Animating Sacred Landscapes through Making Rock Art

Summary

To understand the relationships among rock art and ritual landscapes needs recognize how the process of making engaged in a set of spatial and social practices. These practices create a field of relationships that define the rituality of rock art as well as the sacredness of landscapes. In this paper, we discuss this process in a prehispanic agrarian community of Central North Chile. We propose the process of making rock art related to the animation of a world constituted by a web of non-human and human actants through the creation of central and sacred places in the landscape. This idea of central places was experienced and constituted by a specific articulation of spatial practices that located petroglyph far away of residential sites but in mediation points between the quotidian and non-quotidian landscapes. The sacredness of this central didn't rest only in the characteristics of the images, or in a particular geomorphological attribute of that point. Its sacredness was the result of a complex web of relationships among space, rocks, social practices, images and movements along the landscape. This research has granted by FONDECYT 1110125 & 1150776

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Rock Art and Sacred Spaces: Recent Approaches to the Study of Ritual Landscapes

Keywords

Spatial Coverage