How can a body of visual images without any accompanying texts or words possibly be understood? In addressing some of the issues in the interpretation and understandings of the ‘art’ of Ice Age or Paleolithic Europe, we face a conundrum different from other corpuses of visual imagery. In a non-literate, mobile hunting—gathering society such as it was some 20,000 years ago, the images may have had more, not less, cultural significance even if the cave art was not likely to have been seen by many. Furthermore, in our attempts to read the images, the modern representations of them in photos and drawings, and the very selection of which images to depict in books and other media play a more crucial role in our interpretations than do the original images that are not easy to access. This article addresses the ironies of images without words, images that have profound status as evidence over time and space despite the fact that so many archaeologists have not taken them seriously.
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