Stone Age Cave Art example essay topic

416 words
The new museum also operates as a research establishment and conference centre, therefore pursuing an interdisciplinary academic approach beyond its purely museo logical remit. Its stated objective is to contribute towards the understanding of man's early history. To this end it organizes regular conferences and symposia with the aims of generating interdisciplinary contacts and sparking new ideas and perspectives. The Museum publishes the lectures given at these conventions in its own series of research papers. It is also establishing a database on the Neanderthals and their environment, and further creating a collection of casts from the palaeo anthropological fossil report. This will be accessible to professional academics and amateur historians alike, as will the media library containing video material and literature on early human history.

The Museum also organizes archaeological field research projects and seeks to provide young academics and recipients of research grants with a forum for their research and publications. Prehistoric cave art in its context - a research project in southwest France Early in April 2001 a new research project focusing on the meaning of stone age cave art was launched at the Neanderthal Museum. This project is, at present, being supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) for a duration of three years. Its objective is to draw up a model showing the connections between stone age cave art and the activities of the prehistoric people in the cave. Thus it is hoped to enlighten the processes often described as 'cultic-religious' which took place in the interior of the cave.

Until present previous attempts to study stone age cave art have almost exclusively employed ethnographic comparisons. Specifically this model is beeing developed in three of the most famous caves in the world. These are the caves of the Vol - Tuc d'Audoubert, Les Trois-Fr " eres and Enl " ene (B'EGOU " EN / BREIL 1958). This ensemble of caves is unique, and the excellent preservation of the legacy from the end of the last ice age, about 15.000 years ago, can only be compared to that in the cave of Chauvet in the Ard " echo region (France) or La Gamma near Santander (Spain). The caves are situated in the foothills of the Pyrenees in the southwest of France. They own their worldwide reputation to two clay sculptures of bisons (Tuc d'Audoubert) and the depiction of a human-animal-creature known as the 'sorcier' (Les Trois-Fr " eres).