Prehistoric Aesthetics: An Ontology of Stone Age Art from the Lower Palaeolithic until the Neolithic

Prehistoric Aesthetics provides a new definition of the concept of prehistoric art.It argues that the autonomy of art and the aesthetic can be extended beyond modernity, and reworks the Western tradition of philosophical aesthetics towards a prehistoric aesthetics.Whereas it is normally modern Western art that is considered to be an autonomous type of art, which is coupled to an autonomous aesthetic experience, the book argues that it is in prehistoric art that the true autonomous condition of art and aesthetics manifested itself.A new research strategy is developed in which the fields of prehistoric archaeology and theoretical archaeology are integrated with the fields of philosophical aesthetics and metaphysics.This is related to current theoretical developments in archaeology, in which we see a turn towards ontological questions.The study examines three different types of prehistoric art: the hand axe and stone bola of the Lower/Middle Palaeolithic, the cave art of the Franco-Cantab