Places of art, traces of fire

Anthropomorphic figurines are one of the most discussed instances of Palaeolithic Art. This study provides an overview of such objects in the Pavlovian, an Upper Palaeolithic archaeological culture in Central Europe. The author describes the sites, their chronology and interpretations. The objects, belonging to the oldest "ceramic" objects in the world, are analysed in terms of raw material, technology, form and spatial distribution. In the second part, the author discusses three themes in the interpretative history: the question of representation and realism, the relationship between anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figurines, and the issue of the purport of the find location itself. Key notions in his discussion are the "cosmology of sharing" and the importance of boundaries. Also published as Dolní Vestonice Studies 6.