Rock Art Research

The recent find of a female statuette in Aurignacian contexts in Hohle Fels Cave, southwest Germany, has important implications for the understanding of the development of European Palaeolithic art and its ideological and practical contexts. Here, it is argued that this figurine provides support for the continuity of metaphorical relationships that connected the characteristics of humans and animals over thousands of years during the early Upper Palaeolithic of Europe. These relationships were expressed during the Aurignacian period (c. 40 000 – 32 000 bp) mainly through figurative animal representations that were materially and socially attached to individual persons. Subsequently (c. 29 000 – 18 000 bp), this discourse was transformed in the course of socio-economic changes in subsistence and settlement patterns and with the development of larger and more permanent settlement structures. The new find
of the Hohle Fels ‘Venus’ allows an understanding of these processes of change and continuity in greater detail, and has implications for future studies in this direction.