Chapter 1

Art? What is art?

Try describing it to a stone-age man or woman, and you will get a blank look, for they tend to think in terms of things – people, objects, flora and fauna, and not imaginary concepts like art, as a generalisation. However, show them what you think can be classed as art and you will get a knowing look in response, meaning: of course we know that sort of thing: it is just putting what you can see in your mind into the form of a picture or what you know resides inside a stone or a chunk of wood and needs to be revealed.

Art for art’s sake; conveying emotions or beauty in a pictorial style, impacting the psyche with unusual lines, colours, and symmetries that had not struck you before; that is art as viewed by the 21st century mind. It is a new concept for this stone-age culture.

Our hero, lost in a stone-age society in what appeared to be Earth, ‘but not as we know it’, is an involuntary time traveller stuck for life in a time not of his choosing. When he arrived, his memory was almost completely blank, and only very slowly did his memories return. This appeared to be a side-effect of the time travel equipment; a side-effect unknown to the neonazi group who had hijacked ithe machine and its operators in an attempt to change their present to their own liking.

However they had chosen him to be their progenitor, he had been infused with nanotechnology to enable translation of local tongues, and medical protection against unwanted diseases. As he discovered later, they had sent separately a storehouse of weapons and equipment for future survival, once he had gained the first steps in the survival game.

Before he even became aware that he possessed such training, he had to use many of the talents he had learned in the UK’s SAS regiment, facing wild animals and dangerous humans. In the course of his adventures, he met and collected several young women as mates under the existing traditions of the local tribes. He knew his first name was John, and later accepted that his surname was Hunter, and that it was appropriate.

Discovering that there was no particular way of starting a tribe, he founded his own tribe, then established friendly contact with a neighbouring tribe. His ability to understand the locals, and for them to understand him, failed to come to his conscious notice for a while; it just seemed natural, but it wasn’t.

This Earth had a few oddities that implied it was not the true precursor to the 21st century he had been despatched from to do his mysterious masters bidding: unusual fauna; a mysterious seafaring civilisation able to build ocean-going wooden cargo vessels that they sold to merchants; and on the land where he was deposited, a semi-organised invading army from the south that brought diseases to the locals, making conquest easier for the invaders.

He found himself acting as a one-man army defending local tribes from invasion. He used guile, misdirection and fake intelligence reports to deter the invaders by persuading them that another army was coming to oppose them. He also used his tribe to apply hit-and-run tactics in the night. This at a minimum stopped the advance of the invaders, many of whom were ill-trained.

Life in this era was generally more complicated and organised than he expected, and his tribe had to devise new trade products to swap with other tribes for materials they needed for their original trades: manufacturing of soap and mocassins. Art was to be his latest promotion of new products, and his tribe would tell him what they saw as possible art productions.

The idea of a representation of the Earth Mother went down a storm. Everyone had an idea of what she looked like, but no two persons had the same thoughts. This was the occasion when John saw that he could steer the art in specific directions. He asked if the Earth Mother was skinny or ... rotund? They were unclear about the meaning of that word. He tried again: Well-fed? Fertile? He wanted to avoid the words ‘fat’ or ‘tubby’, but that was the way ancient goddess artwork seemed to go in his own past. He assumed the very bulky pregnant shape was the symbol of fertility; the pregnant matron visualised to the extreme for a goddess.

Just as he had expected, they all saw her us a pregnant matronly figure, with large breasts and an overly large body. All he had to do was suggest they make an image that matched their vision. Not a single person saw the Earth Mother as an erotic symbol of any kind, even though they all viewed her as being naked. Probably it was the idea that if you have a pregnant body, flaunt it as a powerful symbol of future expansion!

When he talked to his tribe about natural scenes of landscape, or a single tree, the reception was, ‘Why’? Why would you want a picture of a tree, as you can see a tree close by, simply by looking. The same went for landscapes: such visions were all around you as you looked out of your hut. He was forced to accept that if you were from a society that lived in a town or city, a natural landscape eventually became something special. People tried to recreate it in parks and gardens, remoulding the landscape in miniature. Rural tribesfolk saw it differently.

His memory reminded him that the idea of a landscape as something beautiful was late in arriving in England, when at last poets and prose writers wrote about it in glowing terms as a desirable sight. Urban living and industrialisation had to happen before the concept of rural scenery as desirable could develop. In the native society here, it was a simple background to life.

Portraiture was an old concept, because leaders always wanted to be envisaged as important, and a painting or bust was an accolade worth having, even if you had to commission an artist to do the deed for you. Every mansion – a fancy hut in this era - had to have portraits of their owner and his family on display, to show how important or special they were; sometimes just to show they had enough in assets to have a portrait painted! If you had no huts with decent walls, you used a cave and made it a sacred site that only the chosen could visit to see the paintings.

