Prehistoric Art: The Symbolic Journey of Humankind

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful
Review: Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Anyone who likes art will be fascinated by this book, Great for the coffee table.

Rating:
Summary: A work of impeccible scholarship
Review: Prehistoric Art: The Symbolic Journey Of Humankind by Ice Age art and technology expert Randall White (Professor of Anthropology, New York University) is an amazingly impressive and informationally detailed survey overview of the paintings, sculptures, pottery, and more, crafted by human beings before times remembered and recorded by the written word. Breathtaking full-color photographs superbly enhanced a thorough, scholarly, fully accessible text describing what is known about sites of prehistoric art worldwide. Prehistoric Art is a work of impeccible scholarship and very highly recommended addition to Art History and Anthropological Studies reference shelves and reading lists.

Rating:
Summary: A book to change your thinking
Review: This is a magnificent looking production, with hundreds of ancient items reproduced in extraordinary quality. The captioning, referencing and graphics are excellent. The reader can follow how representational styles and subjects changed over time, and varied between areas of settlement. And many of the objects -- a lion-headed figure, a smoothly carved woman's head, wall-painted images of a horse in different moods -- are breathtaking and memorable.
What I love about this book, though, is that it has changed the way I think about "art", and how I think about my forebears of 10,000-50,000 years ago. It is a risky error to imagine that people in cultures so remote in time from ours would have painted or chiselled or carved for the same purposes that a modern-day Western artist would. Notions of "art" and "beauty", the purposes to which representational objects are put, vary greatly between cultures, and are bound to have varied hugely over such long periods of time. And these were loooong periods of time: "prehistoric" peoples occupied the world for hundreds of generations before the adoption of agriculture and the many changes it brought, and their habits and beliefs and languages would have changed many times. I will never again think of the ancient peoples of the world as a single, unchanging group.
This is a rigorous, beautiful and unforgettable book.