2018_Rock Art in Central and South America: Social Settings and Regional Diversity (original) (raw)
Recent Rock Art Studies in Eastern Mesoamerica and Lower Central America, 2005-2009
Rock Art Studies News of the World IV, 2015
Endangered by deforestation, agro-industrialisation and urbanisation, the protection of Central American rock art is more necessary than even before. Locally applied strategies of rock art preservation depend on the concept of a site's further utilisation. Thus one of the most omportant to pose is: How might ancient rock art be integrated into modern social contexts?
Rock Art, Ancestors and Water: The semiotic construction of landscapes in the central Andes
Rock Art, Ancestors and Water: The semiotic construction of landscapes in the central Andes, 2017
As landscape art, the rock art of the central Andes offers clues regarding relationships between ancestor veneration and the negotiation of rights to water through time. To understand these relationships this thesis focuses on a large complement of rock art on the Fortaleza Ignimbrite (FI), a distinct geologic formation, situated at the headwaters of the Fortaleza and Santa Rivers in highland Ancash, Peru, (3400 - 4250 m.a.s.l.). A systematic, regional survey of the FI revealed 299 archaeological features, of which 192 are rock art places, consitituting one of the highest concentrations of rock art ever recorded at such high altitudes. GIS analysis of the survey data reveals how certain rock art styles, motifs and production techniques relate to altitude, and specific geologic, hydrological and built features. The stratigraphy of carved and painted rock art of the FI is paired with the archaeological stratigraphy and radiocarbon results retrieved from excavations at three puna rock shelters and one collective tomb, in the lower altitude quechua ecozone, to answer the question of when these works were produced. The results from these methods are synthesized to develop a typological sequence, and a spatio-temporal map of the of the rock art of the FI, defined by styles and traditions, which spans approximately 3,000 years (1800 B.C – A.D. 1820). Because the FI sits at the nexus of ecological, political, economic and religious realms, and because it is located at strategic places of power, this thesis hypothesizes that its rock art was active in constructing social landscapes in the region by facilitating the control of resources, primarily water and heritage. In other words, instead of prioritizing the referential meaning of rock art, the primary question of this thesis asks what role the rock art of the FI had in socializing the land. In this regard, the central argument of this investigation is that rock art places are the result of, and agents of, landscape and that they relate people in a communicative system having to do with their many purposes and symbolism. To support this argument and model the manifold relationships between people, the land and rock art in answering the primary research question, Alfred Gell’s tripartite, semiotic model of icon-index-symbol is applied to the styles and traditions of rock art identified in this thesis. Gell’s other tripartite model of artist-prototype-recipient is then applied to answer the question of who produced these works and who they had intended as their audience. These models inform how rock art relates to landscape construction and provide the basis for developing and applying a Peircean, eco-cultural semiotic model, contextualized in part by 17th century historic accounts from the region, to elucidate how in situ, landscape-based art related to social interactions in the central Andes.
: This article presents a preliminary hypothesis about a pattern of interaction between a sample of Amazonian petroglyphs and its lithological substratum expressed by a covariation between rock type and rock art stylistic patterns (i.e. perceived graphic behaviour or patterned arrangement of formal attributes) located on a geological frontier on the Lower Negro River, Northern Amazonia. Elements of Perspectivism derived from Amazonian ethnological studies are applied to the geological realm as an interpretive tool to help understand how ancient Amazonian indigenous groups might have thought about geological phenomena and thus, reflect upon possible consequences of this process on rock art behaviour in areas of marked geodiversity. This constitutes a tentative articulation between ethnology and archaeology to bring into play elements of an ethnogeological framework as applied to Amazonian rock art studies. KEYWORDS: Petroglyphs; Brazilian Amazon; Negro River; Geological Frontier; Perspectivism; Ethnogeology