Back in his own world, oil portraits remained a bragging point up until photography was invented, when everyone and his neighbour could go to a photographer’s studio and get a picture made with light and a magic machine; even though it was black and white, or even tinted sepia to make it appear fashionably antique.

Anyway, for the present stone age society, portraits were unlikely to be popular sellers except for a few vain tribal chiefs who might want a portrait painted on wood and hung up on an interior wall. Generic representations of humans were equally a specialist interest for the time being, except as part of a story of battle or bravery.

Illustrations of military men, in John’s memory, were popular, but mostly those of a great leader, preferably astride a rearing war horse, though John had not seen any horse in this time and place. Less warlike pictures of warriors standing ready for battle usually displayed their fighting equipment and uniform. Here there was neither a uniform nor much of a choice in weapons; it was bow and arrow or spear/lance; and everyone seemed to have a knife of some kind.

Pictures of ships in his own time always seemed to go down well with the seafaring community for some reason; perhaps the ship was something different from the restless sea that surrounded them like an unseen or unfixed landscape, with only land appearing in the distance.

Many of the most revered paintings and sculptures that he could recall were of religious subjects, but in this era the only religious subject was the Earth Mother deity that everyone, friend or foe, seemed to view as their object of reverence. There was no sign of multiple gods here; the concept did not appear to have caught on, if it had even been considered worthwhile. They were all happy with the Earth Mother.

For the present, it looked to John that as far as being commercially viable the best bet was a scupture of the Earth Mother in a portable size, capable of being carried around as evidence of your piety, that could be placed in your abode as a sign of worship. That might be a best seller of the future art trade.

Whittling wood into an image of the Earth Mother was probably central to any effigy not of stone, and simple to manufacture, but wooden models of boats might be attractive to the right market. As he thought about markets, it occurred to him that children’s toys were a perennial market, for wooden toys got damaged and broken in use, and there was always another generation coming along, looking for something to play with.

Dolls could be an attractive sales item if made with a talented hand, allowing small girls to pretend they were mothers. The good aspect about this fixation on dolls is that they learned many of the essential motherly traits by watching their own mothers and applying the learning to the dolls.

For small boys, toy weapons were always the thing of most interest in his own memory, stimulated by visions of male warfare in the past, where scenes could be depicted in images or even words for those who were taught to read.

Wheeled vehicles also interested boys, with chariots at the earliest level, rising to spaceships for the 20th century youngsters. Here the wheel was just starting, so would not likely yet to be of interest to boys; unless he could get the adults and children to view the wheel as a tool to be developed into something more.

Kids used to have fun with hoops that they could propel along a track or roadway. As he recalled, iron hoops often came with a solid whip-like stick impeller to speed up the hoop and prevent it falling over. The stick ended in a curved piece used for steering the hoop to make it go in the right direction once you had it moving well. Unfortunately iron was not yet a metal in use in this time period.

The next step up from a simple hoop was the bicycle, but that was a more complicated mechanism to manufacture; not one that he could expect to see here for many years. Perhaps the children could be persuaded to make their own carts with smaller wheels and a low centre of gravity to keep the vehicle stable. The usual four-wheeled toy cart might start out as a tricycle effort, though tricyles, despite their maneuverability, did not possess the inherent stability of the four-wheeled cart. The four-wheeled contraption had to have the front pair of wheels steerable to be effective. Good design was important, even in toys.

There was a fine distinction between art and design. A well-designed artifact could be as attractive as a piece of artwork. An iron or bronze sword with smooth curves and perfectly balanced centre of gravity was a beautiful tool as well as an effective weapon.

The sleek lines of a design for a proposed supersonic fighter, shown in model form to the US army in 1939, made no impact whatsoever on the military, for they saw no need for an expensive but very fast fighter plane. That remained the case until their bombers started being shot down by German fast jet fighters near the end of World War Two.

Frank Whittle had a similar problem in the UK, when he wrote a thesis at the RAF College in 1928, on the possibility of jet propulsion. The Air Ministry riduled it as impractical. The Germans had another inventor who gave them their own plans for jet propulsion in 1932, with the first practical jet engine operational in 1939, and they had a jet-powered plane in service by 1942, and later a jet fighter in 1945, though Italy had a jet fighter in the air by 1940. Whittle’s engine design finally was given UK government support, and the Gloster Meteor jet fighter got into production in 1944, in time to combat the German V1 flying bombs.

This all showed that inventing a new device does not guarantee its implementation into production. It needs government backing, unless it has commercial potential. This was why John Hunter was now pushing for new products to be designed and made for his tribe; products that had commercial potential for the future.

“John?” a voice broke into his reverie. “Any more instructions for the exploring teams?” Chief Numa asked him. He remembered that they were sending teams out to find a replacement site for the tribe to live as it expanded its numbers.

