Heads without bodies: Evidence of cattle sacrifice in the rock art and burials of the Okunev culture in southern Siberia

A Companion to Rock Art Edited by Jo McDonald and Peter Veth Wiley Blackwell, 2012 ISBN 978-1-4443-3424-1. Pp. xxxiv+680. 133.30 [pounds sterling]. This international volume on rock art provides a complete, comprehensive and up-to-date overview of most of the main research theories and methods used, and the research questions addressed, in current archaeological debates on rock art, be they global or regional. It was conceived by the editors as a tool teaching the next generation of rock art researchers in a 13-week semester cycle. But this volume is more than a collection of educational materials. It gathers research papers addressing some key topics in rock-art studies, and thus becomes essential reading for anyone interested and/or conducting rock-art research today. The 37 contributions by 57 international scholars from five continents are structured into 11 meaningful sections, with two to four papers per section. While the chapters in each section are intended to address a specific issue, well defined by the section headings (I. Explanatory frameworks; II. Inscribed landscapes; III. Rock art at the regional level; IV. Engendered approaches; V. Form, style and aesthetics; VI. Contextual rock art; VII. The mediating role of rock art; VIII. Rock art, identity and indigeneity; IX. Rock art management and interpretation, X. Dating rock art, XI. Rock art in the digital age), some key questions are explored recursively across the volume. This shows their significance for achieving a more complete understanding of rock art, as a tool for exploring past and present human behaviour and cultural practices. Questions of time (relative or chronometric), place, past and present as well as individual and group identities, function and/or meaning are explored through the systematic deconstruction and analysis of the motifs, themes and panels, their patterns of variation, the context and/or the landscapes, from a variety of international perspectives and backgrounds. Case studies from Australia and the Pacific, Northern and Southern America, Siberia, Europe, Africa and India, and a wide range of periods, from the European Upper Palaeolithic to current Australian rock art, fully illustrate these questions. All these studies remind us once more that rock art is not only about the decoration of passive surfaces with beautiful images, as emphasised by Blinkhorn et al. in chapter 11. Rock art is an alternative source of information about human behaviour and practices, and can be used to explore continuities and discontinuities, human interaction, past territoriality, group mobility, symbolic behaviour and so forth. The large number of chapters prevents us from briefly summarising each of them, but some key issues for current debates are worth mentioning. Of special interest for interpretative approaches is Lewis-Williams' reflective contribution (chapter 2) on the misinterpretation and misuse of his concept of to universally interpret rock art. As he states, shamanism is only one of the many potential interpretations of rock art, and thus it cannot be systematically used to interpret past arts. While past interpretative trends used to emphasise a unique function for Pleistocene art (for a brief summary of past interpretative schools, see Moro and Gonzalez, chapter 15), current studies recognise the multiple functions of past and present imagery and the variety of social contexts (religious, social and political) in which art operates. Take as an example the multiple functions of Western Desert People's rock art, summarised by McDonald and Veth (chapter 6: 96), which includes marking place and individual's affiliation, storytelling or instructive purposes, initiation ceremonies, visual representation of an ancestral being or event, and so forth. It is fully accepted throughout the volume that only through a thoughtful analysis and understanding of the context of rock art (the walls, the surrounding archaeological site, the geographical context, the acoustic or other sensorial properties, etc. …

What defines the “Minusinsk Style” in the earliest rock art of the Minusinsk Basin, southern Siberia?

Complimentary to the common perception of rock art, i.e., painted or engraved images on rock surfaces, as an archaeological source informing about the past, this article argues that what equally and additionally makes rock art heritage is the role the ancient images play in the present, influencing and shaping contemporary cultural processes. Developing this idea, the article discusses the use of rock art motifs in contemporary art, focusing on the example of the art of Arzhan Yuteev, a native Altaian painter from Gorno-Altaisk in southern Siberia. Although rock art has attracted the attention of many Siberian artists in recent decades, Yuteev’s art is unique in this regard, as his drawing upon prehistoric art is not only aesthetically inspired but is also significantly embodied in an identity narrative. This narrative was particularly noticeable in the exhibition Heritage, held in the artist’s hometown in 2019, where Yuteev’s works were displayed. The three works presented in this exhibition are analyzed in detail in the paper, providing the key data to answer the questions: how are the prehistoric art motifs incorporated into this narrative, how do they contribute to the idea of reclaiming the heritage and what is the social efficaciousness of Yuteev’s art.

