Humans Making History through Continuities and Discontinuities in Art

Abstract

Early representational art seems to tell a story all of its own, but in reality, it depended on the oral stories that accompanied its production. The art system has four parts: the producer, the subject of the story, the images of that subject, and the seer. Through the stories of the producer and the seers, this system implicated members of society in ways that were not limited to the images produced. By tying those stories to particular places, rock art influenced society more broadly through foraging choices and ritual. Because the persisting marks of rock art necessarily required storytelling, the stories penetrated the mental lives of people in the society. Interwoven with these considerations is the observation that for archaeologists, the producer, the stories and the original seers are gone and all that is left is the material of the rock art and the archaeologist. Writing archaeohistory from these materials requires interpretation in light of the archaeological evidence distributed across both space and time. One way of interpreting archaeohistory suggests that rock art played a significant role in cognitive evolution through its engagement in ritual.

Historical Dimensions of Rock Art: Perspectives from ‘Peripheries’

“…The continuity/discontinuity of rock-art making during the European Palaeolithic is not well understood (Davidson 2023); at this point, it is not possible to confirm if it was constantly made throughout the entire period or periodically abandoned for millennia. As Conkey and Fisher (2020) rightly point out, there is something fundamentally wrong in looking at it as an uninterrupted practice over millennia and continent-wide.…”

“…They make visible those features that are potentially unsustainable or dysfunctional in a process of social change. The examination, rather than avoidance, of the discontinuities (Davidson 2023) may highlight the great social significance (to the artists, to the observers, to those who could know but not observe) of rock art in particular contingent historical contexts; traditional teleological narratives built on linearity, uniformitarian principles and ahistorical implicit assumptions, can be weakened. This strategy puts the emphasis on 'negative evidence' or 'absence', a very particular kind of data that usually go under the radar.…”

“…In short, most rock-art research is based on the principle that the cognitive ability of art makers is self-explanatory, one necessary step in human evolution: people made rock art because they had developed the cognitive skills/capacities to make it, moving between three and two dimensions (Davidson 2023;Nowell 2015). This is obviously true, but only in the framework of research that emphasizes the 'modernity' of symbolic behaviours this cognitive claim seems to be both necessary and sufficient.…”

“…These interruptions are indeed regularly detected but rarely considered worth of interpretation, because continuity is emphasized (e.g. Robb 2015; 2020; but see Davidson 2023 for an exception). From this premise, the disappearance of rock art is often interpreted as cultural decline, almost decadence, of a glorious tradition, rather than the result of socio-economic transformation (González-Morales 1997).…”

“…Our goal in this paper is to show specific study cases of rock art around the world and explore what they tell us about rock art and its historical contexts, scarcely considered so far (Conkey 1997, 344;Davidson 2023;Nowell 2006, 244).…”