Animal Figures In Ancient American Culture

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1. Animal figures appear in variety of cultural objects produced by the ancient American peoples. What types of artifacts or sites include such imagery or forms? What meanings or associations have been suggested for the specific cultures associated with these examples.
Animal figures appear in a variety of art forms from the ancient American period. Dramatic hunting scenes, views of domestic family life, and costumed dancing figures are a naturalistic representations of human and animal forms often arranged to tell stories.
The “Apollo 11” cave is the site known for figurative artworks on the African continent. They are animal figures dating to about 25000 BCE, painted in red and black pigment on flat stones. The stones were found in the late 1960s. Looking at the picture (Figure 14-2) its crazy to think about how the red and black pigment that they used is still visible! (after all those years) The small slab contains the readily discernable image of an animal marked on the stone in a charcoal-based pigment. The animal is abstracted, with a large head and long thick neck. In my opinion I’m not sure what type of animal the artist was trying to draw (maybe the artist was trying to capture the essence or spirit of the animal). …show more content…
It is basically a scene of hunting, with the men chasing the herd of eland. From where the hunters are positioned, they can watch undetected movements of eland herds across the open plains. This possibly marks the site as a ritual location for the hunters preparing physically and spiritually for the rigors of hunt. You can also see that an eland and a hunter are both in an awkward position. “Scholars interpret these gestures as those of a dying eland with a successful hunter who holds the animal directly while it dies in order to absorb its spiritual

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presented it as a symbol of religion significance, the figure and metal screens representing confessions in Roman Catholic churches. Another picture caught my eye of a nude male figure, which is presented by Mapplethrope in 1994, an art selection of male nudity when male nudity was not yet popular on the art scene. Mapplethrope describe the picture as a male body in a taut compressed energy with his muscle limbs bent as seen on ancient Greek figure vases. In 1972 Mapplethorpe met John McKendry, who…

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only about four inches high. More than 100 fertility figures of this kind have been found in an area reaching from France to southern Russia. The sculptor of the Willendorf Venus, scraping away with a flint tool at his fragment of limestone, is not engaging in what we would call art. His tiny but profoundly convincing fertility goddess is a religious object. An encampment of mammoth hunters at Gagarino, in the Ukraine, has yielded many such figures. The huts of the Gagarino hunters even have niches…

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