Díaz-Andreu, M. 2002. Marking the landscape. Iberian post-paleolithic art, identities and the sacred. In Nash, G.H. and Chippindale, C. (eds.), European Landscapes of Rock-art. London, Routledge: 158-175. (original) (raw)
Related papers
In this chapter my aim is to look at the ways in which the ritual aspect of the landscape has been analysed in rock-art studies. I will propose that the use of the concepts of ritual depth of the landscape and of identity of the actors who lived through rock-art landscapes can greatly improve our understanding of the ritual landscape. I will apply both concepts to the examination of a specific case-study, the post-Palaeolithic paintings of Villar del Humo (Spain), and argue that their use gives us a far deeper understanding of how landscapes were ritualized through rock-art. Rock-art and landscapes Rock-art and landscapes: ritual depth and identity The landscapes of Iberian post-Palaeolithic art Villar del Humo: the ritual meaning of landscape The ritual depth of the Villar del Humo rock-art landscape Identities and the distinct perceptions of the sacred Keywords: rock art, Levantine rock art, Spain, colour, geology, landscape, ritual landscape, Cuenca, Villar del Humo, Teruel, Albarracín
Rock art research as landscape archaeology: a pilot study in Galicia, north-west Spain
World archaeology, 1994
Like so much rock art, the Neolithic/Bronze Age petroglyphs of Galicia have been studied mainly as a source of stylistic information. This paper contends that it may be more rewarding to see them as a vital component of the prehistoric landscape. In this paper we study their siting in relation to Galician ecology and the movement of wild animals across the terrain. We also consider the organization of the panels of carved rock at a more local level and attempt to interpret their distinctive use of the local topography. We should not treat rock carvings as if they were portable artefacts. A more flexible approach to this material may help to break down the functionalist bias of landscape archaeology.
In R.J. Wallis and K. Lymer (eds), A Permeability of Boundaries? New approaches to the Archaeology of Art, Religion and Folklore, British Archaeological Reports, International Series S936. Oxford: 71-78, 2001
Rock-art ought to be approached in its essentiality and universality, as a multivocal and plural phenomenon that crosscuts entirely different temporal, spatial, cultural and cognitive contexts. Rock-art should not be simply regarded as the object of archaeological research but as everyday praxis, implying a permanent dialogue between past and present. This paper aims to demonstrate how rock-art both as action, (the inscription of signs on natural features) and as a prevailing symbolic topology (for the current perception of the landscape lies partly upon the re-interpretation of ancestral remains) plays an essential role in the cosmological constructs of peasant societies in the present. Therefore, it was intentionally structured in order to reverse the traditional diachronic approach evolving from a prehistoric standpoint by considering the present day use of carvings and paintings found on natural rock formations.
The Limarí Valley stands within Central Northern Chile and forms part of the foothills of the western Southern Andean region. In terms of altitude, much of the upper reaches of the valley stands over 1000 m above sea level. The natural environment comprises mainly semi-arid scrubland. During later prehistoric times, the Limarí Valley would have provided an important access route between the Pacific Ocean and communities occupying the valley (and its tributary valleys to the north and south). It is within the upper reaches of the valley that prehistoric rock art is located in a variety of locates including rock shelters and open-air sites. Many sites show that both painting and engraving techniques have been applied. This diverse media, along with changes in style, composition and subject matter reflects at two different chronological phases: hunter-gatherers and agrarian communities. In this short paper we compare the socio-ritual organisation of landscape among these two communities that at different times occupied this semi-arid area. Despite the aridity of this landscape, water appears to be the main focus for ritual activity among hunter-gatherers, especially within the secluded upland side valleys. Whilst hunter-gatherer rock art is associated with settlement, agrarian rock art relates to route-ways and the movement of people; here panels appear to act as markers within a transitional landscape. Fieldwork has revealed that hunter-gatherer rock art was usually placed close to flowing water, whilst agrarian rock art sites were located in isolated places, and with no apparent relationship with water. Both hunter-gatherer and agrarian communities are paradoxically contradicting each other in that hunter-gatherer rock art is metaphorically sedentary and agrarian rock art is fluid. Both regimes show how two different ways to engaged with arid places in the Southern Andean region ; one related with water and the other with the movement of people and commodities. Both are key aspects to how communities utilised the same landscape, but in different ways and at different times.
