Aurignacian Culture

Aurignacian culture

Cave painting of a bull and a horse; in Lascaux Grotto, near Montignac, France.

(credit: Hans Hinz, Basel)

Stone-tool industry and artistic tradition of Upper Paleolithic Europe, named after the village of Aurignac in southern France where the tradition was first identified. The Aurignacian period dates to 35,000–15,000 BC. Its tools included scrapers, burins (which made the engraving possible), and blades. Points and awls were fashioned from bones and antlers. Aurignacian art represents the first complete artistic tradition, moving from simple engravings of animal forms on small rocks to finer pieces of carved bone and ivory to highly stylized clay figurines of pregnant women (the so-called “Venus figures,” presumably fertility figures). By the end of the Aurignacian, hundreds of engravings, reliefs, and paintings had been executed on the walls and ceilings of limestone caves in western Europe, most famously Lascaux Grotto.

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Aurignacian Culture 

an archaeological culture of the early stage of the Upper Paleolithic. It is named after Aurignac Cave (in the department of Haute-Garonne, France), where excavations were conducted.

The Aurignacian culture, in the narrow sense of the term, was widespread in France, where it is dated by the radiocarbon method at 33,000–19,000 years B.C. It replaced the Mousterian culture, with which it has no genetic ties (the Aurignacian culture most likely did not originate in Western Europe but was introduced from elsewhere); was contemporaneous with the Périgordian culture; and preceded the Solutrean culture. In the broader sense of the term, the Aurignacian culture was represented in a number of Western and Central European countries.

The Aurignacian culture is characterized by flint blades with retouching and fluting along the edges, end scrapers, core tools, rather well-developed bone working (in particular, split-base bone lance points), remains of dwellings, and relatively well-developed art.

REFERENCES

Grigor’ev, G. P. Nachalo verkhnego paleolita i proiskhozhdenie Homo sapiens. Leningrad, 1968.
Bordes, F. Le Paléolitique dans le monde. Paris, 1968.

P. I. BORISKOVSKII