Let There Be Light

For most of human evolutionary history our only source of light was the sun. The sun came up and it was light and after it went down it was dark and there was not much left to do than to go to sleep. With the exception of the occasional moon-lit night.

Mastering fire was one of the most important turning points in human evolution. This probably started by the opportunistic use of natural fires by Homo erectus many hundreds of thousands of years ago before fire use became more habitual in the early Middle Palaeolithic.

The earliest convincing evidence for the control fire comes from two places in Europe, in the shape of a series of hearths discovered at the Beeches Pit site in East Anglia, and near Schöningen in Germany where heated stone and charred wood have been discovered. These 400,000 years old hearths would have provided warmth and protection against predators wherever these early Neanderthals travelled. It would have allowed them to cook food to fuel their large cold-adapted bodies and growing calorie-hungry brains.

Before humans made fire their activity was restricted to daylight but the warmth and accompanying light of a hearth would have allowed the extension of undertakings into the dark and colder hours of the night. This would have caused an important change in behaviour and the habitual use of fire appears to coincide with a revolution in stone age technology, pre-determined flake production. The transfer of such skills down the generations, when gathered around the fire, may even have sparked the beginning of language.

Once lit a fire is not very mobile and although burning branches may haven been removed from the hearth by Middle Palaeolithic man and used to light living quarters in a rock shelter or cave, no evidence for this has been discovered. We have to wait until the arrival of Cro-Magnon man in Southern Europe before another revolution in illumination is invented: the lamp.

The earliest lamps found in the Upper-Palaeolithic are largely unaltered cup-shaped slabs of natural rock or fossilised sponges and shells that would have been filled with animal fat as fuel with a wick made from moss or string. The great advantage of such a lamp over a torch is that the size of the flame can be controlled and it is smokeless.

The first uncontested lamps, with carefully carved depressions to contain the animal fat or oil, appear late in the Upper Paleolithic with the earliest example dating from the Gravettian found at La Laugerie Haute in the Dordogne. For an excellent overview of the stone lamps of the Palaeolithic see Don's Maps.

The example shown above is a Magdalenian lamp from Solvieux in the Dordogne (Southern France). Although broken in several pieces, it shows a shallow pitted depression that would have contained animal fat and a wick. The lamp is 231mm in length with a maximum width 156mm and 51mm thick. Dimensions of the pitted depression are 107mm (transverse axis) by 100 mm (longitudinal axis) with a depth of 6mm. The original on display at Le Musée National de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies-de-Tayac.

Unlike the earlier examples, many of the Magdalenian lamps have a handle. This gorgeous spoon-shaped lamp, delicately carved from red sandstone, dates from the Magdalenian (17,000 ya) and was found on the cave floor of the enigmatic Lascaux cave located the Vézère valley in the Dordogne. It's cup still contained soot residue and the remains of a juniper wick. The original on display at Le Musée National de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies-de-Tayac.

The lamp shown below was the first object to be identified as a such. It was found in the Grotte de la Mouthe cave in the Vézère valley near Les Eyzies de Tayac. The back of the lamp is decorated with an image of an ibex. The original is on display in La Musée d'Archeologie Nationale et Domaine, St-Germain-en-Laye.

The invention of the lamp in the Upper-Palaeolithic coincides with the appearance of the many decorated caves in the south of France, including Lascaux. Since many of the findspots include cave sites, the invention of the lamp and the development of cave art must be linked.

Many of the decorated recesses in caves such as those of Lascaux or Altamira (Spain), shown here, would not have been accessible without having a means of lighting (Illustration Arturo Asensio).

Althought the lamps from Spain were all found inside caves, many of those found in France were recovered from rock shelters and open air sites, indicating that were a common item in the Upper-Palaeolithic household.

As can be seen on the map there are no finds of Upper-Palaeolithic lamps known from north of the Seine river in France or anywhere else in Northern Europe, except for the one found in Gönnersdorf in the Central Rhineland of Germany (indicated by a red dot in the far rigth corner of the map). Beaune & White, Scientific American 1993.

This lamp, made from a slab of slate that was hollowed out, was found in an open-air Magdalenian site on a Middle Terrace of the Rhine (Bosinski (1981)). This site is very rich in figurative art, including abstract depictions of the female form.

During a visit to the village of Sweikhuizen in the Netherlands, a Magdalenian site located 145 km from Gönnersdorf (black dot in the top right corner of the map) earlier this year I made a very interesting find.

This slab of natural grey Revinien quartzite, commonly found in this area, has a shallow but clearly carved/pitted depression very similar to the Gönnersdorf lamp and the Magdalenian lamps from France, such as the one from Solvieux shown above. The carved depression has a rusty brown colour with several faint black lines running across. Dimensions: maximum lenght 100mm, maximum width 80mm and 23mm thick. The pitted depression measures 65mm (longitudinal axis) by 45 mm (longitudinal axis) with a maximum depth of 5mm at the edge.

Although it is impossible to put a date on this object because of the lack of contextual information of this surface find, its similarities with some of the French Upper-Palaeolithic examples raise the possibility that it could perhaps be Magdalenian. Speaking in favor of such a conclusion is that the object was found in close proximity to a well-known Late Magdalenian reindeer hunter settlement. This site, located on an elevated and loess-covered plateau in the Meuse valley, has produced many stone artefacts made from the local Cretaceous flint as well as the remains of a tent with a hearth.

Although natural stone lamps continue to appear in later archeological periods in Europe, such as the chalk lamps from Grimes Graves and Avebury (shown below), from Mesolithic times clay becomes the preferred material.

An example of an early ceramic lamps is shown here. These so-called blubber lamps were small, ovally shaped round bottom lamps that started to appear in the Late Mesolithic. They were filled with the fat of from terrestrial or marine animals, but also freshwater fish such as eel.