托福TPO4阅读真题及答案Part2
Cave Art in Europe
The earliest discovered traces of art are beads and carvings, and then paintings, from sites dating back to the Upper Paleolithic We might expect that early artistic efforts would be crude, but the cave paintings of Spain and southern France show a marked degree of So do the naturalistic paintings on slabs of stone excavated in southern Some of those slabs appear to have been painted as much as 28,000 years ago, which suggests that painting in Africa is as old as painting in But painting may be even older than The early Australians may have painted on the walls of rock shelters and cliff faces at least 30,000 years ago, and maybe as much as 60,000 years
The researchers Peter Ucko and Andree Rosenfeld identified three principal locations of paintings in the caves of western Europe: (1) in obviously inhabited rock shelters and cave entrances; (2) in galleries immediately off the inhabited areas of caves; and (3) in the inner reaches of caves, whose difficulty of access has been interpreted by some as a sign that magical-religious activities were performed
The subjects of the paintings are mostly The paintings rest on bare walls, with no backdrops or environmental Perhaps, like many contemporary peoples, Upper Paleolithic men and women believed that the drawing of a human image could cause death or injury, and if that were indeed their belief, it might explain why human figures are rarely depicted in cave Another explanation for the focus on animals might be that these people sought to improve their luck at This theory is suggested by evidence of chips in the painted figures, perhaps made by spears thrown at the But if improving their hunting luck was the chief motivation for the paintings, it is difficult to explain why only a few show signs of having been Perhaps the paintings were inspired by the need to increase the supply of Cave art seems to have reached a peak toward the end of the Upper Paleolithic period, when the herds of game were
The particular symbolic significance of the cave paintings in southwestern France is more explicitly revealed, perhaps, by the results of a study conducted by researchers Patricia Rice and Ann The data they present suggest that the animals portrayed in the cave paintings were mostly the ones that the painters preferred for meat and for materials such as For example, wild cattle (bovines) and horses are portrayed more often than we would expect by chance, probably because they were larger and heavier (meatier) than other animals in the In addition, the paintings mostly portray animals that the painters may have feared the most because of their size, speed, natural weapons such as tusks and horns, and the unpredictability of their That is, mammoths, bovines, and horses are portrayed more often than deer and Thus, the paintings are consistent with the idea that the art is related to the importance of hunting in the economy of Upper Paleolithic Consistent with this idea, according to the investigators, is the fact that the art of the cultural period that followed the Upper Paleolithic also seems to reflect how people got their But in that period, when getting food no longer depended on hunting large game animals (because they were becoming extinct), the art ceased to focus on portrayals of
Upper Paleolithic art was not confined to cave Many shafts of spears and similar objects were decorated with figures of The anthropologist Alexander Marshack has an interesting interpretation of some of the engravings made during the Upper He believes that as far back as 30,000 , hunters may have used a system of notation, engraved on bone and stone, to mark phases of the If this is true, it would mean that Upper Paleolithic people were capable of complex thought and were consciously aware of their In addition to other artworks, figurines representing the human female in exaggerated form have also been found at Upper Paleolithic It has been suggested that these figurines were an ideal type or an expression of a desire for
Paragraph 1: The earliest discovered traces of art are beads and carvings, and then paintings, from sites dating back to the Upper Paleolithic We might expect that early artistic efforts would be crude, but the cave paintings of Spain and southern France show amarked degree of So do the naturalistic paintings on slabs of stone excavated in southern Some of those slabs appear to have been painted as much as 28,000 years ago, which suggests that painting in Africa is as old as painting in But painting may be even older than The early Australians may have painted on the walls of rock shelters and cliff faces at least 30,000 years ago, and maybe as much as 60,000 years