Chapter Two

The Paleolithic Era: The First Dances

 

 

 

 

 

When belly dance emerged into Weston popular culture in the early 1970’s, it came complete with an imaginative history that associated this dance with an empowering vision of a world in which women were valued in a way denied by modern patriarchy.  Both by teachers of enthusiastic students, and by instructional books which spread the word all over the United States, belly dance was described as an ancient art, “The High Priestess of Dance,” with a long and fulfilling history.  In the days of its origin, women, rather than being looked down upon as too emotional or physically inferior or irrational, were respected, even held in awe, since their role as life-givers was understood and honored.  Consequently, belly dance, as a woman’s dance, inherently expresses that valuation of women (and millennia of human history aside, has retained that force, even if “underground,” from then until the present day).  In this view, belly dance is inconceivably ancient, perhaps the first dance ever done, often described as the “oldest dance” or “the birth dance of mother earth.”  Belly dance, as this history elaborates in some sources, is the dance of a time before rigid social hierarchies developed – an innocent childhood of the species, when belly dance was a natural, joyous expression of the bounty of life, performed by the women who played such a key role in the conceptualization of the divine.  In this primitive Eden, there were none of the schisms (of body from soul, feeling from action) that trouble us now, so belly dance arose from an integration of feeling and expression impossible today.  As Rawza elaborates, [QUOTE]

This is pretty clearly a mythic history, which is to say, a history that speaks more to our own vision of what the dance is and should be, than a real inquiry into the past.  All the same, many dancers not only believe it, but have an emotional investment in believing it.  In speaking with dancers about dance history over the past decade, I have found that challenging this view often causes great discomfort, perhaps because it seems to be whittling away at the self-esteem and vitality this image of dance gives to its modern practitioners.   

It might be easier to let the “history” lie, since it offers comfort to so many.  Yet I feel there are not only historical problems with it, but conceptual and practical problems as well.  First, its naiveté is obvious to non-dancers, who do not respect us any more for clinging to this fantastic view of prehistory.  Second, it puts into the distant past issues that are better addressed from a firm grounding in the realities of the present day.  Third, it unconsciously incorporates views about women, nature, and antiquity that are the direct descendents of the unrelentingly patriarchal Victorian era.  And finally, this history is in effect a colonization of the past.  Just as we once (and still) made the Orient into a field for Western fantasies, these imaginative histories do the same thing to the past – without opposition, since its inhabitants are no longer around to trouble us.  But I think we owe it to them, and to ourselves, to investigate the real possibilities for knowing ancient dance, and the possible roles SIDTA – “belly dance” – played in the earliest days of humanity.

 

“Primitive” Dance

Not everything in these mythic views of primitive dance is wrong.  Among hunter-gatherers (people who live in small bands and survive by hunting and gathering natural resources, as early humans did), the modern West’s rigid distinction between sacred and ordinary experience does not exist.  Nor does a religious hierarchy separate individuals from direct sacred experience.  Individuals do dance for sacred purposes, and dance is a part of life.  And generally speaking, at least by comparison to early urban societies, women are respected: hunting and gathering societies tend to be more egalitarian than societies that develop with agriculture and later. 

But there are also fundamental flaws with the myth.  To begin with, although it is taken as a woman-empowering history, this image of primitive belly dance is actually grounded in the patriarchy of the Victorian era. 

In the perspective of the late 19th century, the modern European represented the adulthood of mankind, and hunting and gathering societies from early in human history – or from the “primitive” parts of the world – were taken as representing the childhood of the species.  As metaphorical children, hunter-gatherers were seen as simple, primitive, impulsive, spiritually innocent, and naïve, just as children were.  But – since sometimes we contrasted ourselves with beasts instead of children – the Paleolithic hunter could also be portrayed as a brutish, club-wielding savage, as could the peoples of less materially advanced nations. 

While they placed the modern European at the top of the cultural and historical hierarchy, 19th century thinkers also realized that the modern world bred complications with no ethically simple solution.  What would the world be like without the problems of industrialization, class conflict, changing mores?  Better and simpler, perhaps.  So, to complement the view of subsistence-level hunter-gatherers as brutish or childish, there emerged the idea of the “noble savage.”  In this view, the primitive tribesman was portrayed as honest, simple, pure, insightful, and close to nature.  He had a type of wisdom that we lack.  We might even regard it as superior to our own “wisdom,” which has led to so much social upheaval and unhappiness.

