In life and in death,
our ancestors covered themselves with iron oxide.
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Image of a horse
colored with yellow ochre from Lascaux cave, France, c
17,300 BC
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“What is the oldest pigment?” a reader asked me this week. That’s
one of the few questions that archeology can answer definitively.
It’s ochre, one of the iron-oxide pigments. These minerals are
common and easy to manipulate. Primitive man needed only to find suitable rocks
and scratch or grind them. Adding water, he had paint. Adding milk, he had
paint with a protein binder.
Ochre’s history is far older than modern man. A quartzite
hammerstone found
near the Danube shows a 500,000-year-old partial handprint of ochre. The
earliest known cache of milled ochre comes from a Homo erectus site that’s about
285,000 years old. By 250,000 years ago, Neanderthals were using
ochre at the Maastricht
Belvédère site in The Netherlands. By 40,000 years ago, ochre
was being manufactured in an ongoing process in an Ethiopian cave. That
workshop lasted 4500 years.
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Image of a human hand
created with red ochre in Pech Merle cave, France, c. 25,000 BC
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All that makes the Upper
Paleolithic cave art at Lascaux
seem downright modern.
Sienna, umber and red oxide are other iron-oxide pigments
from antiquity, but none are as venerable as ochre. In ancient practice,
different hues might have come from different rocks, or they could have been ochre
that was heated or treated to change its structure.
The easiest way to manipulate ochre was to toss it in the
fire. Burned, it turns red. Evidence of this dates from 100,000 to 70,000 years
ago in deposits in Blombos
Cave in South Africa.
Ochre filled a large niche in the prehistoric world. In
addition to its obvious uses as a paint, it was a medicine, cosmetic, tanning
agent and mastic.
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Paintings in the Tomb
of Nakht in ancient Egypt, c. 15th century BC
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“[It] is not unusual to find a layer of the cave floor
impregnated with a purplish red to a depth of eight inches. The size of these
ochre deposits raises a problem not yet solved. The colouring is so intense
that practically all the loose ground seems to consist of ochre,” wrote archeologist
André Leroi-Gourhan of prehistoric Europeans. “One can imagine that the
Aurignacians regularly painted their bodies red, dyed their animal skins,
coated their weapons, and sprinkled the ground of their dwellings, and that a
paste of ochre was used for decorative purposes in every phase of their
domestic life. We must assume no less, if we are to account for the veritable
mines of ochre on which some of them lived.”
Red ochre is closely associated with prehistoric burial
rites. The so-called Red Lady of Paviland
was a male skeleton dyed with red ochre about 33,000 years ago.
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Remains of the Red
Lady of Paviland, Wales, c. 35,000 BC
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“I found the
skeleton enveloped by a coating of a kind of ruddle ...
which stained the earth, and in some parts extended itself to the distance of
about half an inch around the surface of the bones ... Close to that part of
the thigh bone where the pocket is usually worn surrounded also by ruddle
[were] about two handfuls of the Nerita
littoralis. At another part of the skeleton, viz in
contact with the ribs [were] forty or fifty fragments of ivory rods
[also] some small fragments of rings made of the same ivory and found with the
rods ... Both rods and rings, as well as the Nerite shells, were
stained superficially with red, and lay in the same red substance that
enveloped the bones,” wrote its discoverer, the Rev. William Buckland.
Some prehistoric graves used cinnabar in place of ochre.
That would have been a costly trade item. Even in death, society has always
been divided between the haves and have-nots. Ironically, what they had in this instance was
toxic.
