Art and Environment

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Nash
Keyword(s):  
Rock Art ◽  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
Spatial Context ◽  
Rock Surface ◽  
The World ◽  
Surrounding Landscape

When telling stories through rock art, the artist formed an intimate relationship with the audience through the act of conveying such stories. Ethnographic evidence in many parts of the world suggests that the artist is merely a device through which stories are transmitted from rock surface to audience, whereby the artist becomes an intermediary within the act of performance through the medium of the brush, chisel, and finger, thus creating a theatre of performance. During this performance, the artist used many devices to either conceal or promote the narrative; one of the props used within this performance would have been the panel on which the art was performed, placing figures into spatial context and observing the rules of grammar. This chapter explores how early artists selected and used various rock surfaces, utilizing the rock face’s colour, texture, placement, and natural topography to mimic the surrounding landscape.

Travelling Through the Rock to the Otherworld: The Shamanic ‘Grammar of Mind’ Within the Rock Art of Siberia

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 413-432
Author(s):  
Andrzej Rozwadowski
Keyword(s):  
Rock Art ◽  
The Other ◽  
Rock Surface ◽  
Upper Palaeolithic ◽  
The World ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Universal Nature ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Cave Art

One of the aspects of the relationship between rock art and shamanism, which has been supposed to be of a universal nature, inspired by trance experience, concerns the intentional integration of the images with rock. Rock surface therefore has been interpreted, in numerous shamanic rock-art contexts, as a veil beyond which the otherworld could be encountered. Such an idea was originally proposed in southern Africa, then within Upper Palaeolithic cave art and also other rock-art traditions in diverse parts of the world. This paper for the first time discusses the relevance of this observation from the perspective of unquestionable shamanic culture in Siberia. It shows that the idea of the otherworld to be found on the other side of the rock actually is a widespread motif of shamanic beliefs in Siberia, and that variants of this belief provide a new mode of insight into understanding the semantics of Siberian rock art. Siberian data therefore support previous hypotheses of the shamanic nature of associating rock images with rock surface.

Rock Art Modification and its Ritualized and Relational Contexts

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liam M. Brady ◽  
R. G. Gunn ◽  
Joakim Goldhahn
Keyword(s):  
Rock Art ◽  
Ritual Practice ◽  
Relational Networks ◽  
Modification Process ◽  
The World ◽  
Surrounding Landscape ◽  
Relational Qualities ◽  
Relational Contexts

Australia has some of the most complex and extensive examples of modified rock art (e.g., superimposed, re-painted, re-drawn, re-pecked) in the world. Typically used to document style-based chronological sequences and address questions of meaning and intention, less well known are the relational networks within which these ritual modification practices are embedded. In this article we explore the ritual rock art modification relationship to further highlight the value of a ritual-based approach to access and enhance understanding of modified rock art. Central to this approach is the idea that modified motifs do not exist in isolation—their placement, the actions, rules, and structures linked to the modification process, along with the surrounding landscape, are all part of relational networks that extend across multiple social and cultural realms. By identifying key themes associated with this ritual practice, we explore relational qualities to further understand the ritual rock art relationship to broaden archaeological and ethnographic understanding of rock art.

Palaeolithic Cave Art at Creswell Crags in European Context

2007 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Late Pleistocene ◽  
Rock Art ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Upper Palaeolithic ◽  
Southern France ◽  
European Context ◽  
The World ◽  
Cave Art ◽  
Illustrated Book

Cave art is a subject of perennial interest among archaeologists. Until recently it was assumed that it was largely restricted to southern France and northern Iberia, although in recent years new discoveries have demonstrated that it originally had a much wider distribution. The discovery in 2003 of the UK's first examples of cave art, in two caves at Creswell Crags on the Derbyshire/Nottinghamshire border, was the most surprising illustration of this. The discoverers (the editors of the book) brought together in 2004 a number of Palaeolithic archaeologists and rock art specialists from across the world to study the Creswell art and debate its significance, and its similarities and contrasts with contemporary Late Pleistocene ("Ice Age") art on the Continent. This comprehensively illustrated book presents the Creswell art itself, the archaeology of the caves and the region, and the wider context of the Upper Palaeolithic era in Britain, as well as a number of up-to-date studies of Palaeolithic cave art in Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy which serve to contextualize the British examples.