As a student in the mid 1960s, and in the early 1970s as a junior lecturer, I worked with Peter Ucko and Andree Rosenfeld on a project studying the prehistoric rock art of northern Spain. These beautiful paintings and engraving were made between ten and twenty thousand years ago by the hunter-gatherers of the Solutrian and Magdalenian. Although apparently full of meaning for their creators, they are tantalizingly silent today. The frustration of not knowing how to interpret them lured me to Australia in 1974, to work with living hunter-gatherer communities on their art. Although, in the end, I did more work on land claims than on rock art over the next seven years, the problem of interpreting the past and present art of other cultures has remained with me. The idea that we could hope to 'read' the rock art of cultures distant from our own in time and space has been subject to increasing criticism, much of which I agree with. Early researchers into Palaeolithic rock art thought that ethnographic study of recent hunter-gatherer art would provide direct parallels with prehistoric traditions. This expectation was long ago abandoned. It was replaced by the Structuralist approach. Structuralism seemed to provide a means of escape from the apparently random variability of human cultures. It held out the hope that general principles could be identified in the organisation of human thought, even when the choice of particular symbols was based on 'arbitrary' cultural convention. Structuralists assumed that behind exotic images lay familiar mental oppositions such as ma1e: female or cu1ture: nature. Â Bourdieu questioned whether such terms could accurately render understandings specific to the conventions of another culture. The Structuralist (an outsider) seemed to regard understanding a foreign culture as an exercise in code breaking (Bourdieu 1977: l), seeking to find familiar meanings, or sense, behind outwardly bizarre customs or images. Exotic behaviour is reduced to familiar categories such as gift-giving, feuding, and familial kinship, which are held to exist independently of the anthropologist's theory of culture. All too often, such categories prove to be derived from the history of our own social experience. The postmodernist critique of structuralism has cast considerable doubt on the possibility of reliably interpreting past efforts of communication. Modernism is the tradition of Descartes. The Cartesian approach sees a monologue as the prototype of language. It defines mental phenomena in terms of individual representations or states which accurately map the character of the outer world, and regards that external world as having qualities and meanings which exist independently of the language used to describe them. The Cartesian is opposed to the hermeneutic approach that leads to postmodernism, and sees human cognition and language as profoundly social. The hermeneutic approach contends that what is meant by a linguistic expression is only intelligible from within the social tradition that expression is drawn from (see, for example, Rommetveit 1987:92-96). Perception is shaped by culture. Postmodernism draws upon hermeneutics, or interpretive sociology. Postmodern anthropologists challenge Levi-Strauss' idea that the structure of culture is both transparent and unchanging, to be discovered by Levi-Strauss as he sat in his Parisian study, reading a missionary's report from the Amazon. Levi-Strauss claimed 'Myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact' (Levi-Strauss 1970:12). According to Derrida's theory of free-play, on the other hand, words gain their current meaning only through usages which set themselves in opposition to previous usages. Each usage leaves a trace which, in time, is eradicated by successive transformations of meaning. Thanks to the work of Geertz (1988) or Shanks and Tilley (1987), post-modemism has got a bad name in anthropology and archaeology for its apparently defeatist attitude to cross-cultural study. These writers have challenged the Modernist view that the Western social scientist can stand aloof, empirically recording the quaint customs of other cultures and then processing their observations by means of objective, scientific explanation. In the postmodern view, other cultural traditions are closed and inaccessible to us, not only because our language and symbolism are relative to our own arbitrary, cultural conventions, but because these conventions are themselves constantly subject to renegotiation. Meaning is created within language itself. No common ground exists by means of which translation of sense from one culture to another can be achieved. How, then, could we ever study the way in which members of another cultural tradition elicit information from rock art? 1s there, indeed, such a thing as a legitimate reading of a rock painting or engraving? Such views derive their intellectual status primarily from the work of Derrida (1976, 1978). For radical postmodernists such as Derrida it is not just prehistoric art that becomes uninterpretable, the same is true of what was said or done in the recent past within one's own tradition. This suggests even indigenous readings are gratuitous once the paint has dried on the rock. I shall argue that there is an important difference between the methods available to anthropology and archaeology for overcoming Derrida's negative stance.

