The term portable art refers to objects carved during the Upper Paleolithic period (40,000-20,000 years ago) of prehistory that can be moved, in contrast to cave art.
Traditionally, Upper Paleolithic art is divided into categories--parietal (or cave) art, and including the paintings at Lascaux and Altamira, and mobiliary (or portable art), meaning art that can be carried, such as the famous Venus figurines.
Portable art from the Upper Paleolithic generally consists of objects carved from stone, bone, or antler, and they take a wide variety of forms. Small, three dimensional objects such as the widely known Venus figurines, carved animal bone tools, and two dimensional relief carvings are all forms of portable art.
There is some argument to made about the historical subtext of the use of the terms 'portable art' and 'cave art', that in the 19th century there was serious doubt about the antiquity of cave art. The 'crude' portable art was accepted as a craft; but the cave paintings were seen as 'high art', and thus not possibly as old as the portable art. But, as Paul Bahn has said (but far more elegantly than this), it is futile to try to encompass 25,000 years of art into simple categories.
Sources
See the glossary entry for Cave Art for comparison.
Abadía Moro, Oscar and Manuel R. González Morales 2004 Towards a genealogy of the concept of "paleolithic mobiliary art". Journal of Anthropological Research 60(3):321-339.
Bahn, Paul G. 1995 New developments in Pleistocene art. Evolutionary Anthropology 4(6):204-215.
This glossary entry is part of the Dictionary of Archaeology. Any mistakes are the responsibility of Kris Hirst.