scholarly journals Speech-Breath: Mapping the Multisensory Experience in Pecos River Style Pictography

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Carolyn E. Boyd ◽  
Ashley Busby
Keyword(s):  
Rock Art ◽  
Archaic Period ◽  
Human Origins ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
The World ◽  
Application Techniques ◽  
Graphic Device ◽  
Pecos River ◽  
Lower Pecos ◽  
Multisensory Experience

Archaic period hunter-gatherers of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and Coahuila, Mexico, created complex rock art murals containing elaborately painted anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures. These figures are frequently portrayed with dots or lines emanating out of or into their open mouths. In this article, we discuss patterns in shape, color, and arrangement of this pictographic element and propose that artists used this graphic device to denote speech, breath, and the soul. They communicated meaning through the image-making process, alternating brushstroke direction to indicate inhalation versus exhalation or using different paint application techniques to reflect measured versus forceful speech. The choices made by artists in the production of the imagery reflect their cosmology and the framework of ideas and beliefs through which they interpreted and interacted with the world. Bridging the iconographic data with ethnohistoric and ethnographic texts from Mesoamerica, we suggest that speech and breath expressed in the rock art of the Lower Pecos was tied to concepts of the soul, creation, and human origins.

scholarly journals Artificial Intelligence, 3D Documentation, and Rock Art—Approaching and Reflecting on the Automation of Identification and Classification of Rock Art Images

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Horn ◽  
Oscar Ivarsson ◽  
Cecilia Lindhé ◽  
Rich Potter ◽  
Ashely Green ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Data Augmentation ◽  
Rock Art ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Rock Surface ◽  
Southern Scandinavia ◽  
Bounding Boxes

AbstractRock art carvings, which are best described as petroglyphs, were produced by removing parts of the rock surface to create a negative relief. This tradition was particularly strong during the Nordic Bronze Age (1700–550 BC) in southern Scandinavia with over 20,000 boats and thousands of humans, animals, wagons, etc. This vivid and highly engaging material provides quantitative data of high potential to understand Bronze Age social structures and ideologies. The ability to provide the technically best possible documentation and to automate identification and classification of images would help to take full advantage of the research potential of petroglyphs in southern Scandinavia and elsewhere. We, therefore, attempted to train a model that locates and classifies image objects using faster region-based convolutional neural network (Faster-RCNN) based on data produced by a novel method to improve visualizing the content of 3D documentations. A newly created layer of 3D rock art documentation provides the best data currently available and has reduced inscribed bias compared to older methods. Several models were trained based on input images annotated with bounding boxes produced with different parameters to find the best solution. The data included 4305 individual images in 408 scans of rock art sites. To enhance the models and enrich the training data, we used data augmentation and transfer learning. The successful models perform exceptionally well on boats and circles, as well as with human figures and wheels. This work was an interdisciplinary undertaking which led to important reflections about archaeology, digital humanities, and artificial intelligence. The reflections and the success represented by the trained models open novel avenues for future research on rock art.

Time and the ancestors: landscape survey in the Andrantsay region of Madagascar

Antiquity ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 75 (290) ◽  
pp. 825-836 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoë Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The World ◽  
Everyday World ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Central Highlands ◽  
Landscape Survey ◽  
The One

The landscapes of the central highlands of Madagascar are inhabited by the spirits of the dead as well as by the living. The ancestors are a forceful presence in the everyday world, and the archaeology of the central highlands is intimately entwined with them. This is made manifest both in the on-the-ground experiences encountered during fieldwork, and in archaeological narratives, such as the one presented here. Tombs are a traditional focus of archaeological research, and those that dot the hills of the central highlands are part of a network of beliefs and practices which engage with the landscape as a whole and through which social identity is constructed and maintained. In the central highlands, and indeed elsewhere in Madagascar, there is an intimate relationship between peoples’ understandings of their social and physical location in the world and their understanding of their relationship to the dead.

