Portable art

While it is the rounded female statuettes, dubbed venus figurines, that have garnered the most attention, sculpted objects also featured more "normal" human depictions, as well as that of animals.

The statuettes and carvings were done using flint tools in a wide variety of materials, ranging from their simple inception as terracottas, to limestone, sandstone, ivory, stealite, coal, jet, and even amber.

The vast span of time, as long as 40,000 years in some cases, separating the creation of portable art and its subsequent analysis poses a great problem in dating the works.

In many cases, however, even stratigraphical dating is impossible, due to the disregard early archaeologists gave when excavating the caves or other sites portable art were discovered in.

The destruction of a datable stratigraphy also commonly occurred as a result from ransacking and illegal digs focused not on the study of the material they discovered, but on its re-sale value.

Also posing a difficulty to stratigraphical analysis is the possibility that the time of an object's creation and final deposit can vary greatly.

Through the migration of prehistoric man, it is possible that the final resting place of an object is hundreds or even thousands of miles from the point of its original creation.

[citation needed] Though difficult, dating portable objects provides an important link in building a chronology of the art, and thus evolution of prehistoric man.