Design History: Neolithic Art – Episode #3

The Neolithic period existed from 6000 BC to 3500 BC. This neolithic period started once when people started to learn the art of agriculture and started settling down in and and around water areas which supported them in agriculture, and cattle farming.

After the rather ho-hum art of the Mesolithic era, art in the Neolithic (literally: “new stone”) age represents a spree of hellzapoppin’ innovation. Humans were settling themselves down into agrarian societies, which left them enough spare time to explore some key concepts of civilization – namely, religion, measurement, the rudiments of architecture and writing and, yes, art.
Painting, in Western Europe and the Near East, left the caves and cliffs for good, and became a purely decorative element. The finds of Çatal Hüyük, an ancient village in modern Turkey, show lovely wall paintings (including the world’s earliest known landscape), dating from c. 6150 BC.

The key characteristics of Neolithic art were:-

• It was still
• They were almost without exception
• They were created for some functional purpose
• There were more images of humans than animals
• The humans looked more, well, human
• They were cromtech design
• They were circular and spiral arrangements
• There are realistic and symbolic petroglyphs
• They were mostly outline drawings but most are silhouettes.
• They were figurative and abstract components.

The Neolithic paintings and artworks illustrate the way in which early man interacted with his environment, his level of development as in the tools he had fashioned, his culture, his vision of himself in relation to the world and other living creatures, and his beliefs, further providing a link between the different stages of human evolution and art development through analysis of the different techniques and materials used, and the different subjects portrayed as well as the differing methods of portrayal.
Therefore, these are the characteristics of neolithic art and this is what great archeologists and great artists have interpreted about neolithic art.

History will continue…

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