Meaningful Choices and Relational Networks: Analyzing Western Arnhem Land’s Painted Hand Rock Art Style Using Chaîne Opératoire

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

A core feature of rock art studies concerns the characterization and analysis of motif styles to generate new insights into their function, meaning, and symbolism in the deep and recent past. Yet what is oftentimes overlooked is attention to the production sequence used to create motifs, and what this can reveal about the social and cultural behavior of artists. Where it is evident that a particular group of motifs contains a wide range of individual design conventions, questions about why and how these choices were made become points of enquiry that have the potential to develop new insights into their symbolic and relational character, and cultural significance. To address this challenge, we undertook an investigation of the rare and highly distinctive Painted Hand rock art style from western Arnhem Land (Northern Territory, Australia). Using a quantitative, systematic, style-based analysis, and an ethnographic exploration of a select group of distinctive design conventions, we show how the decisions made by artists to use specific design conventions were not random but instead were deeply implicated in, and shaped by, social processes acquired through learning or enculturation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38029.0