Archaeology Brown Bag Lecture Series

What is art? How do we know when we see it? For millennia, scholars have contemplated the nature of aesthetic experience—and more recently neuroscientists have begun to explain how we experience and process art in the brain. A central question is understanding when, in our evolution, did we begin to appreciate beauty? And when did we first create something that could be considered “art”. Although most people envision the caves of Upper Paleolithic Europe (ca. 40,000 BP) as the earliest...