There is some truth to this image, in that the wisdom of hunting and gathering peoples provides perspectives that industrialized nations lack, just as the insights of the people of industrialized nations would provide hunter-gatherers with the perspectives of a different world-view.  But the “noble savage” idea, even while it compliments the wisdom of the “primitive,” has its own brand of condescension.  In making these “primitive” peoples stereotypically noble and wise, it prevents us from realizing their full humanity.  Hunter-gatherers  are not more simple than ourselves, nor are they all alike.  While hunting and gathering people are definitely more in tune with the natural world than people raised in the modern industrial West, this does not make them pure or uncomplicated.  They are not more noble, or more naïve, because they are more ecologically attuned.  They are real people, who can be resentful or spiteful or angry as well as loving and honest.  As individuals, they are diverse, although to us as outsiders, they might share traits that are less common in our own sort of society.[1]

This condescending attitude often finds its way into the mythic histories of belly dance.  When we describe ancient dancers as innocent and childlike, or as inherently good and fulfilled, we strip away a little of their humanity, in exactly the way our Victorian predecessors did with “primitive” peoples.

What was the reality of the inhabitants of prehistory?  To begin with, since they were human beings, they were as complicated as we are.  Their relationships to their world were nuanced and sophisticated, not simple childlike delight.  Also, hunting and gathering societies were diverse.  Just as, for example, Riyadh and Paris have different customs, hunting and gathering societies in different environments would differ from one another.  And just as individuals vary in our world, individuals would have varied in the distance of prehistory as well. 

 

The Emergence of Dance

What can we actually say about any dance – and about belly dance in particular – in the prehistory of the SIDTA area? 

The physical evidence leaves much to be desired.  We are not even sure when dance of any sort evolved in human history.  It has been argued that males developed all aspects of culture, from religion to dancing, as mating display – and conversely, that females developed symbolic art (including dance) in order to control male access to fertile women.[2]  But most would agree that dance evolved because in some way, groups who danced together stood a better chance of weathering the challenges of their difficult environments.  Dance can give hunters a feel for working together as a group.  Dance can produce physical effects such as heightened awareness or trance.  As a social activity, it can create a sense of communal solidarity reinforced by this physically heightened awareness.  Since the physical effects of dance can be channeled toward heightened spiritual awareness, it can be used to induce (for example) shamanic trance or healing power.  Because it is symbolic action, it can incorporate religious feeling and religious imagery.  Dance is used in all these ways in modern hunting and gathering societies.  The social relationships, spiritual realizations, and/or physical skills fostered by dancing made human survival more likely. 

If dance is in fact a survival adaptation, how fundamental is it to human beings?  When did it arise in human history?  Authorities do not agree.  There is a vast divide between the earliest possible development and the latest provable.  One possibility is that the survival advantages of dance developed early – anywhere from two million to 700,000 years ago – possibly along with hunting.[3]  At the opposite extreme, dance may be understood as a symbolic language, not actually proven until the archeological record begins to show that cognitively, humans were capable of symbolic thought – sometime after 50,000 BCE, and not proven until about 13,000 BCE.

 

The Archeology   

Unfortunately, archeology offers us very little insight on the dance of Paleolithic people, and gives us no evidence of anything like belly dancing. In some of the cave paintings that are found in Europe dating after 13,000 BCE, there are representations of people who might be dancing.  The “Shaman of Trois Fréres”, apparently a man wearing a horned mask, probably represents a shamanic ceremony involving dance.  Another well-known dance scene is found in the Addaura cave in Sicily, dating to about 9,000 BCE.  The dancers are almost all identifiably male (they have penises) and an animal figure is involved.  It probably represents a men’s hunting ritual, and while SIDTA is not out of the question in this context, there’s nothing to support that identification.

About 4,000 years later, a painting from the Roca del Moros site in Cogul in Northern Spain shows female figures gathered for some purpose, which is probably dance.  The figures are distinctly female, their breasts clearly indicated.  They wear belled skirts, and their hair is long and probably elaborately dressed.  The figures are probably moving in a counterclockwise circle, two by two.  There is also a male figure in the center of the action, smaller than the women, with his genitals clearly indicated.  The figures show signs of having been repainted at different times, and later inscriptions show that the site was recognized as a sacred place in the fifth century BCE.[4]  Since most cave art is probably magical or sacred, this depiction of women moving together probably represents a danced part of a ritual.  Although some New Age writers have discussed this dance scene as representing “the dance of the  Hours”[5] or related it to other important New Age dance ideas, this is all conjecture.  There is no information on the undoubtedly complex range of associations this dance had for the people who did it. 

These representations show us that people danced, and indicate some of the reasons for dancing (a shamanic ritual, or before or after a hunt).  But they don’t show us how they danced.  They don’t show whether or not hip articulation was an element of the dance.  They don’t provide any information about whether or not SIDTA existed.  With respect to the Cogul scene, it appears that the dance involved circling in formation, which does not rule out hip articulation but is not like modern SIDTA. 

In any case, none of the Paleolithic depictions of dance is from the area of modern SIDTA that we are most concerned with. 

The human body moves in many different ways.  Some Paleolithic hunter-gatherers may have practiced solo-improvised dance based on hip and torso articulation.  But there is no direct evidence of it.

