Dolni Vestonice

The discovery of the working properties of clays must have resulted in one of humankind s first expressions of representational art, roughly contemporaneous with the discovery of the colouring properties of natural pigments and their use in cave art. The additional discovery that the result of the manipulation of this art form could be rendered permanent by the use of fire must indeed have been a source of wonder. The earliest fired ceramic so far known is a small moulded figurine from Dolni Vestonice in what was Czechoslovakia, dated to approximately 26000 years BP (Vandiver et al., 1989). By approximately 10000 years ago, simple utilitarian vessels were being produced in the Near and Far East. 

In that time there was a corridor between the ice layers in the north and the Alps in the south of Europe. It consisted of relatively warm tundra area which extended from former Czechoslovakia to the Ukraine and Siberia. It that area, or to be more precise in Dolni Vestonice (in the Czech Republic) archeologists found three huts not far from each other and next to a small river. These huts were found to be from around 27,000 BC. The place where they were found is situated in low-lying countryside and on limestone covered with loess. The framework of the walls and roofs was made of bones and tusks from mammoths (fig.2.3)... 

This is a baked statue representing a woman. It is thougth to be a fertility symbol or a representation of femininity. About 15 important sites have been identified where such statues can be found, but the most well-known one is in Dolni Vestonice. Here an approximately 27,000 year old finger or toe print was also found on a piece of clay which had been hardened to ceramics by the fire. The Venus is about 11 cm high and was found in 1924 by Karel Absolon. An amusing anecdote in 1980 the editor of the East Texas Newspaper in the USA refused to print a picture of the statue because he considered it unsuitable for a family newspaper. 

And now another important question is Should these Venus sculptures be classed as ceramic materials Initial analyses proved that they were made of silicon-containing ash and mammoth bone and possibly also mammoth fat, but no aluminium oxide or potassium oxide - which are always present in clay - were found. A later analysis of the Venus of Vestonice led to the concusion that a mixture of mammoth fat and bone, mixed with bone ash and local loess had been used but still no traces of potassium nor of aluminium. In the eighties the Venus was examined using more sophisticated equipment and the result was no bone or other organic components and no stone fragments. In the period 1955-1965 some researchers concluded that the animal statues of Dolni Vestonice were made of clay, and they called this terra cotta which means burned soil . Present studies indicate that the loess of Dolni Vestonice was used as raw material for the animal figurines. 

Upper Paleolithic Blade tools Lascaux Pincevent Dolni Vestonice Homo sapiens sapiens Homo sapiens neanderthalensis Art... 

FIGURE 2.3 A 25,000-year old baked clay Pavlovian figurine called the Venus of Vestonice found in 1920 in Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic. 

The first ceramics appeared at Dolni Vestonice (in the former Czechoslovakia), as early as 26,000 BC. They were both anthropomorphic figurines and diverse artifacts whose shards were discovered in the thousands. The technology was... 

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