Scenic narratives of humans and animals in Namibian rock art

Summary

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 interaction should be considered as well.

Here we present a formal approach that provides a rigid framework for the definition of scenic coherence encompassing Gestalt and interaction. This approach allows quantification across the large corpus of Brandberg rock art and it shows that just 2.4% of all scenes show "encounters" of humans and animals. Only once in 117 encounters the animal is clearly in a dominant role. Our data suggest that combining humans and animals in scenes (not in juxtaposition) may be a narrative of hierarchical agency. For the future we aim to grasp the structures of scenic narratives through cooperation with computer science, exploring whether algorithm based data mining enables us to identify underlying rules of scene formation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Not Just Good to See: Global Perspectives on Scenes in Rock Art

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15818