ABSTRACT
The distribution of these statuettes in Europe reinforces the notion of an eastern origin for the Gravettian. O f the Russian sites Kostienki has yielded one, Gagarino seven of them carved in mammoth ivory; and while others come from Malta in far-distant Siberia, Willendorf (PI. II, i) and Vistonice1 by the Danube have been no less productive, and with Savignano in Emilia and the Grimaldi Caves (PI. II, 2-3) their making reaches Western Europe. At Brassempouy and again at Sireuil in France the context was apparently not Gravettian but Aurignacian, perhaps evidence of contact between the cultures, for in and before the Aurignacian art had indeed appeared, but art of a different order. To the hunter vitally dependent upon his hunting, the magic of life and death concerned not his own kind alone, but above all the animal quarry whereon his own kind subsisted. As the Vistonice site has shown, the Gravettian could fashion talismanfigures of animal as well as human abundance, but the same inspiration of primary want had impelled his predecessors in Western Europe to what was an animal art essentially, the hunter’s spontaneous imagery of the beasts it was his life to kill.
