De verbeelding van de prehistorie. Spelen met de oertijd

Samenvatting

The imagery of prehistory. Playing with cavemen. Representations of prehistory should by definition be based on archaeological research. It is interesting to note that the translation of scientific insights into other domains reduces the variability of the archaeological record to a limited number of stereotypes. In this paper, toy representations of prehistoric people are analysed. It is clear that prehistoric man is reduced to the ‘caveman’ stereotype which includes dark hair, animalskin garb and club. It is proposed that the Flintstones comics and TV series served as the main source of inspiration for this rather uniform group of toys.