Rebecca Farbstein graduated with highest honors from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in art history and archaeology, and earned an M.Phil and PhD in archaeology from the University of Cambridge (St. John’s College). Her interdisciplinary education and interests inform her research, which bridges the fields of art history, archaeology, and anthropology to explore the way prehistoric artists made some of the world’s earliest art. This research investigates fundamental questions about the origins of symbolism and the ways technological innovation and creativity intersected in the production of some of the world’s most ancient art.  Her research develops a technological and material-based methodology that reconstructs the processes that transform a raw material from its found form into a piece of art. This methodology involves visual assessment of the objects, experimentation with the raw materials, and contextual analysis of other finds and raw materials found at study sites. She evaluates all sequences of production at each location to trace the prevalence of these manufacturing processes. This contextual and comparative approach allows her to distinguish previously overlooked local social and technological preferences from more widespread, shared practices. For her PhD, she studied portable art and figurines from sites in Central Europe that date to between 29-24,000 years before present.  Through this new methodology, she was able to discern differences between artistic traditions at sites usually discussed as culturally related, suggesting more variability and diversity of social practice and art production choices than has previously been noted.

As the Caroline Villers Research Fellow at The Courtauld, she will use this methodology to study a new collection of Palaeolithic art, focusing on approximately400 objects curated at the British Museum. These figurines were excavated from sites in southwest France, Switzerland and England, which date to between 17-11,000 years before present. The art objects were made in a wide range of raw materials including mammoth ivory, antler, animal bone and soft stones.  This assemblage offers the opportunity to study the convergence of technique and appearance in art found in different contexts and made in distinct raw materials.  The expected outcomes of this research include publications and presentations at both international conferences and events hosted by The Courtauld Institute and the Research Forum.