This paper presents acts of fluting as tangible expressions of activities performed by Palaeolithic communities of practice, in which situated learning was part of the social transmission of knowledge and communities of practice include children, men and women. To identify individual members of the communities of practice who were involved in the creation of parietal art in the Franco-Cantabrian region we have analysed the age and the sex of the people who 'decorated' the caves. Secondly, by following the analysis of lines created by flutings by different members of the community of practice, we suggest that children under the age of seven, who had no the cognitive abilities to comprehend the meaning of images, were active and prolific fluters and performed acts of decorating cave walls by themselves or with the support of other community members. This approach allows us to consider parietal art as community art where visual contributions were created by community members of all age and sexes.
The interpretation of images in relation to their particular setting on rock surfaces has been highlighted in recent studies into the location of depictions in the natural landscape and shamanistic beliefs and practices. The significance of the approach in this article, however, lies in studying the morphology of the rock surface as an integral part of the visual imagery of the rock art, notably how the physical dimensions of the rock surface were used in recreating the physical landscape familiar to the prehistoric artists. We use experiential and cognitive approaches to visual perception to combine an appreciation of artistic endeavour of rock art with an enhanced understanding of the human capacity for creating such images. The results of this approach to rock art contribute to a better understanding of the creative and cognitive aspects of prehistoric fisher-gatherer-hunter art. A detailed example is discussed showing how the physical landscape was re-created in the morphology of the rock surface by using the motion of skiing to illustrate one of the visual narratives at the site of Zalavruga in northern Russia.
The aim of this paper is to establish how visual narratives can be used in the social context of storytelling, enabling the remembrance of events and those who participated in them in prehistory around the White Sea in the northernmost part of Europe. One of the largest complexes of fisher-gatherer-hunter art is located here, dating from the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age (ca 6000–4000 B.P.). A number of methodological strands are brought together to aid in the interpretation of the art, combining Western art-historical and non-Western visual traditions that challenge our modern ways of seeing. The paper proposes an unconventional interpretation of this rock art, in which the prehistoric imagery is ‘translated’ via two short films creating the visual link between past and the present.
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