Ochre: An Ancient and Powerful Color

 Humans have been engaging in art for a long, long time. One of the earliest colors that these artists used is a vibrant red called ochre. Ancient people used it for painting walls, and possibly their skin and clothes. The fact that they often covered burials with ochre suggests they may have believed it to have magical properties.

Marco Almbauer, CC BY-SA 3.0 
<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>,
via Wikimedia Commons

Ochre (pronounced OAK-er) is a soft, clay-like rock that is pigmented by hematite, a reddish mineral that contains oxidized iron. It can be ground and mixed with water to make a paint. Since ochre is a mineral, it doesn’t fade or decay with time, allowing its vibrant color to last over the millennia. 

The use of ochre is even older than man. A Homo erectus site in Kenya called GnJh-03 provides the earliest evidence of ancient humans using ochre. Archaeologists found about 70 pieces of ochre weighing about 11 pounds at this site, which dates to about 285,000 years ago.

At an early Neanderthal site in the Netherlands called Maastricht-Belvédère, archaeologists excavated small concentrates of ochre, which they believe was powdered and mixed it with water so that they could paint their skin or clothing.

La Pasiega, a cave in northern Spain, has ochre paintings, including this one of a horse. The paintings are estimated to date to at least 64,000 years ago and it is believed they were created by Neanderthals. Lawrence Straus, a distinguished professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of New Mexico disagrees with both the dating and the attribution of the paintings, arguing that Neanderthals might have used ochre to make non-representational paintings, such as lines and dots, but that it's debatable whether they made more complex cave paintings, such as illustrations of animals or human figures.

Gobierno de Cantabria, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 

Vincent Mourre / Inrap, CC BY-SA 3.0
via Wikimedia Commons

Blombos Cave, in South Africa shows some of the earliest uses of ochre by modern humans. A small rock flake has a red ochre hashtag on it that was probably painted about 73,000 years ago.

Ancient use of ochre is widespread, and is documented in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Russia and Australia. When people crossed over the Bering Strait land bridge from Siberia and East Asia to the Americas, it appears they brought ochre with them. Once they were here, they continued to mine the soft stone. Powars II, a site in the southern Rocky Mountains of Wyoming, was first mined about 12,800 years ago. It is the only one of the five red- ochre quarries discovered in the Americas that is north of Mesoamerica. 

Ochre was not only used for painting caves. One grave found in Southern Wales, in the United Kingdom, in 1823 had a skeleton that had so much ochre on it that archaeologists speculated that the skeleton must be the remains of an indecent, scarlet woman. It turns out that they were very wrong, and that the famous Red Lady of Paviland is actually the burial of a young man who lived during the Paleolithic about 33,000 years ago.  An Alaskan burial of two infants covered in ochre dates to about 11,500 years ago.

Ochre may have had practical applications as well. Some archaeologists argue that it was as a sunscreen and to keep insects off the skin. 

Some archaeologists believe that because of its color, red ochre is a symbol of blood and was used ceremonially for hunting success. Others think it was a symbol of life and fertility. Even today, the color red brings up strong emotions. When someone says they are seeing red, it means they are very angry. Red hearts are symbols of love. It’s no wonder that ochre has continued to be used as a pigment throughout antiquity, medieval times, the Renaissance, and continues to be used today.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is an author of historical and contemporary fiction for adults 

and middle grade readers. Her novel, The Last Song of the Swan is a dual timeline story set in the modern Southwest and in what is now Denmark, during the late Ice Age, when Neanderthals and Modern Humans both lived in the area. This spring, In the Shadow of Sunrise will be published. It is a story about a young man ready to go through the ceremonies that will prove him a man, and it's set in the Southwest 11,000 years ago, during the Folsom Period. Both books feature the use of ochre in paintings, burials, and hunting ceremonies.