We describe rare toreutic items found in the 1970s, 1990s, and 2010s near the Tomskaya Pisanitsa rock art site—a zoomorphic fi gurine, two anthropomorphic masks, and an ornithomorphic pendant. Parallels among the ritual and funerary artifacts from Southern and Western Siberia are discussed. The fi gurine representing a horse or an onager resembles certain examples of ritual toreutic art of the Tagar and Kizhirovo cultures (500–300 BC). Anthropomorphic masks represent the Tomsk-Narym variant of late Kulaika toreutics (100 BC to 500 AD) but may be as late as the sixth century, being associated with the post-Kulaika early medieval tradition. The ornithomorphic fi gurine, dating to 500–700 AD, belongs to the early medieval trans-cultural tradition that had originated from late Kulaika art. The Tomskaya Pisanitsa site resembles Early Iron Age and early medieval sanctuaries of Western and Southern Siberia with votive hoards of artifacts including toreutic ones. Such sites are part of the Northern Asian tradition of offerings made near rock art galleries. Hypotheses are advanced about the attitudes of the late Kulaika people to rock art sites in the fi rst half of the fi rst millennium AD.

The article presents the results of field research in South-Eastern Kazakhstan in 2022–2023. The authors introduce into scientific discourse information about seven locations of rock carvings with tamgas. Fifteen signs and the petroglyphs that accompany them are being published. The drawings are found on open vertical and horizontal planes of large and small rocky outcrops, on the tops of the southern, southwestern and southeastern slopes of the Kairakkol and Karakungey mountains. The rock carvings were made using two main techniques: picketing and surface carving. Sectors with tamgas are part of large clusters of petroglyphs of different periods, but at the same time they are located separately from other drawings. In one case, a similar sector was discovered on rocky planes located at a distance from placers of rock carvings. Figurative images are represented mainly by geometric symbols and their combinations. Diacritics – dots, lines, arcs and curls. The majority are tamgas, which find indirect analogies in the signs of the nomads of the Northern Black Sea region, Ustyurt, Southern Kazakhstan, Southern Siberia and Mongolia at the turn of eras. Among the petroglyphs that accompany the signs, there are images of snake-like and dragon-like figures, silhouette and outline figures of animals, some of which are made in an openwork manner. A new series of tamgas, identified in Eastern Semirechye, shows broad ethnocultural connections, the originality of the region’s population in the Hunno-Sarmatian period and the migration routes of nomads along the Dzungarian Alatau mountain system.

The paper features the problem of identification of natural-historical shrines in the case of petroglyphs of Mount TuruAlty in Kosh-Agachsk district of the Altai Republic. Currently, all rock art sites in Southern Siberia are considered in scientific literature as rock art monuments. The authors studied the Mount Turu-Alty, the location of the petroglyphs, and other archaeological monuments in the neighborhood. As a result, they offer a different scientific interpretation of the monument as a natural-historical shrine. On the mountain top there is a rocky platform with a vertically standing large stone that faces the south and is completely covered with images. In the vicinity, there are several stone mounds. The mountain top is clearly visible from the foot on the sides of the southern slope. From this center, there are two ridges of large stones extending down to the right and left: they go round the terrace-like platforms of the steep southern slope. This natural formation has the shape of an amphitheater. On its top, there is an altar-like large stone. Standing at the foot of the southern slope, one cannot but feel the sacredness of this natural formation. On the large boulders that frame the southern slope, there are grouped and single etchings of animals. The field studies revealed images on 271 stones; 97 of the images are grouped, most are thematic. According to the plots, most of the images refer to the first millennium BC and the first half of first millennium AD. At the beginning of the first millennium BC, in the early Saka period, Mount Turu-Alty obviously acquired a special sacred status and began to function as a natural-historical shrine. The "altar" stone played a special role in this geological composition. It stands vertically on the top of the mountain, and its southern side is covered with 101 images of stylized deer, sheep, and goats. The stone is the main symbol of Turu-Alty. In the center, there are two large figures of deer flying to the east. All the other silhouettes are much smaller; all but one face the east. The animals are subject to eastward movement towards the sun. The authors consider the Turu-Alty complex as a natural-historical shrine from the period of the first millennium BC – first millennium AD.

