Take this exhibition: A Settlement in colonial New Mexico was in effect a transplantation, a new version of the order that had prevailed in colonial Mexico and Spain. It was not the work of footloose individuals in search of adventures or wealth, but of small, homogeneous groups of simple people who brought with them their religion, their family ties, their ways of building and working and farming.  J.B. Jackson, A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time. New Haven, CT., 1994.

the paleolithic peoples: M. Raphael, Prehistoric Cave Paintings. New York, 1945.

their environment:"(M.) Lorblanchet's recent bid to re-create one of the most important Ice Age images in Europe was an affair of the heart as much as the head. 'I tried to abandon my skin of a modern citizen, tried to experience the feeling of the artist, to enter the dialogue between the rock and the man,' he explains. Every day for a week in the fall of 1990 he drove the 20 miles from his home in the medieval village of Cajare into the hills above the river Lot. There, in a small, practically inaccessible cave, he transformed himself into an Upper Paleolithic painter. And not just any Upper Paleolithic painter, but the one who 18,400 years ago crafted the dotted horses inside the famous cave of Pech Merle. Using the spitting techniques he had learned from Australian aboriginal rock artists, Lorblanchet said, 'My intention had been to use manganese dioxide, as the Pech Merle painter did...but I was advised that manganese is somewhat toxic, so I used wood charcoal instead.'" R. Lewin, "Paleolithic Paint Job." Discover, July. 1993.

this property: L. Watson,The Nature of Things. Rochester,VT.,1992.

wooden bench:

The oldest: M. Simons, "Stone Age Art Shows Penguins At Mediterranean." The New York Times. 20 October 1992. Leroi-Gourhan proposes that fingers were folded back to appear as if missing, a "deliberate arrangement, that suggests there was a manual code exhibited like that which is still used for the hunt by the Bushmen." A. Leroy-Gorin, "The Hands of Argas: Toward a General Study." October 37 (1986)
    "It is reported that the walls of every native-built house in Jerusalem are decorated by prints of the hand, in order to avert the evil eye. A similar custom is practiced by the Moors generally, and especially the Arabs of Kairwan, who apply red hand prints to the lintels and supports of buildings as talismans to drive away evil. There is a record, from Tunis, of a Jewish practice of placing the imprint of a bleeding hand upon the walls of each floor of a building. Among the Garos, of Assam, white hand marks form a part of the rice-harvest ceremony. Hand prints are found on the Kei Islands. Similar negative prints of hands are reported from Melville Island as well as pipe-clay drawings on bark (eucalyptus) within native huts." V.J. Smith, The Human Hand in Primitive Art. Austin, TX., 1925.

A kind of code: "Other features of the iconography have pretty clear developmental significance for the emergence of writing. Many depictively opaque icons that did not contribute pictorially to scenes were evidently used to encode particular concepts or associations. These icons appear in all media and styles of presentation. The existence of conceptually-specific graphic units with no direct depictive interpretation may have stimulated or supported other developments that are virtually restricted to ceremonial celts, all involving the depiction of parts or accouterments of a human figure without depicting the figure itself." J.S. Justeson, and P. Mathews, "Evolutionary Trends in Mesoamerican Hieroglyphic Writing." Visible Language, Winter. 1990.