a little time on their hands, maybe after a meal. They have a superfluity of stripped bones and flint burins, and are becoming familiar with the idea of making pictures from the work of the ‘professional’ artists inside the caves. The Palaeolithic evening class chip and scratch, some maybe working in pairs or groups, some producing little more than scribbles, like the marks young children make when they first have access to pencil and paper. The more accomplished are attempting to capture the intriguing forms that make up the green backcloth to their lives, maybe adding ciphers and clan emblems and entirely personal curlicues. The plant as a spontaneous cultural motif, rich with everyday metaphorical meaning, has its first tentative beginnings here. I’m reluctant to call it ‘decorative’, because of the etymologically unwarranted associations of superficiality which flutter around this idea. What I’m suggesting is that plant images and metaphors were used very freely, and continue to be so in the visual vernacular, as if floral and foliate growth somehow echo the dynamic processes of our imaginations. If animals have chiefly been metaphors and similes for our physical behaviour, plants – rooting, sprouting, forking, branching, twining, spiralling, leafing, flowering, bearing fruit – have, from these hesitant beginnings in the Palaeolithic salons, come to be the most natural, effortless representations of our patterns of thought.
But the physical evidence of these beginnings is slim, and if the paucity of images rather than their style is really the important part of the story, there may be an alternative interpretation. Not yet part of early culture and belief systems, kept outside the dark theatres where the human imagination took flight, undomesticated and unrevered, plants were still essentially wild. It was a quality and a status that was soon to be eroded by the invention of agriculture. What had been ‘outside’, beyond, was now ‘taken in’, enclosed. What had followed its own twiggy path was now drilled into our straight furrows. If you consider the whole tradition of images and conceptual framings of plants, it is striking how often they occur in spaces that have a sense of enclosure and possession. Depiction of plants doesn’t start again till 5,000 years after the end of the Palaeolithic era, and the simultaneous beginnings of agriculture in the Middle East. In Egyptian art, already well populated with birds and animals, notional plants begin to appear about 2500 BC. A thousand or so years later the pictures are beginning to be impressively accurate, and often embedded in some kind of narrative of enclosure. On one of the walls of Sennedjem’s tomb in Thebes there is a painting of a fully working farm. The estate is surrounded by irrigation channels and divided up into tidy fields. In one, a man (possibly Sennedjem himself) and his wife are picking bushels of flax. In an adjoining plot he is harvesting what look like ripe barley heads with a sickle. It is a naturalistic portrait of humans in full command of the plant world but, positioned as it is in a nobleman’s tomb, is probably allegorical, too – the farm already, as it would continue to be, a symbol of human life on earth, with all its stations of fruiting, harvest, death and rebirth.
At much the same time, in nearby Mesopotamia, the Genesis myth of an enclosed garden began to take shape, a model which was echoed three millennia on in the hortus conclusus of the Middle Ages. The first botanic gardens, created in the seventeenth century, were attempts to reconstruct the lost order of the Primal Plot: Eden itself. When they later became centres for the advancement of science and commerce, the sense that they were also botanical theatres for staging the unfolding dramas of theology and science was unmistakable. Soon botanical wonders from across the globe were being displayed on literal stages, in the bijou bell jars of Victorian drawing rooms and the great glasshouses of country houses and public gardens. Contemporary descriptions of the multitudes who came to stare at them hint that they resembled excited theatre audiences, and sometimes supplicants in a temple.
In his famous ‘Allegory of the Cave’ from the Republic, Plato tries to express the nature of the everyday experience of the physical world by imagining a group of people chained inside a cave, facing a blank wall. They watch the play of shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire located behind them, and begin to give names to the shapes and to discuss their qualities. The shadows – visual metaphors, so to speak – are as close as the prisoners get to viewing the real world. Plato then explains (rather self-servingly nominating the philosopher as the one character qualified to find a way out) that only by leaving the cave can people experience the true nature of reality.
The beginnings of horticultural order. Garden of fruit trees enclosing a flower-bordered duck pond, Tomb of Nebamun, Thebes, c. 1350 BC.
Our perception and understanding of plants has, shall I say, been less black and white and more diversely democratic than Plato’s allegory. But the counterpoint between ‘real’ plants and the shadowy forms of metaphor, and between the spontaneous, imaginative experience of vegetation and the models of scientific, commercial and priestly elites, are themes which meander through this book.