By combining ethnographic and evolutionary psychological approaches, this paper compares adaptive strategies of two groups of hunter-gatherers colonizing marginal environments, one in Southern Siberia (Minusinsk Basin) and the other in North America (Great Basin and Colorado Plateau). The biological and cultural survival of Southern Siberian (Evenki) and Basin-Plateau (Numic) hunter-gatherers depended upon developing a complex of social and symbolic strategies, including ritual, oral narratives and rock art. These symbolic representations, which emerged in response to reproductive and somatic demands, appear to have been preserved and transmitted inter-generationally, and to have recurred cross-culturally above chance.

The rapid expansion of cultural tourism has led to increased numbers of visitors to rock art sites throughout the world. The rise of rock art tourism has affected not only the preservation of rock art sites, but also the social values attributed to the sites by communities in the immediate vicinity. Social values refer to the social and cultural meanings that a place of heritage holds for a particular community. This article aims to discuss the influence of tourism on the social values that uphold local communities’ emotional attachment to rock art heritage, using the Huashan rock art area in China as a case study. Zuojiang Huashan Rock Art Cultural Landscape is the first rock art heritage in China proposed to be inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List and officially obtained World Heritage Status in July 2016. This article argues that many of the changes generated by the endeavour towards tourism promotion by the authorities in their pursuit of World Heritage designation have contributed to the reinforcement of the social values under discussion. However, negative feelings among the communities in response to the undesired consequences of the designation campaign might have resulted in the attenuation of such values. The ultimate goal of the research is to prompt further reflection on existing rock art heritage management mechanisms both in China and worldwide.

The Guanzhong area has a long history and rich cultural and artistic heritage. As an important art form, the traditional stone carving art in Guanzhong architecture has always been concerned by people, and its research is also extensive. The traditional part of Guanzhong architecture is based on the classification of stone carving art, further summarizing its subject matter and main techniques, and deeply discovering the performance of Guanzhong architectural stone carving art in folk culture, and putting this research into the digital animation of Guanzhong architectural stone carving shape. In performance research, it provides a new perspective and method for studying stone sculpture art, and provides theoretical support and practical guidance for further stone art protection.

Background: Interpreting the symbols found in the rock art of an extinct culture is hampered by the fact that such symbols are culturally determined. How does one break the circularity inherent in the fact that the knowledge of both the symbols and the culture comes from the same source? In this study, the circularity is broken for the Bradshaw rock art of the Kimberley by seeking anchors from outside the culture.Methods: Bradshaw rock art in the Kimberley region of Australia and Sandawe rock art in the Kolo region of Eastern Tanzania were surveyed in six visits on foot, by vehicle, by helicopter and from published or shared images, as well as from the published and online images of Khoisan rock art.Results: Uniquely shared images between Bradshaw and Sandawe art, such as the ‘mushroom head’ symbol of psilocybin use, link the two cultures and indicate that they were shamanistic. Therefore, many mysterious features in the art can be understood in terms of trance visualisations. A number of other features uniquely link Bradshaw and Sandawe cultures, such as a special affinity for small mammals. There are also many references to baobabs in early Bradshaw art but not later. This can be explained in the context of the Toba super‐volcano, the likely human transport of baobabs to the Kimberley and the extraordinary utility of the baobab.Conclusion: Many more mysterious symbols in Bradshaw rock art might await interpretation using the approaches adopted here.

