Description
| Summary: | While some prehistoric sites - notably the painted caves at Lascaux in France and at Altamira in northern Spain - are familiar, many more such places are almost unknown. In fact, remains left by prehistoric men and women are far more numerous and have been found over a much greater territory - including Eurasia, Africa, Australia and the Americas - than most people are aware. These remains include paintings and engravings in caves and rock shelters, but also decorated tools, weapons, statuettes, personal ornaments and even musical instruments made of stone, ivory, antler, shell, bone and fired clay. starting with the first explosion of imagery that occurred approximately 40,000 years ago but also including the creations of essentially prehistoric peoples living as recently as the early 20th century. Drawing on up-to-date research, White places these discoveries in context and discusses possible uses and meanings for the objects and images.
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| Physical Description: | 239 pages : illustrations (chiefly color), maps ; 29 cm |
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| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (page 232) and index. |
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| ISBN: | 0810942623 |
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| Author Notes: | A distinguished authority on Ice Age art and technology, Randall White directs the not-for-profit Institute for Ice Age Studies and is Professor of anthropology at New York University. His field work has taken him to a wide range of prehistoric sites, from the high arctic of Canada, to north Africa, the Russian Plain, and the Dordogne Valley in France, where he co-directs an excavation at the 35,000-year-old settlement at Abri Castanet. The author of more than a hundred books and articles on prehistoric life, and a frequent consultant to Time, Newsweek, Natural History and other magazines, Professor White was also the guest curator of the landmark 1986 exhibition Dark Caves, Bright Visions: Life in Ice Age Europe at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He divides his time between New York City and Montignac in the Dordogne of France.
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