Not Just Good to See: Global Perspectives on Scenes in Rock Art

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

There is considerable temporal and geographic variation in the conventions involved in the choice, rendering and layout of subjects in rock art. Just as the emergence of naturalism through the application of perspective is said to have created new ways of representing and seeing the world in the European Renaissance so too changes in the ways images of animals were represented with regard to other animals, humans and non-figurative signs likely testify to changes in the ways prehistoric people experienced the world around them. The purpose of this session is to invite scholars with an interest in the variation of fauna in rock art to explore how we can use comparative studies of rock art to identify key differences in the ways in which people engaged with their natural and cultural landscapes.

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  • Documents (8)

Documents
  • A Census of Women in the Upper Paleolithic (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Melanie Chang. April Nowell.

    Binary models of gender are often uncritically applied in paleoanthropology, even if the biological sex or gender identity of a specimen or representation is ambiguous. In the Upper Paleolithic, indicators ranging from simple bifurcating lines to overt representations of secondary sex characteristics may be used to identify an illustration, engraving, or piece of portable art as "male" or "female." These taxonomic rubrics are rarely stated explicitly. Still, the impression given by an overview...

  • A Comparison of "Scenes" in Parietal and Non-Parietal Upper Paleolithic Imagery: Formal Differences and Ontological Implications (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Elisabeth Culley.

    Upper Paleolithic cave art is well-known for its skilled execution, specifically the use of shading, relief, and perspective to render life-like depictions of Pleistocene fauna. Cave art is equally well-known for a near absence of flora, humans, and scenes. In this regard, parietal imagery is distinct from "art mobilier," where these are more common. However, defining "scenes" as a graphic phenomenon can be problematic, and identifying them among superimposed and fragmented images more so....

  • Narrative or Analysis: identifying scenes in the rock art of the Kimberley and Central Desert, Australia (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only June Ross.

    Analysis of the composition of figurative motifs within rock art panels holds the potential to provide information on the relationships intended by the artist/s between humans, between humans and animals, or between animals depicted. Two contrasting rock art assemblages from Australia illustrate this potential; the paintings from the remote Kimberley in the tropical northwest, and the diverse geometric assemblage from the arid heart of central Australia. Ethnographic data provides...

  • Perception et analyse des scènes dans l'art paléolithique européen (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Carole Fritz. Gilles Tosello.

    En art paléolithique, les "scènes" sont rares et leur identification repose le plus souvent sur la présence d'un acteur humain ou anthropomorphe. Paradoxalement, la thématique paléolithique compte moins de 5 % de figures humaines pour 95 % d'animaux. Cela signifie que la majorité des assemblages que l'on retrouve dans les grottes sont constitués d'images animales. Or dans nos cultures, l'image humaine est centrale et lorsque nous parlons de scène, nous recherchons intuitivement la référence à...

  • Putting Southern African Rock Paintings in Context: The View from the Mirabib Rockshelter, Namibia (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Grant McCall. Theodore Marks. Andrew Schroll. Jordan Krummel.

    Various researchers have made great strides toward understanding southern African rock art through the exploration of the ethnographic and ethnohistoric records of San hunter-gatherer shamanism. In contrast, less attention has been paid to the archaeological context of the Later Stone Age (LSA) in which rock art was produced. This paper examines Middle Holocene rock paintings at the Mirabib rockshelter in the Central Namib Desert, western Namibia. Our fieldwork at Mirabib and our re-analysis of...

  • Rock Art Categorization (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Livio Dobrez.

    Rock Art Categorization Over the past ten years I have sought to elaborate a new categorization for rock art images and one based on analysis of visual perception bolstered by cognitive psychology experiments and current knowledge of visual system neurophysiology. The result has been a suggestion for three classes of image, viz the Canonical (mostly profile), Narrative (scene), and Performative (frontal). At the same time Patricia Dobrez has added two possible classes represented by hand...

  • Scenes and Non-Scenes in Rock Art: Are There Things We Can Learn about Cognitive Evolution from the Differences (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Iain Davidson.

    Analysis of rock art in several regions shows great variability in the presence or absence of combinations of individual images that can be considered as scenes in our graphic traditions. This presentation will consider examples from Australia, Europe and North America to show that the differences in the way people represented the world are significant about how they related to the world.

  • Scenic narratives of humans and animals in Namibian rock art (2017)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Tilman Lenssen-Erz. Brigitte Mathiak. Eymard Faeder. Maya von Czerniewicz. Joana Wilmeroth.

    In prehistoric rock art the notion of ‘scene’ always played an important role but a clear and widely accepted definition of scene does not exist and little was written about what constitutes a scene. If informing context lacks, Gestalt features are often taken to identify what can be considered a meaningful scene. If we consider a scene as displaying a social animated configuration, then the Gestalt laws alone are an insufficient tool. Particularly in scenes including humans and animals...