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The Cave Artists
Ann Sieveking
Ann Sieveking's *The Cave Artists* is a compact, authoritative introduction to the painted and engraved art of the Ice Age, published by Thames & Hudson in 1979 as part of its long-running Ancient Peoples and Places series. Sieveking, a prehistorian, surveys the great decorated caves of southern France and northern Spain - Altamira, Lascaux and their kin - and weighs the competing attempts to explain them, from hunting magic to the structural readings of Andre Leroi-Gourhan. Rather than simply admiring the images, she takes their style seriously as evidence about chronology and society. Well illustrated and clearly organized, it is the kind of measured, expert primer the series was built for. For readers wanting a grounded starting point on Paleolithic art before the flashier recent books, it still serves admirably.
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The author
Ann Sieveking was a British prehistorian and specialist in Paleolithic art and portable artifacts, part of a distinguished family of archaeologists. She wrote for a general readership without softening the scholarship.
The book
One volume in Thames & Hudson's Ancient Peoples and Places series, The Cave Artists introduces Upper Paleolithic cave art and the history of its interpretation, giving particular weight to stylistic analysis in the tradition of Leroi-Gourhan and to what style can reveal about date and social meaning.
How it has aged
Decades of new discoveries (Chauvet chief among them) and dating techniques have moved the field on, but as a clear framing of the questions - who made this art, when, and why - it remains a sound introduction.
For more context
Follow it with Jean Clottes's writing on Chauvet, or David Lewis-Williams's The Mind in the Cave for a bolder interpretive theory.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Ann Sieveking
- Publisher
- Thames & Hudson
- Place of publication
- London
- Year
- 1979
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine
Added from photo pass