Rock Art, Cognition, and Embodied Ontologies

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the past few decades, increasing attention toward the study of rock art in the archaeological community has resulted in new approaches to this sub-discipline. Through various research projects, a number of archaeologists have begun to consider what kinds of questions can be examined through the study of rock art and different methods of approaching rock art analysis which can contribute to the archaeological analysis of past societies. This paper seeks to explore another method of studying rock art by analyzing the spatial placement and co-occurrence of rock art motifs in relation to the ontologies of past societies, which no doubt differed from our own views of the world. The research examines the frequency of motif occurrence in rock art from two separate Hohokam sites, and compares possible patterns of motif re-occurrence and spatial co-occurrence based on quantitative analytical methods. Analysis of gathered data focuses on the spatial placement of artistic imagery in relation to embodiment of ontological categories. This paper incorporates theoretical models from cognitive archaeology, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience to provide a comprehensive discussion of how the Hohokam depicted their world, as they saw it, through their rock art.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24373