This study presents and analyses dancing activities
in prehistoric Europe. This subject covers such a vast
geographical area and large span of time, that we
must limit our discussion to a number of case studies
in order to demonstrate the types of evidence
that we have on this very elusive aspect of human
behaviour. Researching the dance of past societies is
usually limited to historical periods, and relies on
written sources or graphic representations of dancing.
The history of dance in the ancient world has
focused mainly on drawings on Greek pottery of the
mid-first millennium BC. Some attention has been
devoted to the description of dancing in Pharaonic
Egyptian (the second and third millennia BC). In my
previous work, I enlarged the historical perspective
of dance to include the Early Neolithic period in the
Near East, up to c. 9000 BC. Recently, however, it
can be shown that the history of dance can be started
as early as the first appearance of modern humans
in Europe, nearly 40 000 years ago.
Ancient human dance is a very neglected topic of
study. Seldom can one find articles dealing with
dance, while books are almost non-existent. The
study of dance by archaeologists is challenging for
two main reasons:
❶ Dancing activity does not leave visible remains,
so the chances of finding foot-prints in a circle, or a
group of human skeletons trapped and buried during
a dance are minimal. Until relevant data become
available, we are dealing with a very fragmented record.
❷ Modern archaeological and anthropological research
evolved in western civilization, which is dominated
by a Christian point of view. Unlike most
other religions, its attitude to dance is negative. In
the New Testament, the term is mentioned only
once, in the extremely dramatic dance of Salome,
which concluded with the beheading of John the
Baptist (Mark 6, 21–26). In contrast, the Old Testament
described dancing dozens of times, using ten
different verbs (Gruber 1981). Indeed, dance is not
part of any official Christian liturgy. The unawareness
of western scholarship of the importance o