Rethoric and agency around Iberian sacred landscapes (11th and 12th centuries)
Revista Digital de Iconografía Medieval, vol. X, nº 20, 2018
This paper aims to demonstrate the feasibility of referring to ‘landscapes’ in medieval art. To this end, it will focus on the agency and rhetoric of five Iberian landscape representations produced between the eleventh and the twelfth centuries. These are the Girona Creation Tapestry, folios 63v-64r and 186v-187r of the Facundus Beatus, the wall paintings of the Pantheon of the Kings, the Monastery of Santa María de Sigena, and the Church of Santa María de Taüll. Do they reflect a direct observation of reality? To what extent are these landscapes symbolic and are their figures acting as spatial references cores? They show a rhetorical selection of points of view working as visual mediums. The notion of space is accentuated as an abstraction, a scenery of social practices and Biblical locations. This inquiry opens the discussion about the role of the multiple devices through which Romanesque landscapes were expressed.
Walking on the stones of years. Some remarks on the NW Iberian rock art
Picturing the Bronze Age (J. Ling, P. Skoglund, U. Bertilsson eds). Swedish Rock Art Series, 3. ISBN: 9781782978794, pp. 47-63, 2015
Over the last two decades, the traditional descriptive paradigm has given way to other views focusing on the relationship between petroglyphs and prehistoric landscapes, seeking to understand that artistic phenomenon in the framework of societies undergoing deep socioeconomic changes and increasingly altering their environment. We shall review, in the light of the last discoveries, aspects such as the chronology of the regional rock art, the audience it was meant to address or the archaeological context of the carved rocks. Going beyond the perception of the rock art as a mediating element, open to the different communities inhabiting the land, we might acknowledge its possible role as an active agent through which human groups would negotiate its own identity and association with the surrounding space. The relationship between petroglyphs and landscape would be a dialectic one, so that several factors could regulate the access and reading of the decorated panels, eventually restricting these to certain individuals or sectors of the communities. Lastly, the similarities with the rock art in other areas of Atlantic Europe may be just another example of the circulation along the seaways of goods, ideas and people at least from the early Neolithic.
Lopes, S.S., Gomes, S. A. (eds) , Between the 3rd and the 2nd millennia BC: Exploring Cultural Diversity and Change in Late Prehistoric Communities, 2021
As it is more often said than done, the challenge to look at what is exposed as a core issue may be more accurately addressed if we approach it from the margins. This premise is at the genesis of studies leading to the reconfiguration of the dynamics of Late Prehistoric art traditions in northwestern Iberia and also of the hermeneutics disclosed in this chapter. But the need to attend to this procedure is also implicit in the research questions that inspired this volume, for the focus on evidence for social and cultural change in the transit from the 3rd to the 2nd millennium BC, implies a vigorous stretch of the temporal, spatial and conceptual boundaries as a means to look at the historical processes developing millennia before and after the transition. This chapter addresses the dialogue, affiliations and segregation processes apparent in the relationship between carvings and paintings in natural rock formations and decorated megalithic tombs, in the long-term and on a supra-regional scale, in order to rethink the socio-cultural processes underlying the emergence, span and abandonment of the major European rock art traditions that reached northern and central Portugal.
Alves, L. B. 2002. The architecture of the natural world: rock art in western Iberia
Monuments and Landscape in Atlantic Europe, 2002
Atlantic Europe is the zone par excellence of megalithic monuments which encompasses a wide range of earthen and stone constructions from impressive circles to modest chambered tombs. A single basic concept lies behind this volume: that the intrinsic qualities encountered within the diverse landscapes of Atlantic Europe both informed the settings chosen for the monuments and played a role in determining their form and visual appearance. This, in part, derives from the use of local materials and the manner in which they were displayed within the monuments: for example how stone, clearly taken from the local geology, was visibly incorporated. Yet we may go further than this in some instances and propose that the nature of local landforms itself both attracted monuments, providing meaningful or dramatic settings, and offered a series of ideas which played some part in influencing the form of those monuments themselves.
This paper discusses how the social construction of landscape and the sense of identity and territoriality can emerge in relation to a ritual space. Through the analysis of monumental constructions or arrangements of rocks, its topographical connection and the location of cave paintings and cemeteries, a ritualized landscape may be defined. The archaeological information of the Sierras Lihué Calel is employed for this. This area is located in the western sector of the pampean region of Argentina.