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.

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.

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.

Representations of oxhide ingots in Scandinavian rock art: the sketchbook of a Bronze Age traveller?

Antiquity ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 89 (343) ◽  
pp. 191-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan Ling ◽  
Zofia Stos-Gale
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Rock Art ◽  
Image Position

Abstract

scholarly journals Rock art and the prehistoric landscape of Galicia: the results of field survey 1992–1994

1995 ◽  
Vol 61 ◽  
pp. 347-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Bradley ◽  
Felipe Criado Boado ◽  
Ramón Fábregas Valcarce
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Field Survey ◽  
Rock Art ◽  
Outer Edge ◽  
Early Bronze Age ◽  
Copper Age ◽  
North West ◽  
Abrupt Changes ◽  
Ground Conditions ◽  
The Relationship

This paper discusses the relationship between the earlier prehistoric pattern of settlement in Atlantic Europe and the creation of rock art. It investigates the organisation of the Copper Age and Early Bronze Age landscape of north-west Spain using the evidence provided by the distribution, siting, and composition of rock carvings. It presents the results of field survey in three sample areas extending from the centre to the outer edge of their distribution. Although these drawings cannot be interpreted as illustrations of daily life, they may have helped to define rights to particular resources in an area which experienced abrupt changes of ground conditions over the course of the year.

The Boat of the Dead in the Bronze Age

Antiquity ◽  
1941 ◽  
Vol 15 (60) ◽  
pp. 360-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. V. Grinsell
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Pacific Islands ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The World ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Bronze Age

In many parts of the world and at many periods the practice has prevailed of depositing boats, or models or other representations of them, with the dead, either as a means of facilitating his supposed voyage to another world, or as a symbol of his maritime activities during his lifetime.That the former is generally the correct explanation of the custom there can be no doubt. This is shown by the evidence of the belief in a voyage to a future world, and the customs to which it has given rise, among living primitive peoples in the Pacific Islands and elsewhere, so well collected and presented by the late Sir J. G. Frazer. It is shown also by traditions such as that of our own king Arthur's journey by barge to ‘the island valley of Avilion, where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow’ It is shown also by the ancient Greek and Roman custom of placing a coin in the mouth of the dead to pay Charon's fee for ferrying him across the Styx.

scholarly journals Beyond Transgressive Lands and Forgotten Seas: Towards a Maritime Understanding of Rock Art in Bohuslän

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-140
Author(s):  
Johan Ling
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Clay Soil ◽  
Rock Art ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Bronze Age

Since the beginning of the 20th century rock art in Bohuslän has traditionally been interpreted, on the basis of its adjacent location to the clay-soil plains, as an indicator ofpermanent pastoral or agrarian settlement units. However, recent results ofthe first substantial and extensive shoreline study, covering the whole of Bohuslän, have shown that, during the entire Bronze Age, many of these lower, clay- soil plains were in fact sea bottoms in shallow bays. On the basis of these results new measurement of the rock art panels and the surrounding terrain were made. The study showed that many rock carvings had been placed on or near the contemporary shore during the Bronze Age. It therefore seemed essential to present new questions about the social and ritual behaviour, as manifested by the rock art in these particular areas. It is here suggested that the rock art in the investigated area may be a materialised reflection of seasonal maritime interactions during the Bronze Age.

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