In a half-term week spent dodging big squally showers, this was the best thing we saw.
It was found in Montastruc, SW France and is the oldest sculpture in the British Museum.
It is
13,000 years old.
And we'd have missed it if we hadn't have made a sideways glance to the left as we were leaving.*
It is made from mammoth tusk and depicts two swimming reindeer.
No-one knows exactly why it was made, or what it was for.
----
"The presence of antlers on both animals and the characteristics of the female coat show them as they appear in autumn when they cross rivers on migration to their mating grounds and winter pastures. Was the sculpture left at Montastruc to bring good luck or ward off evil spirits? Could it be an apology to the reindeer for having to kill some of them or a representation of autumn, made in the hope that the reindeer mating would be successful, ensuring human and animal survival?
Was the sculpture a group totem, a shaman’s wand or the focal point of a story based on a journey in or between real and supernatural worlds? Such questions cannot be answered with certainty but the reindeer do suggest a religious impulse to be at home with nature at a deeper level."
----
Oh bless you dear Scientist, it is a
work of art then.
A tiny, beautiful thing made at the onset of winter by a hunter in Ice Age France, now admired by thousands in a world and time entirely beyond his imagining.
Roy Harper - 'Frozen Moment' (1985)
*We had been to see the Staffordshire Hoard - which is very lovely, but not so much a hoard here as a bijou pile, since most of it is still in the Midlands.Multimedia reindeer here.
