Rock Art Studies: News of the World VI

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Rock Art ◽  
The World

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.

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.

Nurturing and Balancing the World: A Relational Approach to Rock Art and Technology from North Central Chile (Southern Andes)

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrés Troncoso ◽  
Felipe Armstrong ◽  
Francisco Vergara ◽  
Francisca Ivanovic ◽  
Paula Urzúa
Keyword(s):  
Rock Art ◽  
North Central ◽  
Central Chile ◽  
Relational Approach ◽  
Technological Style ◽  
Art And Technology ◽  
Social Actions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Anthropology Of Technology ◽  
The World

Technology has been a central theme in archaeological discussion. Different approaches have been developed in order to understand and better explain the processes that lead to the production of objects and things. The anthropology of technology has been one such effort, with its focus on technological style and the chaîne opératoire. In this paper we argue that, despite their many contributions, these approaches tend to isolate the process of production, as well as to see it as the imposition of culture over nature. Instead, we propose a relational approach to technology, one that considers the multiple participants in the social actions involved, stressing the affective qualities of the different entities participating in the process of making. We focus this discussion on the production process of rock art in North Central Chile by Diaguita communities (c. ad 1000–c. 1540), arguing that making petroglyphs was a central activity that aimed at the balancing of the world and its participants, creating a mediating space that facilitated connectedness between the multiple members of the Diaguita world, humans and other-than-humans.

Early Australian Anthropomorphs: Jabiluka's Dynamic Figure Rock Paintings

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally K. May ◽  
Iain G. Johnston ◽  
Paul S.C. Taçon ◽  
Inés Domingo Sanz ◽  
Joakim Goldhahn
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Rock Art ◽  
Figurative Art ◽  
The World ◽  
Rock Paintings ◽  
Body Adornment ◽  
Art And Society ◽  
Detailed Nature ◽  
Sheer Number

Early depictions of anthropomorphs in rock art provide unique insights into life during the deep past. This includes human engagements with the environment, socio-cultural practices, gender and uses of material culture. In Australia, the Dynamic Figure rock paintings of Arnhem Land are recognized as the earliest style in the region where humans are explicitly depicted. Important questions, such as the nature and significance of body adornment in rock art and society, can be explored, given the detailed nature of the human figurative art and the sheer number of scenes depicted. In this paper, we make a case for Dynamic Figure rock art having some of the earliest and most extensive depictions of complex anthropomorph scenes found anywhere in the world.

Sally's Rockshelter and the Archaeology of the Vision Quest

1999 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
David S. Whitley ◽  
Ronald I. Dorn ◽  
Joseph M. Simon ◽  
Robert Rechtman ◽  
Tamara K. Whitley
Keyword(s):  
Physical Properties ◽  
Electron Microprobe ◽  
Mojave Desert ◽  
Rock Art ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
The World ◽  
Vision Quest ◽  
Foreign Materials

Quartz, the most common mineral on earth, is almost universally associated with shamans. Why this ritual association occurred worldwide has remained unexplained scientifically, at least in part because western scientific thinking assumes that religious beliefs and practices are epiphenomenal and not worthy of study. This association is archaeologi-cally evident at Sally's Rocksheiter, a small rock engraving-vision quest site in the Mojave Desert, where quartz rocks were placed as offerings in cracks around the rock art panel. SEM and electron microprobe foreign materials analyses of Mojave rock engravings show that the association between quartz and rock art was common: almost 65 per cent contained remnants of quartz hammerstones, used to peck the motifs. A combination of ethnohistory and physical sciences explains why quartz, shamans and vision questing were so strongly associated: triboluminescence causes quartz to glow when struck or abraded, which was believed a visible manifestation of supernatural power. Recognition that this belief and behavioural association were based on quartz's physical properties aids our ability to identify the antiquity of the vision quest in the far west, suggesting that Mojave Desert shamanism is the oldest continuously practiced religious tradition so far identified in the world.

The hidden paintings of Angkor Wat

Antiquity ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 88 (340) ◽  
pp. 549-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noel Hidalgo Tan ◽  
Im Sokrithy ◽  
Heng Than ◽  
Khieu Chan
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Rock Art ◽  
Digital Photography ◽  
Great Success ◽  
Naked Eye ◽  
The World ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Specific Phase

The temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia is one of the most famous monuments in the world and is noted for its spectacular bas-relief friezes depicting ceremonial and religious scenes. Recent work reported here has identified an entirely new series of images consisting of paintings of boats, animals, deities and buildings. Difficult to see with the naked eye, these can be enhanced by digital photography and decorrelation stretch analysis, a technique recently used with great success in rock art studies. The paintings found at Angkor Wat seem to belong to a specific phase of the temple's history in the sixteenth century AD when it was converted from a Vishnavaite Hindu use to Theravada Buddhist.

A Land Apart: Environments and Rock Art in Northernmost Bohuslän, Sweden

2008 ◽  
Vol 88 ◽  
pp. 1-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Coles
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Rock Art ◽  
World Heritage ◽  
Site Conditions ◽  
The South ◽  
Changing Environments ◽  
The World

This paper focuses on a distinctive region of granite ridges and forests in the parish of Hogdal, well north of the World Heritage rock art area in Bohuslän. In the later second millennium BC, a wide lake, left by the receding sea, provided the setting here for an arc of rock-carving sites along its shoreline. A second group of sites lies near the entrance to a major fjord to the south. The two areas contain Bronze Age imagery remarkable for its variety of scale, subject and artistry. The paper describes recording and analysis work undertaken in 2006 and 2007, offers commentaries on changing environments, chronology, site conditions and preservation, and provides a discussion of Bronze Age imagery and society.

Rock Art in Central and South America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrés Troncoso ◽  
Felipe Armstrong ◽  
Mara Basile
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
Social Complexity ◽  
Rock Art ◽  
Spatial Features ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Art Research

Central and South America is a vast region, where a wide range of different societies established, transformed, disappeared, and endured. This kaleidoscope of peoples offers a particularly rich and diverse body of rock art in terms of its historical, technical, visual, and spatial features. The first sections of this chapter briefly introduces the reader to this diversity, as well as to the history of rock art research, presenting and discussing the different theoretical and methodological frameworks used. The authors discuss the role that rock art played—and still plays—for different groups, which they have grouped in terms of their common socioeconomic strategies. The authors argue that rock art research from this region can contribute to the wider understanding of rock art in the world, offering its materialistic and archaeological approaches ranging from the study of social complexity, the domestication of animals, mobility, and memory.

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