Carvings that have languished for decades in the British Museum’s vaults may hold the answer
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskArtefacts are dug up over the course of centuries by teams with varying skills or commitment to book-keeping. Objects end up in archives, entirely shorn of their context. For finds whose purpose or beauty is not readily apparent, or for those that do not fit neatly into an archaeological tale that explains that purpose, eternal repose in the basement is likely.
They started by hauling up 54 carvings that had languished for decades in the British Museum’s vaults. First excavated in the 1860s at Montastruc in France, near Toulouse, these “plaquettes”—flat, mostly limestone slabs about the size of a postcard—were made by the Magdalenian people. This seemingly art-minded culture spread throughout western Europe between roughly 23,000 and 14,000 years ago.
The pinkness suggested a few possibilities. Perhaps the plaquettes had ended up buried and later fires had burned above them. Or they might have outlived their aesthetic appeal and experienced second lives as cooking stones. Or, more intriguingly, perhaps they were deliberately set near to fires for purely cultural reasons.
Suppose the purpose was a fireside art gallery. What, the team wondered, might those prehistoric people have seen among the carvings? Subjecting the British Museum’s treasures to the rigours of flame-based experimentation would not do, so the team took to their computers. They made a simulation of a hearth as would have been constructed by the Magdalenians, set light to a virtual fire and then subjected precise, 3models of the plaquettes to the resulting light.
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