“No, I don’t think so,” he replied. “They know what they are looking for, in terms of water, slope, pasturage, forestry resources and so on. You can be too explicit and so miss useful sites. Let them decided whether a site fits our needs and suggest it. I would rather have two or three possible options to choose from, than only one that they think is acceptable to you.”

“Right. I shall send them off. They each have a direction and approximate area to look over, so that they shouldn’t overlap. Do you want to come and show your confidence in them?”

“No. You can do that, my love. Just assure them that I have given you my backing to choose the best option that they can find.”

Chief Numa went to despatch the teams on their task. It was only after she had left him that he remembered what he wanted to ask her, and it wasn’t about when her baby was due. It was when she expected Fergo, the messenger-cum-artist, to return from the fisher village with examples of his artwork.

She didn’t think it was planned for today, but John was unclear whether the lad would simply turn up when the next delivery of fish would be made, or whether he would be making a special trip with a collection of his works.

Noma, younger sister of Chief Numa, with a similar pregnancy bulge, came to ask him if he was going to stop building huts here.

“Not yet, Noma. We will always need some people living here, to protect the cave and its contents in the dark section. These are too valuable, as well as dangerous, to allow others to have access to them. We will need a protective guard team, so our guards can use the new huts as a base outside of the cave, and we can build a barricade inside the cave near the entrance; the guards can use that as a fall-back position if they face a larger force.”

“Okay. We have asked both Makers about how to construct houses at a new site without using the panels from the store in the cave, as these are limited in quantity. They say we can split logs lengthways, up to about two hands width, then link them together in the vertical orientation with the flat part to the inside. We can place a strap at the top and the bottom on the inside, and screw the strap to the split logs to make a new panel. Brando thinks we can seal the joints between uprights with a thin strip of wood screwed or nailed on both sides of the join.”

“Seems sensible to me. The more we can go with local solutions, the better, as a far as I am concerned,” John voiced his opinion.

Noma went on, “Raka says she and Brando came upwith an idea for the base of the house walls, to stop them rotting by sitting in wet conditions. The idea they are kicking around is for the wall of the building to sit in a raised mound of rough gravel, so that water can drain through the gravel to a lower level and thence into some sort of gravel-filled drain. The outer, sloped, part of the gravel ridge would be covered by a layer of hard-packed clay that would be effectively water-repellent. That way, almost all rainwater would run down the wall and out over the clay. Any seepage would drain away through the gravel, and so there would be no rot in the wood. Does that seem reasonable to you, husband?”

“That sounds an excellent proposal, Noma. Tell Raka that it has my approval, but I still feel that stakes next to the wall should be kept in the design to offer long-term support, in the case of severe storms.”

“I’ll pass that notion on to Brando, John.”

The exploration teams spent several days looking for viable new tribal sites, and in the meantime Fergo, the delivery man and messenger from the fisher village, came back dragging a new sled by a long pole handle. The sled had higher sides than the previous one, better able to hold the cool basket of fish and a surrounding lower packing, comprised of artwork wrapped in large leaves to protect the items from damage on the way.

He walked direct to the cooking area, for the women in charge to examine the fish and decide which would be best used first, but once he had hoisted the basket out of the sled, he pulled the sled over to where John and the ladies who had talked of art were now standing.

“Chief?” he asked of Numa. “You wanted to see what I make, that fits your description of ... art?”

“Oh, yes. You are the fisher artist! Do let me see what you have.”

Fergo bent down and brought out the first parcel with a look of pride in his eyes. He unwrapped it, and presented the wooden fish to Chief Numa. She stared at what was in his hands.

She gasped, “It is leaping out of the water!”

“Yes, That is the idea; a fish jumping out of the water. It happens from time to time. If a fish jumps out and lands in your boat, it is regarded as a bad omen, and the fishermen return to land. You might otherwise meet with a bad end at sea. Fortunately most jumping fish fall back into the water, so no bad omen involved.”

Numa glowered, “You don’t really believe that about omens, do you? It is sheer superstition.”

Fergo was unfazed. “You used to believe that a woman who was away from her tribe and is caught by a man, belongs to him, didn’t you?”

“Well, yes, but that is different. It was merely a tribal tradition; not a superstition.”

“So what is the difference, Chief Numa? Can you tell me?”

“You are a cheeky young man, Fergo. It is lucky for you that we are not your tribe, or you would be in trouble. John? Describe the difference between superstition and tradition?” She turned to her husband for an answer. He smiled at the buck being passed to him.

“The difference? Well, a tradition is what a tribe has accepted should happen, and a superstition is what your tribe thinks will happen. Other than that, they are much the same: no evidence for the truth of either one.”

Numa thought this over, and made up her mind.

