Bloggery Street

One of the earliest forms of art work excavated during archaeological digs, besides clay pots, were different figurines.  These included figurines of people, deities, as well as animal figurines.  Some of these animal figurines were created before the Sumerian civilization of Mesopotamia, dating as far back as the Neolithic period in human history! (Approximately 10,000 BC)

But why figurines?  Surely, humans of the time had more important things to do, such as searching for food, finding cover from Earth’s relentless elements, and fighting off those pesky sabretooth tigers!  There could be several answers to this, but two are worthy of closer consideration.

Before Jesus, before Moses, and definitely before L. Ron Hubbard, human worship consisted of many beliefs, most of which were (in some form or another) animalistic.  These roving bands of humans were confused about the workings of the world, and to help explain some of its mysteries, they created belief systems based around animals.  To pass down the traditions, some people created animal figurines to help their tribesmen (and women) envision these animal deities while stories about them were being told.

Another reason we are finding these animal figurines from thousands of years ago could simply be from the fact that humans have incredible imaginations, and some among us have a yearning to express these imaginations through art.  While many of the animal figurines found are most likely religious in nature, it would be foolish to say that they all have religious meaning, since it is very possible that some of them were spontaneous works of art.

Today, animal figurines are created from a variety of materials:  metal, stone, wood, plastic, porcelain, and clay, as is the case with pottery.  The Easter bunny is a great example of a contemporary animal figurine.  While intricately tied to Easter in the minds of most Americans, the Easter bunny makes no cameo appearances in the Bible and is separate from Christianity (being more closely related to American Capitalism).  Nevertheless, millions (if not billions) of Easter bunny figurines have been created in the recent past, a great deal of which were made of pottery.  They range from tiny to gigantic, from monochrome to intricately painted, and from cheap to Good-God-how-much?!

Thousands of years from now, our robotic descendants will excavate a pottery Easter bunny figurine and wonder what we were thinking when we created it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 9:52 am and is filed under Boleslawiec, Poland, Styles and Designs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.