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The Nature of Paleolithic Art. R. Dale Guthrie. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 507 pp.
Most North American archaeologists have been reluctant to tackle Paleolithic art. While both lithic and faunal analyses have burgeoned, the rich and evocative European Upper Paleolithic mobile art and cave paintings have remained the domain of a surprisingly limited number of specialists. One problem facing North Americans wishing to explore Paleolithic art is the difficulty of access to collections and sites, but this alone explains little. Alexander Marshack, who was until his death the most visible North American specialist in Paleolithic art, was able to study and photograph an impressively large body of material. It might be significant that Marshack came to archaeology as an outsider: he was a journalist, not someone trained in anthropological archaeology. My sense is that the critical difficulty has been to assimilate the study of Paleolithic art with the goals and methods of the New Archaeology and its intellectual offspring.
In his recently published tome The Nature of Paleolithic Art, Dale Guthrie endeavors to couch the study of Paleolithic art as an element of a sociobiological program of research. Perhaps the most lasting contribution of this book will be to remind...