Week 4- Lascaux and Ephemeral Culture

The cave paintings of Lascaux are a great example of how difficult it is to interpret the symbols of another culture without any context as to what that society was like to give us a starting point. There are certainly things that seem like obvious assumptions about the society by looking at them, such as that hunting was a very large part of their existence and that they probably had a lot of experience dealing with animals such as horses and bison, but even these are questionable and don’t tell us much in depth.

Trying to determine the purpose of the drawings or what they meant to the people who made and viewed them is almost futile. They could be stories or myths transcribed so they could be passed down through generations, they could have been descriptions of events, they could have been part of a ritual, they could have simply been art, or they could have been many other things.

What it demonstrates to me is the ephemeral nature of such cultural icons and symbols. Some of the things we take for granted in today’s society could be in pretty much the same position as these cave drawings in the distant future. Maybe future researchers will be able to piece together clues and figure out what get out of them today, or maybe they will be far off of the mark. The cave paintings are a great example of how important cultural context is for interpreting the symbols that are important to a culture. Just like the hobo symbols we looked at last week or the storytelling discussed in the lecture, their real significance (and the key to understanding how they were made in the first place) is in what the culture they were produced for gets out of them and this is extremely difficult to piece together so far after the fact with so few clues to work with.