HAC Arethusa TENUS (Met. 5.642)

2020 ◽  
pp. 84-103
Author(s):  
Eleni Ntanou
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Spatial Context ◽  
Pastoral Poetry ◽  
The World ◽  
Changing World

Arethusa is a symbol who in Ovid’s Metamorphoses is transferred from Elis to Sicily and transformed into a Romanized figure. This chapter demonstrates how Ovid uses Arethusa’s geographical transition to thematize her transposition into a different cultural context—that of Italy, as well as a new generic frame—that of epic. The chapter explores how the delineation of space in the Arethusa story and the altering of her identity contribute to the narrative of Met. 5, as well as to the broader poetic mapping of the ever-changing world in the Metamorphoses. Ovid activates in the spatial context of Arethusa’s story the possibilities offered by Arethusa’s past in colonial myths and in pastoral poetry in order to renew the poetics of epic. The story of Arethusa’s and Alpheus’ travel was traditionally deployed in ancient geographical treatises and in the mapping of the world stemming from colonialism. Ovid picks up Arethusa’s association with migration and her metapoetic symbolism to renew the epic genre, by systematically mapping out Arethusa’s travel.

Fantastic Beings and Where to Make Them ‒ Boats as Object-Beings in Bronze Age Rock Art

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (27) ◽  
pp. 191-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fredrik Fahlander
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Rock Art ◽  
The World ◽  
Change Of Perspective ◽  
Hybrid Character ◽  
Animal Part

The boat motif in Bronze Age rock art is generally assumed to represent real or symbolic boats in some form. In this paper, however, it is argued that Bronze Age rock art motifs are independent material articulations, made to do something rather than to represent. From such a perspective, the hybrid character of the boat motif as part animal, part object is conceived as a special type of entity, an object-being that has no original elsewhere. The change of perspective, from representation to articulation, and from object to being, allows for a more coherent view of Bronze Age rock art as primarily enacted imagery integrated with rock and metal as vitalist devices, aimed to affect the world.

scholarly journals ‘This ‘Merikay War’: Poetic Responses in Lancashire to the American Civil War

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-143
Author(s):  
Simon Rennie
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Editorial Comment ◽  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Poetic Discourse ◽  
Historical View ◽  
Local Newspapers ◽  
The World ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Voice

Abstract This article examines Lancashire commentary on the American Civil War during the Cotton Famine of 1861–65 through poetry which has recently been recovered from local newspapers. The complexity and variety of the often labouring-class subjectivities figured in the texts works to further disrupt the conventional historical view of a region united in moral and political sympathy with the Union cause, as exemplified by discourses surrounding Lincoln’s letter to the region in 1863. Much of this poetry displays an acute awareness of its place in the world. Labouring-class Lancashire people were forced by economic circumstances to confront the nature of a Victorian globalization which had proved its instability, and many began to see themselves in terms of a global subjectivity for the first time. This poetic discourse may have been materially and culturally adjacent to journalistic comment on the crisis, but poetry’s imaginative freedom and ability to compress language and hence cultural meaning often represented an amplification, distortion, or even contradiction of implied editorial comment. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the sometimes febrile context of Lancashire commentary on the American Civil War and its domestic effects. Even when no particular resolution was offered as an option the ability of Lancashire poets to represent the voice of their fellow sufferers with some degree of authenticity served to reflect the ever more intimate relationship between the Victorian global and the local which the effects of the American war demonstrated in such stark terms.

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