History on Display: Scenes from the Stone Age
I don't get to Chicago's Field Museum as often as I would like. I notice a special exhibition that looks interesting: Cleopatra, the royal courts of India, pirates. I look at how long it's running and think, "Oh, I have plenty of time." Then I put my head down and forget about it until it's too late. When My Own True Love brought Scenes from the Stone Age: The Cave Paintings of Lascaux to my attention, I made sure we put it on the calendar.
I'm glad we went. The exhibit was fascinating in a deconstructionist, post-modern kind of way. But, quite frankly, it was kind of weird.
The first room had scale models of the cave system, with lines drawings of the paintings below each section. At first I couldn't figure out what the models were. They reminded me of bones in the desert. Or teeth.
The second room discussed the construction of Lascaux II, a replica of the caves created by the French government. The technology involved was amazing. So was the scope of the project. The original caves were closed to tourists in 1963.* Lascaux II was designed to allow people to have a simulated experience of visiting the caves. It's been an enormous success. Roughly five million people have visited the replica since it opened in 1983. Created over a period of eleven years by twenty artists using materials and techniques believed to be similar to those used by the original artists, Lascaux II is the Disneyland version of the caves, including mock-ups of prehistoric scenes and live examples of some of the animals depicted in the paintings.
Having seen the second room, the first room made more sense.
After that, the exhibit was more understandable. A review of different generations of archaeological work in the caves. A life-size mock-up of one section of the cave, created using the technology used for Lascaux II. A series of videos and hands-on displays discussing the paintings as both art and social constructs.**
Here were the things that struck me the most:
• The paintings are much larger than I pictured. It is absolutely clear that they weren't the work of a single inspired artist working with a torch. These paintings required organization and resources. ***
• That said, we know little about the society that created them or what the paintings meant to them. We can (and have) catalogue the images, including the abstract signs that are interspersed with the more-well known animal images. We can determine what materials they used for paint. But we don't know why or how or even when. ****
• "From the entrance to the innermost depths of the cave we see before our very eyes the great book of first mythologies, their very foundations themselves, with the creation of life as its central theme and through this the genesis of the world." Prehistorian Norbert Aujoulat (1946-2011)
The exhibit will remain at the Field Museum through September 8. Its next stop will be Montreal. Despite the weirdness factor, Scenes from the Stone Age is worth seeing if it comes to a theater near you.
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* The effect of thousands of tourists on the atmosphere of the caves caused damage to the paintings. One of the most dramatic interactive stations in the exhibit illustrates the immediate change in temperature and humidity caused by one person standing still.
** The oddest, and yet most intriguing, of these was a series of interviews with French scholars about the caves. The interviews were taped, not filmed. A video of each scholar was exhibited as the appropriate interview was being played. Not videos of them being interviewed; videos of them standing uncomfortably while English subtitles rolled under their pictures. The interviews themselves were very interesting, but it was distracting watching the interviewees squirm in front of the camera. Why? Why?
*** Forget the torches that appear in every recreation of a Cro Magnon settlement that you've ever seen. Apparently they had cool little stone grease lamps. 
This fact alone made the visit worthwhile as I far as I was concerned.
**** Archeologists estimate the paintings were done 20,000 years ago, give or take a couple of thousand years. But that is based on the age of artifacts found in the caves, not the paintings themselves. The paintings were done with mineral pigments with no organic matter so they can't be tested with C14 methods (aka radiocarbon dating). Archeology is endlessly fascinating.
Image of the stone lamp courtesy of Shemur, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Riddle of the Labyrinth
In The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest To Crack An Ancient Code, Margalit Fox adds a new layer to the story of how the ancient script known as Linear B was deciphered.
In 1900, archaeologist Arthur Evans uncovered a cache of clay tablets in an unknown script on Crete. For fifty years, scholars across the world struggled to decipher Linear B without even knowing what language it encoded. In 1952, an amateur named Michael Ventris solved the puzzle with what is often presented as a single stroke of inspiration. In fact, Ventris's inspiration was based on the work of another, largely forgotten, scholar-- classicist Alice Kober. Working alone in her Brooklyn home, Kober created a new methodology for decoding the unknown script without the benefit of a bilingual text or a computer. She also identified the keys that allowed Ventris to make his imaginative leap.
In The Riddle of the Labyrinth, Fox returns Kober to her rightful place at the center of the story. She divides her story into three parts, focusing on the charismatic digger, Evans, the methodical detective, Kober, and the brilliant architect, Ventris in turn. She handles the mix of biography, archaeology, cryptology and linguistics with a sure touch. Technical discussions of how to decipher an unknown script written in an unknown language are as engaging as the lives of her protagonists.
In a satisfying conclusion, The Riddle of the Labyrinth ends where it begins, with the tablets themselves and what we have learned from them.
This review was previously published in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
History on Display: Henry VIII at Chicago Shakespeare Theater
My Own True Love and I recently went to see Henry VIII at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. As far as I'm concerned, the play isn't one of Shakespeare's best,* but the performance was a theatrical tour de force. As always. CST knows how to do it right.
Written in 1613, ten years after the Queen Elizabeth's death, the play tells the story of Henry VIII's efforts to dissolve his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, his not-quite-subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn, and his break with the Catholic Church. It ends with the baptism of the newly born Elizabeth and Archbishop Cranmer's triumphant prophesy that the infant princess will be "a pattern to all princes living with her,/And all that shall succeed." Under her reign,
…every man shall eat in safety,
under his own vine, what he plants; and sing
The merry songs of peace to all his neighbors;
God shall be truly known; and those about her
From her shall read the perfect ways of honor...
The original audience would have been even more aware than their modern counterparts of the story that followed: Henry VIII's later marriages, the religious conflicts of the later Tudor reigns, and the glories and contradictions of Elizabeth's reign. CST cleverly foreshadows all of it. (I was particular taken with the use of dance as a visual metaphor that ties the story together.)
Shakespeare (or possibly CST artistic director Barbara Grimes), depicts Henry as dissolute, demanding inconstant, and charismatic, Katherine as fiery and tragic,** and Anne Boleyn as a bit of a floozy. Cardinal Woolsey, who plotted to keep England Catholic, is complicated and slimy; his Protestant rival Cranmer is virtuous and smug. With the possible exception of Katherine, it was hard to warm up to any of them. Instead, the character that caught my attention was the young Thomas Cromwell,*** who transforms himself over the course of the play from Cardinal Woolsey's devoted secretary to an advocate of the English Reformation.****
Looks like it's time to learn a little something about Mr. Cromwell, or at least read Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.
The play runs through June 6. If you're in the Chicago area, do yourself a favor and see it.
*It is generally believed that Shakespeare wrote the play in collaboration with an up-and-coming young playwright, John Fletcher (1569-1625). Fletcher became one of the most influential playwrights of his time; today he is best remembered for, well, nothing. (Unless you're a specialist in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, in which case you know him as one of the most influential playwrights of his time.) Proving once again that readers can’t judge which contemporary literary works will become classics and which will become dissertation fodder.
** I'm not sure whether Shakespeare or actress Ora Jones was responsible, but Katherine blows everyone else off the stage in her scenes.
***Not to be confused with Oliver Cromwell, who led the Roundheads during the English Civil War.
****Like pretty much everyone who became involved with Henry VIII, he was later executed when Henry became unhappy with one of his own choices. But not in this play.