The cave and the retrospective construction of design

Historical narratives begin at a particular point in space and time, but the openings of design histories are inconsistent in this respect. While industrial design histories tend to begin with European industrialization in the 18th or early 19th centuries, interior design and graphic design histories each claim the Paleolithic caves in Southern France and Spain as their mythical birthplace: Altamira, Lascaux and/or Chauvet are used as a conventional starting point in standard textbook narratives. This paper analyses such conventional narratives that have retrospectively constructed the Paleolithic cave as a creative or designed artefact. While we know nothing about the creators of the mythical cave, our writing and re-writing constructs and re-constructs the cave in order to reinforce existing discourses about design and its origins.