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Paddox Primary School

PaddoxPrimary School

All Hands on Deck

Time to roll our sleeves up and find out if Stone Age cave art can be recreated with modern materials.

We all like to make our mark, to leave some sign that we've been here. The Stone Age artists who put their hands on the walls of caves across the planet could never have imagined that they would still prove inspirational 30,000 years later.

It's still unclear how the original prints were made, but Year 3 followed one experimental archaeology line of enquiry: that ground pigments (like powder paints) were crushed fine enough to be blown through a tube (a hollowed out bone or reed; in our case, a plastic straw!) Going through the bodily process of grinding charcoal or chalk with sticks and stones helps to put us in the place of our ancestors, to solve problems like they did (how to work in windy conditions...) It also reminds us that our art room powder paints - yellow ochres and burnt umbers - have a natural source, rather than just being squirted from a bottle.