ABSTRACT
People in the earliest days will not have had the same concepts of work and leisure that we now do. This chapter provides the swiftest of tours down the ages, from prehistory to today. There are surviving artefacts from ancient cultures that clearly show ornamentation on a scale that signifies that expression was an important component of living, and was perhaps bound up with the rudiments of religion. Although early artwork, such as the cave paintings and rock art (Chippendale and Taçon 1998), survives, we have only fragments of evidence of what people did with their leisure. We have to deduce from what people left behind, and how others behave, what they may have done.
