Palaeolithic Art Documentary Film: Lisa-Elen Meyering

About the Palaeolithic Art Documentary Film

This Palaeolithic art documentary film was made for Durham University’s Centre for Visual Arts and Culture, one of three profile films made alongside a wider film about the Durham Leverhulme Doctoral Training Programme in Visual Culture. It follows archaeologist Lisa-Elen Meyering, who completed her Leverhulme funded PhD at Durham studying Ice Age rock engravings in Portugal’s Côa Valley.

Faces Turned the Same Way

At the heart of this Palaeolithic art documentary film is a simple but striking question about Upper Palaeolithic art: why do so many of these ancient engravings share the same visual conventions.

I’m studying ancient engravings from Stone Age times, and I’m really interested in how we as humans firstly draw these depictions, but also how all sorts of different depictions come to appear on different rock surfaces, through the creation of the mind. So they are all drawn in a profile outline. They are all facing in very similar directions.

Looking closely at the engravings, she noticed the same details recurring again and again.

So I figured out that actually the majority of them faced to the right, for example, and they all sort of have very similar ways of representing themselves, so that the head would always be accentuated, the dorsal line would be accentuated, and you could almost feel the sense when you were looking at them of how they were engraved, because they are all so similar. That really fascinated me. I wondered why there’s always that convention of people creating their engravings in exactly the same way.

Building a New Field: Palaeovisual Psychology

Much of this Palaeolithic art documentary film is about how that question led Meyering somewhere unexpected. To pursue it properly, she had to combine two disciplines that rarely sit together, archaeology and the psychology of visual perception.

I was looking at the options of how to combine my own discipline, which was archaeology, with that of a different one, because I really wanted to take part in this great initiative that CVAC had set up. And then I found psychology to be a really good option, to start that combination of taking psychological experiments, vision experiments, perception experiments, into that mix of archaeology. That really helped me and our wider team to understand that there is a big need for this field, and we call it palaeovisual psychology, our new field of combining psychological perception experiments with the interrogation of archaeological materials.

She describes the effect CVAC’s interdisciplinary setting had on the way she was able to think.

Before, I really only came from the archaeological discipline, and I really had my mind only set on archaeological methods, looking through archives, looking at really sort of lab based environments. CVAC really opened up my scope and my skill set to understand the psychological underpinnings of all of this, and enabled me to broaden my ideas around thinking in an interdisciplinary way, and really opening up my way of engaging with visual culture.

Summer Schools, Reading Groups and a Cohort Newspaper

Alongside her own research, Meyering was closely involved in the collaborative parts of the programme that ran across each cohort.

One big one for me was always the big summer school at the end of each year, and I really enjoyed participating in it, organising, and thinking of how we can make our contribution from the different cohorts happen. On top of the summer school, we had weekly reading groups, which really were super in developing my skills of how to interrogate visual culture from a reading perspective. I was tasked with creating a newspaper from all of us, so we got snippets from fieldwork from students in my cohort, and everyone submitted some of their articles to me, and I then commissioned and had a group around me that helped with some of the editorial work for the newspaper.

Continuing the Work as a Postdoc

This Palaeolithic art documentary film ends where Meyering’s research stands today. She is now a postdoctoral researcher in Durham’s Departments of Archaeology and Psychology, continuing work on Ice Age art and visual perception, including collaborative research into Palaeolithic plaquette art in the Central Rhineland.

I loved my PhD studentship so much that I decided to continue my work of research. So I sort of went from a large scale area to a small scale area, but the skills that I had learned through CVAC still applied to my current work, which I’m doing as part of my postdoc. I would really urge anybody involved with CVAC, or wishing to be involved with it, to get out there and participate in as many opportunities as it offers, because it is so broad, and has so many departments involved with it. I was so confined to my archaeological thinking, and CVAC really brought me to areas and disciplines and new ways of thinking that I had never really anticipated.