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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: ancient Greek statues weren’t always plain white marble. Many of these sculptures were actually painted in vivid colours. However, most of the pigments have either eroded away or been scraped off by overzealous museum curators, leaving us with just the underlying white stone.
For example, back in 2009 żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ covered research suggesting that the Parthenon temple in Athens, which nowadays is pure white, was originally , possibly with some gilding as well.
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More recently, a study published in February described an analysis of an ancient Greek funerary stele: a carved pillar, topped with a statue of a sphinx. The researchers found traces of six pigments: two kinds of blue, black, two reds and a yellow. There’s an irony here, because more recent statues like Michelangelo’s David were done in imitation of classical Greek styles – but to really mimic ancient Greek sculpture, Michelangelo would have had to get his paintbrushes out.
But what about if we go further back in time? Were prehistoric monuments originally more colourful than they are today?
Colourful tombs
Let’s go back a few thousand years before the Parthenon and look at some : that is, really big stones. Megaliths were used for thousands of years to construct monuments of all kinds: some were just a single standing stone (sometimes called a menhir), while other monuments have the stones arranged in patterns such as circles (as at ) or tables.
In a study published in September, archaeologists led by Primitiva Bueno RamĂrez at the University of Alcalá in Spain summarised research they have been doing since 2011 to document pigments on megaliths in southern Europe, especially Spain and Portugal. They used a range of techniques, from advanced photography to spectroscopy, to identify the pigments on megaliths dating from between 1000 and 6000 BC.
The basic finding is that many megaliths were coloured. The most commonly used colours, in descending order, were red, black and white.
Red pigments were used to create “geometric motifs on supports” as well as “human figures, animals, celestial bodies, and weapons”. The most common red pigments were ochre and cinnabar. The latter is a mercury compound, and the researchers note that some of the people whose remains have been found at megalithic sites apparently died of mercury poisoning – possibly because they had cinnabar tattoos. The team points to a site called Tholos de Montelirio, where people had such tattoos, and in which underground chambers had walls made of standing megaliths painted red with cinnabar.
Cinnabar was also widely , including by the Inca.
In contrast, black was often used to colour in motifs that had first been traced in red, and sometimes to make geometric shapes. In some cases charcoal was used; in other areas, manganese minerals were chosen.
White was the least used. The researchers say that might be because it doesn’t stand out as well as red and black.
In the 20th century, researchers focused on engravings as the only decoration on megaliths, the team says. However, the team’s results show that many engraved megaliths also had pigments – and some were painted but not engraved.
What stands out to me is the apparent obsession with the colour red – because this has come up before.
Scarlet pics
In early September, I wrote a story about  living in Porc-Epic cave in Ethiopia around 40,000 years ago. Porc-Epic held a huge stash of ochre – and at this point I should explain that “ochre” is an umbrella term for a bunch of different minerals that all contain iron and consequently have vivid colours, often but not always red.
As part of my research, I spoke to Rimtautas Dapschauskas at the University of Tübingen in Germany, the lead author of a 2022 review of the use of ochre in prehistoric Africa. He told me a lot that never made it into the story, because there wasn’t room, and it all relates to ochre and the colour red.
Let’s start with what  was used for. There are two main kinds of explanation: functional and cultural.
The functional explanations are that ochre was used for things like sunscreen, adhesive and tanning hides. Dapschauskas said there was some evidence for that, like “residues of compound adhesives still attached to the backside of some stone tools”.
However, for Dapschauskas “this does not explain the consistent search for fine-grained and blood-red materials”. If you just wanted a good glue, you wouldn’t care about the colour. But over and over again, prehistoric people sought out bright red minerals that were fine-grained – meaning they could be turned into a smooth paint-like paste.
It’s hard to overstate how common and long-lasting the use of was in prehistory.
Burning red
Another study published in September, led by Francesco d’Errico at the University of Bordeaux in France, looked at the ways people have decorated their bodies throughout prehistory. It began by looking at shells of gastropods (slugs and snails) found at  in South Africa. The shells were between 100,000 and 70,000 years old and seem to have been used as jewellery.
However, d’Errico and his colleagues then stepped back to view this new data in a broader context. They set out a 10-step sequence for “the culturalization of the human body” – in other words, how prehistoric people , and how the  and techniques involved developed over time.
The oldest technique was body painting: there is evidence of people doing it 500,000 years ago () and it was commonplace by 150,000 years ago. At this latter time, people began collecting single , soon supplemented by shells with natural holes that could be . Later still came the practice of making the holes in the shells themselves, and the use of .
This aligns with Dapschauskas’s timeline of ochre use. He suggests there was an “initial phase” between 500,000 and 330,000 years ago, followed by an “emergent phase” 330,000-160,000 years ago and finally a “habitual phase” from 160,000 to 40,000 years ago.
What we see in all this is a consistent and growing use of red ochre spanning half a million years of prehistory. Other forms of art and decoration seem to have come and gone, or only developed later, but people used red ochre throughout.
“Why is red so interesting for our perception?” Dapschauskas asked me, somewhat rhetorically. It can’t just be about the availability of the ochre: there are plenty of other coloured minerals.
Instead, Dapschauskas suggested the answers might be found in the study of primates and of , both of which indicate that “red really does something with our perception, with our unconscious motivation systems”.
. It’s been suggested that seeing red was important for  against a background of green foliage, or perhaps for  to the skin – like  – that signal emotional states.
Dapschauskas offered another suggestion. “Blood is red, because of the haemoglobin. And blood is a really drastic signal.” If someone is bleeding from an accident or an attack from a predator, they will bleed red. Similarly, for early hunters, red would indicate they had injured or killed their prey. “Red is a really potent signalling colour.”
These explanations are all somewhat speculative. But there’s something going on here. “If you look through the archaeological record,” Dapschauskas said, “people really, really preferred those reddish colours.” It may be that, because red stands out so much to our visual perception systems, this was one of the first colours that humans used for ritualistic purposes, or for artistic endeavours, he says.