 

Ethnographic Comparison

By far the most helpful form of evidence we have about the dance of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers comes from comparison with hunting and gathering groups who live or lived in the 20th century.  Since the lifestyles of these groups are similar to those of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, we may be able to extrapolate from their customs back to human prehistory.  The environmental pressures of living so close to the edge of survival, the size and composition of the social group, and the life and work experience of the modern hunter-gatherer, may produce perspectives and practices that would also apply in the Paleolithic era. 

On the other hand, there are limitations to the ethnographic evidence. 

The first is that it is not direct evidence of the past.  No modern hunter-gatherers are hunting wooly mammoths, for example.  No modern hunter-gatherers are living in the Middle East and North Africa, the areas whose dance we are tracing here.  (Urban industry, agriculture, and nomadic pastoralism are the means of production in those areas.)  No modern hunter-gatherers are carving fat “goddess” figures from stone.  In contrast to the Paleolithic era, many modern hunter-gatherers live in relationship with horticultural or agricultural groups.  Even when modern hunter-gatherers live in environments that are very similar to those found in antiquity, we cannot be sure that the same responses to the environment would follow.  The customs of modern savannah-dwellers are not necessarily the customs of savannah-dwellers 30,000 years ago.  We can’t extrapolate that their dance is the same, either.  With ethnographic evidence, we have possible grounds for comparison, but we do not have direct knowledge. 

Another limitation is that even with direct observation of the dances of hunter-gatherers, any given anthropologist can only see so much.  For a long time, the prevalence of men in anthropology  meant that men’s lives were studied, while women’s lives were less commonly put in the forefront.  Therefore, when male anthropologists studied hunter-gatherers, they gave men the defining voice of their cultures.  Gender dynamics were often misunderstood or ignored in many anthropologists’ perspectives even through the 1970’s.  After that point, the balance begins to shift.  By the 2000’s, anthropologists have spent decades trying to find ways to describe and interpret human behavior without the prejudice of modern perspectives, and without privileging modern Western views as “right.”  Even so, women’s dances and women’s imaginative lives are often undervalued in the traditional literature of anthropology.  Especially if we are seeking a form of ancient dance that had special relevance to women’s experience – which SIDTA may sometimes have been – a we have less to go on in our extrapolations.

All the same, if we find some particular form of dance in a human culture, we can at least suppose that it might have occurred in antiquity.  If there are any hunting and gathering groups which use a dance involving hip articulation, then perhaps such dances existed in the Paleolithic.  If we can find any hunting and gathering societies which have a tradition of SIDTA, then we can argue that this form of dance might have existed among some Paleolithic hunter-gatherers.

 

The Dance of Modern Hunter-gatherers

Are there factors in the dance of modern hunter-gatherers that might apply to the ancient SIDTA area?

There are only a few groups of hunter-gatherers still in existence, but the evidence from these is not encouraging for the existence of SIDTA.  No modern hunter-gatherers perform any dances like SIDTA, despite the diversity in their dance practices.  In a recent article about “primitive” dance, the anthropologist and dance historian Joanne Kealiinohomoku comments, “The dances of these people [i.e. representative groups of hunter-gatherers] differ from one another in almost every way, except that characteristically they are performed by one or the other sex, there is not much torso movement, and the rationale for the dance is rooted in metaphysics.”[6]

What does this comparative evidence say about the likelihood of SIDTA among Paleolithic hunter-gatherers? 

The dances of modern hunter-gatherers are performed “characteristically … by one or the other sex” – by either men or women, not both.  On the other hand, SIDTA is performed almost identically by both men and women, though sometimes men dance with men and women with women at gender-separate social events. 

Hip articulation is apparently rare in the dances of “primitive” peoples, but it is essential in SIDTA.

Among modern hunter-gatherers, “the rationale for the dance is rooted in metaphysics,” that is, dance is about and concerned with the powers that cause the universe to function.  On the other hand, modern SIDTA is about celebration and self-expression.

On these three grounds, the SIDTA that we know does not seem to be related very closely to the dances of the hunter-gatherers who still exist.  That may mean it is not very much like the dances of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers either.

Kealiinohomoku does not mention one key element of SIDTA, solo improvisation.  Is it an element of primitive dance? That is much harder to determine.  In many dance situations, there will be times when people are dancing “together but individually.”  For example, in a healing “dance” of the !Kung of the Kalahari, different dancers become possessed at different times, and perform different movements.[7]  But is this really the kind of solo-improvisation found in SIDTA?  In the SIDTA we know, solo-improvisation is an individual expression of feeling.  But among hunter-gatherers, no one – at least not in any of the anthropological literature I have read – talks about dance as expressive or as conscious improvisation.  Solo improvisation, while it might occur, is apparently not a particular value of hunter-gatherers’ dances.

