The Shamans of Prehistory
Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams set out in The Shamans of Prehistory to build a bridge between modern neuroscience, ethnography, and the stubborn visual traces left by people who lived tens of thousands of years ago. Their book reads like an extended act of sympathetic imagination supported by pattern seeking. They begin with the premise that certain recurring features in Paleolithic and later rock art are not random decoration or simple hunting scenes. Instead these features are the externalized products of altered states of consciousness that arise from ordinary neurophysiological processes in human brains. From that starting point they develop a three part argument. First, they show that many geometric motifs and certain classes of figures appear again and again in widely separated traditions of rock art. Second, they marshal ethnographic accounts of shamanic practice among living hunter gatherers and small scale societies to show how people in trance report seeing similar images and beings. Third, they invoke laboratory and clinical studies of the visual system to argue that the early stages of trance produce predictable visual phenomena, which the authors call entoptic phenomena. The book then traces how those entoptic forms can be transformed in the mind into animal shapes, hybrid human animal figures and complex narrative scenes, and how those experiences can be recorded as images on cave walls and sheltered rock faces.
The narrative of the book moves from theory into detailed case studies. Clottes and Lewis-Williams are careful readers of the great painted caves of Europe. They describe how the visual grammar of caves such as Lascaux, Chauvet and Altamira includes clustered animals, repeated signs, hand stencils and the famous therianthropes, figures that combine human and animal features. The authors pay attention not only to iconography but to the places where images are painted. Caves and rock shelters are examined in terms of access, light, acoustic properties, and sequences of chambers, because the authors believe that the spatial choreography of a site is essential to understanding how images were produced and used. They suggest that many images are placed in locations that would be entered in darkness, seen by firelight or torchlight, and experienced with a sensory intensity that could encourage trance. In some cases the acoustic qualities of the space amplify chants or drumming, and those conditions in combination are likely to have shaped ritual performance and the kinds of visions that were painted.
A central theoretical move in the book is their three stage model of vision in trance. In the first, or entoptic, stage the nervous system produces geometric visual phenomena such as dots, zigzag lines, grids and tunnels. These are universal because of shared human visual physiology. In the second stage those elementary forms are organized by the mind into more structured imagery, sometimes morphing into animals or human animal hybrids. In the third stage fully formed visual experiences unfold as complex scenes involving specific beings, journeys, or encounters with spirits. Clottes and Lewis-Williams argue that Paleolithic artists, often working from memories or live experiences of trance, depicted elements from all three stages. Simple signs are traces of the entoptic stage, composite creatures are evidence of transformation experiences, and dramatic painted scenes evoke full visionary encounters.
Ethnography supplies the cultural context and the vocabulary for interpreting images. The authors draw heavily on accounts of shamans among San foragers, Siberian hunter gatherers, Amazonian groups and indigenous peoples of North America. They show recurring motifs in those accounts, such as the shaman journeying to the underworld, the crossing of liminal thresholds, the presence of helper spirits that take animal forms, and the use of images and ritual paraphernalia to mediate relations between human and spirit worlds. These parallels allow Clottes and Lewis-Williams to read images as components of ritual practice, often invested with purposes that could include healing, social regulation, initiation, the control of animal behavior, and the maintenance of cosmological order.
Throughout the book the authors balance bold interpretation with methodological caution. They repeatedly warn that ethnographic analogy is not literal replication. Their claim is not that Paleolithic people practiced the same institutions labeled shamanism among modern groups. Rather they argue that there is enough continuity in human neurobiology and enough overlap in reported visionary content to allow cautious inference. They propose that shamanic style experiences provide the best explanatory framework for many of the motifs and spatial patterns in rock art, even if the social role and cosmological meaning of those images could have varied widely.
Clottes and Lewis-Williams also engage with alternative explanations. They acknowledge the long standing idea that cave art could be primarily hunting magic, sympathetic magic intended to ensure success. They consider totemic, narrative and social structural interpretations as well. In confronting these alternatives they emphasize fit with multiple lines of evidence. For example an image placed deep in a cave in a locus that is acoustically resonant and accessible only by a small group of participants seems more likely to belong to ritual performance than to a mundane narrative or a mnemonic record.
The book also provokes criticism, and the authors do not pretend their model answers every question. Critics charge that it can be circular, because researchers select images that fit the shamanic model and then treat the fit as confirmation. Others fault overreliance on modern ethnography, arguing that projecting recent behavior onto people ten or twenty thousand years ago risks anachronism. Questions also remain about variation. Not all imagery fits the model neatly, and regional differences suggest multiple symbolic systems and social functions. Clottes and Lewis-Williams respond by acknowledging complexity and urging further comparative work, including careful documentation of motif distributions, site contexts and experimental studies of perception.
In its larger consequence the book transforms how readers think about prehistory. It shifts emphasis away from treating cave art as simple illustration and towards seeing these images as active participants in ritual experience. It reframes ancient painting as embodied practice, where vision, sound, architecture and movement combine. The authors show that bringing neuropsychology into archaeological interpretation can yield testable hypotheses about why certain signs recur and why art is located where it is. Whether or not every researcher accepts the shamanic interpretation, the book has pushed the field to ask richer questions about performance, perception and the cognitive foundations of symbolic life.
By the end of The Shamans of Prehistory the reader is left with a synthetic vision. Clottes and Lewis-Williams do not present a single tidy explanation for all rock art. Instead they offer a coherent framework in which biology, individual experience and cultural meaning intersect. Their contribution lies both in the specific interpretive claims they make and in the methodological invitation they extend to archaeologists. To study prehistoric art fully, they insist, one must attend to the human brain as well as to pigment and stone, to ritual as well as to icon. The result is an argument that is imaginative, anchored in comparative evidence, and consequential for how we reconstruct the inner lives of those who left marks on rock long before history was written.