“Fergo, your bad omen is a combination of superstition and tradition; your fishermen go home when a fish jumps in, expecting that way to prevent the bad thing happening. It is therefore a tradition and a superstition at the same time. Discussion over; let’s look at your fish. It appears to be made from a curved shell.”

She ran her hands over the small sculpture, admiring it. “This is beautiful, Fergo. How long did it take you to carve it?”

“Getting the idea for the scene took some time; finding a shell with the right curves to it took even longer; then carving it took a few hours. It took me in total several days. Which is it you want to know?”

“Your answer solves the problem I was thinking about: calculating the effort it took to make it, and so measure its worth in exchange terms. It is not just the actual time making it, it is the time from visualising what you want to produce to actually producing it; much longer. Did you also colour it yourself?”

“Yes and no. Some of the colour - the shiny parts – are natural; they come with the shell, and are incorporated into the design. I simply added some highlights to show the eyes and gills, the shape and depth of the mouth and the lines on the fins. It was fun to work that out.”

John leaned in to take the fish from Numa, who reluctantly released it. “You will note, Numa, if an artwork is good, you want to get the pleasure of handling it. May I look it over?”

Numa hungrily watched as John carefully examined the small but exquisite sculpture.

“A lovely work of art, Fergo,” he commented. “This is the point where you have to decide to hang on to it, or release it for someone to purchase it.”

Fergo told him, “I made this a year back, so I am easy with it now going to someone else who will get a thrill out of looking at it and want to keep it.”

“Good. What else have you brought for us to see, Fergo?”

He gradually unwrapped and displayed each of his other carvings, until seven or eight stood at their feet. They were of various sizes, but all carved with love of the subject, the material and the end result. John invited Vickie, Sheila and Jean to come and view the art objects. They ambled over quite nonchalantly, but perked up at the sight of the marine carvings.

“Wow! These are great! Who did them?” said Vickie.

“Fergo carved them all, Vickie,” said Numa, pointing towards the young man.

“Beautiful work, Fergo,” Vickie told him. “You will have a career as an artist, I think.”

Sheila and Jean followed her in admiring the objects. Sheila asked him, “Do you do all the colouring yourself?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he admitted. “You like the colours?”

“I do. I know a little about pigments – the materials that make the colours. If you are short of a special colour, I may be able to help you out.”

Fergo explained, “My colours are almost all based on blessings from the sea. Certain shells release certain colours when the animal inside is crushed, like a dark red. I get green from plants that stain the hands when you squeeze them. I found that if you heat a lot of these plants with water, the water becomes green; and longer you boil them, the darker the green.”

Sheila pointed out to him, “We know of a rare green stone we called malachite. If you can find it, you can grind the green stuff to a fine powder, and with a little oil make a vivid green pigment, one that stays permanent in use.

There is also a bush that makes a blue colour we know as indigo. The pulverised leaves are the source material, but extracting the pigment is not easy according to my information. It needs a rare form of clay to be incorporated into the mix. Someone, somewhere, may have heard of this bush and the clay. It should be worth asking around.”

Fergo was interested. “Can I come back some time and talk with you about colours, ma’am?”

“Certainly. I don’t have all the answers, but I might be able to steer you in the right direction for you to make your own colours. My own expertise is in plants and their uses; not really on dyes and pigments.”

Fergo had a suggestion. “If I find things that might make a pigment, can I come to you for expert advice? You seem to know a lot about a lot!”

“I have no objections to that, Fergo. My ideal is to be useful to our tribe, and to other tribes too.”

Chief Numa took over. “Fergo, is it all right with you if you leave these artworks with us to trade with? I will guarantee that at least half of what we can get in exchange for them will come to you.”

“I can accept that, Chief. My village has no interest in obtaining my makings. For some reason they don’t view such carvings as something to be cherished or coveted.”

“That will change, Fergo, if our idea of artwork trading proves to be viable. We have to show other tribes that attractive makings are worthwhile and desirable objects. I believe we can do that.”

Fergo asked, “Do you want messengers to visit the tribes to tell them about your art for trade?”

“It is too early to do that, Fergo. We must collect enough trade items to be able to cater for all tastes. It is no use getting people to call, if we have nothing to show that is of interest to them. Once we are happy that we have a trading stock of artworks, then we can publicise what we have.”

Fergo was disappointed but accepted that nothing would be happening for a while, picked up the trade items given in exchange for the fish, and left for home.

Vickie spoke to Numa, “This really pushes us to get started on gathering artworks for trading. It also reminded me that we need to identify the artist of each piece, so that they can be rewarded for their work, if it gets traded. How about a mark on the base of the object?”

“Hmm ... that would work for scuptures, but how about images on wood, or something woven into a picture?”

“That is easy, Numa. For a picture, the artist includes his or her name within the image for identification.”