 

A World Without SIDTA?

As I have emphasized all along, diversity is the rule among hunting and gathering people.  But judging from Kealiinohomoku’s analysis and other sources, hunting and gathering peoples share some attitudes toward dance that reflect on the possibility of SIDTA existing in this sort of society. 

  1. Dance usually happens as something we would consider a ritual, meaning that the community uses the dance to mark a particular occasion, celebrate an event, and/or facilitate some connection between the ordinary and spiritual worlds. 
  2. Hunter-gatherers often think of dance and spiritual experience as simply integrated parts of life, rather than seeing either as a separate range of experience (“religion” or “art”). 
  3. What seems not to be as crucial to the modern hunter-gatherers’ experience in dance is the notion of dance as an individual pastime, or as a vehicle for self-expression or artistic expression.
  4. Hunter-gatherers tend to think in terms of specific dances rather than “dance” in general. Particular dances may belong to particular times of year, or particular stories, or particular kinship relationships, or particular types of occasions. 
  5. Rather than being an individual activity for individual reasons, dance is seen as something that is done in community. 
  6. Dance is socially important: it may be used to negotiate relationships between individuals, or between individuals and the group, or between individuals/the group and sacred powers. 
  7. Dance has many potential meanings.  It may be disruptive or orderly, individually inspired or a reflection of group consciousness. 

 

While numbers 1 and 5-7 could apply to belly dance as we know it, numbers 2-4 are clearly different.  The dance of modern hunter-gatherers is unlike belly dance in some of the most crucial ways.

One of the premises of this chapter was that if we found any modern hunter-gatherers doing anything like SIDTA, we could argue that SIDTA could have existed in the Paleolithic era.  But we did not find the evidence we were looking for. 

Ethnographic comparison is not proof of whether or not SIDTA existed in the SIDTA area in the Paleolithic period.  Geography may be a vital factor in the equation, and there are not any hunter-gatherers now living in the SIDTA area to provide comparisons.  It is not impossible that SIDTA dates back to the dawn of human history, perhaps in its modern geographical range.

On the other hand, we can be sure that SIDTA is not a universal primitive dance.  The diversity of modern hunter-gatherer societies makes it impossible to make sweeping statements about the dance of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers.  Any claims that belly dance is “the oldest dance” or “the earliest dance of mother earth” are pretty obviously wrong.  The fact that dance styles are so diverse in the world’s cultures makes it very unlikely that one technique of dance – hip and torso articulation – would be universally adopted by all people at any point in human history.  Our evidence shows that romantic ideas of primal, even universal, belly dance belong in the realm of myth, though they have served as an eloquent expression of the security and fulfillment many women have found in their practice of belly dance. 

The absence of an identifiable ethos of solo-improvisation or self-expression should make us wonder whether SIDTA as we know it is really possible among hunter-gatherers living in small bands in on the surface of an undiluted, numinous natural world.  It may be that there is something about the structure of societies that live this way, that makes group and world relationships, rather than individual expression, the key value of dancing. 

Because our evidence is so sketchy, we can’t rule out the possibility that SIDTA existed in the prehistoric Middle East.  But it is my belief that we should look to the urban societies that develop in the wake of agriculture for the origins of belly dance.

 

 

 

 


[1]they might share traits …  Culture and “personality” are intimately related, and stereotypes about “national character” have some grounding in culturally enforced differences in perceiving and acting in the world.  In our society, one is much more likely to encounter ethnic diversity; on the other hand, the homogenizing effect of popular culture in the West may work toward minimizing these cultural differences.

[2] It has been argued …  -----------

[3]“moving together in time”… See McNeill.

[4]later inscriptions show …   Either it was in continuous use for a very long time, or it was rediscovered later, and the dance paintings taken as an indication of its spiritual power.  Many of the scenes from the Cogul area were repainted or touched up at several different stages, this one included; I have read that the male figure was added later though not in an academic source.  The cave art of Northern Spain is usually in shallow or open shelters rather than deep in caves as is the better known cave art of France, and it shows scenes (such as this dancing scene and hunting scenes) rather than illustrating primarily animals.  Pericot 196-98, 209.

[5] Although some New Age writers …  See Stewart ______ .   When the cave was used as a sacred site later in its history, in the 5th century BCE, the dancing female figures would almost certainly have been understood as nymphs, which inhabit the Greco-Roman sacred geography in many different forms.  That does not mean that they were originally intended to be nymphs, or that the people who first painted them had an idea of nymphs in their belief system.  One interesting phenomenon in the history of long-inhabited areas is how a sense of the sacred may remain in a place, while mythology and religious practices change around it.  Cogul offers one example of this common phenomenon.

[6] The dances of these people differ … Kealiinohomoku 1998: 252.

[7] In a healing “dance” … __________________.