Verify Citation - 5. Music, Temperament, and Social Concord
From The Observatory
Verify Citation
Quoted text:
Marshack (1990: p. 20) observed that such clothing “would probably not have been worn in the activity of hunting, butchering or daily domestic activity.” He added that “The assumption that ivory beads, bracelets and head bands evidence the beginnings of an awareness of ‘self’ is Eurocentric.” The “self” is still merged into the kosmos.
For portable art, the practice of covering images such as the Willendorf “Venus” with red ocher may be more than merely decorative. The red color may have symbolized the blood of life. Whatever was being signified, red ocher coloring predates the Cro-Magnons, being found as early as 100,000 BC in Neanderthal burials (Marshack 1990: p. 3).
Art became more cognitive by the late Ice Age. Marshack has shown the extent to which images from the Magdalenian period (15,000–10,000 BC) through the neolithic “were essentially ‘time factored,’ that is they were not simply ‘art,’ but were made at the right time, to be used at the proper moment, in the proper way, and for proper cultural reasons. … In fact symbolic carvings may in some measure have been made so they could be used ritually and ceremonially.” Cave art probably helped heighten and even coordinate seasonal rituals. “The ritual and symbolic use of the caves found in the Franco-Cantabrian area may have been ‘scheduled’ to that calendar frame, along with the manufacture and use of different classes of imagery and the performance of different types of rituals both inside and outside of cave sanctuaries” (Marshack 1990: p. 9).Can you help us identify what text is meant by “Marshack 1990” so we can amend the footnotes and Bibliography throughout this chapter? At first we thought it was The Roots of Civilization and was an edition in 1990 following the original 1972 edition, but we could not find this in that text and need help amending the citations which originally said “Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization (New York: 1972 and 1990)” with link to this page.
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