Oil lamp

The oil lamp is fire stored in fat—a technology that separated illumination from combustion bulk. While torches and campfires consumed their fuel rapidly and demanded constant feeding, oil lamps burned slowly for hours on a few grams of animal fat. This efficiency transformed humanity's relationship with darkness, making caves habitable, enabling nighttime work, and extending the usable day.

The adjacent possible for oil lamps required three converging elements: container technology to hold liquid fuel, wick material to conduct it, and animal fat surplus to burn. The Paleolithic cave painters at Lascaux around 15,000 BCE had all three. Stone vessels could be hollowed; plant fiber or animal hair served as wicks; and the hunting economy provided abundant animal fat as a byproduct of meat processing.

The cave art context reveals the lamp's purpose. Lascaux's painted chambers lie far from natural light; the artists worked in absolute darkness broken only by their own flames. The lamps found alongside the paintings—hollowed stones stained with combustion residue—show how that light was produced. Cave art was impossible without portable artificial illumination.

Oil lamp design remained remarkably stable across millennia. The basic components—vessel, wick, fuel—varied in materials but not in function. Stone gave way to ceramic in the Neolithic; animal fat was supplemented by plant oils; wick materials improved. But the technology that lit Lascaux would be immediately recognizable to a Roman or a medieval peasant.

The lamp also restructured time. Before artificial lighting, darkness ended activity; fires could illuminate but not portably or efficiently. Lamps made indoor work possible after sunset, effectively lengthening productive hours. This time expansion—invisible in the archaeological record but implied by the technology—may have been as significant as the lamp's role in art and ritual.