İnsanlık tarihinde giysi kullanımı ne zaman başladığı bilinmemekte en erken dönemlerde avladıkları hayvan postlarını giysi olarak kullandığı varsayılmaktadır. İnsanoğlunun örtünme içgüdüsü ve doğal olaylardan korunma gereksiniminden doğan, giyim kuşam kültürü, tarih öncesi çağlardan başlayarak günümüze kadar gelmiştir. Giysiler dönemlerin, ülkelerin, toplulukların veya kişilerin özelliklerini yansıtan önemli objeler, kültürlerin en canlı belgelerinden de biri olmuşlardır. Mezopotamya coğrafyasında kurulan devletlerde, Eski Çağ Anadolu Uygarlıklarında tarih öncesi çağlara ait ilk buluntular sanat ve giyim kültürü hakkında bilgiler vermektedir. Prehistorya’ya ait giyim kuşam kültürü hakkında bilgileri duvar kabartmaları, çivi yazıları, kitabe, tabletler ve taş oymacılığı ile yapılan el sanatı eserler, giysiler hakkında bilgi vermektedir. Duvar kabartmalarında tasvir edilen insanların üzerlerindeki giysiler, farklı devirlerin giyim-kuşamını öğrenmemize yardımcı olmaktadır. Kurganlardan çıkarılan kanıtlar arkeologlara insanların giydiği giysilerde çıkarımlar yapma olanağı sağlamıştır. Toplumun sınıflara ayrılmasıyla giysiler arasındaki farklar da artmış, yaşan bu gelişmeler tarihin her döneminde olduğu gibi giyim kuşama da yansımıştır. Çok zengin bir giyim kuşam geleneği olmasına rağmen araştırmalar yetersizdir. Kültürel gelişmelerle değişime uğrayan giysilerin araştırılması önem arz etmektedir. Toplumlara göre farklı özellikler kazanan giysinin tarihsel süreçte gelişimini, bilinirliliğini arttırılmasına katkı sağlanması amacıyla bu çalışma yapılmıştır. Çalışmada nitel araştırma yöntemlerinden tarama modeli kullanılmıştır. Veri toplama tekniği olarak doküman analizi yapılmıştır. Elde edilen veriler örneklemeye uygun olduğu düşünülen görsel materyallerle desteklenmiştir. Bu araştırmada, giysilerin tarih öncesi dönemden (Prehistorik) başlayarak, Sümerler, İran, Mısır, Çin, Hun, Eski Anadolu Uygarlıklarında; Hititler, Uygurlar Frigler, Urartular, Bizans ve Osmanlı Dönemi ve Anadolu halk giysileri araştırılmış ve giysi örnekleri ile ele alınmıştır. It is unknown when the usage of clothes began in human history, however it is likely that they utilized the skins of the animals they hunted as clothing in the beginning. Starting in prehistoric times, the clothing generation's culture, which was developed from the human desire to cover and the necessity to protect against natural events, has made its way down to the present day. Important artifacts that reflect the peculiarities of many eras, countries, communities, or individuals have also become one of the most vivid cultural documents. The first ancient artifacts in the Ancient Anatolian Civilizations provide information on the culture of art and apparel in the states created in Mesopotamia's geography. It includes information about prehistoric clothing, wall reliefs, cuneiform writings, inscriptions, tablets, and handicrafts made with stone carvings, as well as clothing. The clothes worn by the people shown on the wall reliefs teach us about different eras of attire. Archaeologists have been able to make judgments about people's clothing based on evidence found in the kurgans. With the division of society into classes, the differences between clothes have also increased, and these developments have been reflected in clothing as in every period of history. Although there is a very rich tradition of clothing generation, researches are insufficient. It is crucial to look into the clothing that has altered as a result of cultural changes. This study was carried out in order to contribute to the development and awareness of the garment, which has evolved according to the societies, in the historical process. In the study, one of the descriptive research methods, the screening model was performed. Document analysis was performed as a data collection technique. The data obtained were supported by visual materials that were considered suitable for sampling. In this research, starting from the prehistoric period (Prehistoric), the clothes in the Sumerians, Iran, Egypt, China, Huns, Ancient Anatolian Civilizations; Hittites, Uyghurs, Phrygians, Urartians, Byzantine and Ottoman Periods and Anatolian folk costumes were researched and discussed with clothing samples.

Superpositions and superimpositions in rock art studies: Reading the rock face at Pundawar Manbur, Kimberley, northwest Australia

Until recent years, most western scholars had overlooked the existence of rock art in Indonesia or viewed it as being of limited antiquity and of largely regional-interest only. In 2014, however, an Indonesian-Australian team announced the results of a program of Uranium-series (U-series) dating of rock art in Maros-Pangkep, Sulawesi, including a surprisingly early antiquity of at least 39.9 ka for a hand stencil and 35.4 ka for a figurative animal painting. U-series dating more recently has yielded minimum ages for figurative animal painting of 40 ka in Kalimantan and 45.5 ka in Maros-Pangkep, with the latter presently constituting the world’s oldest dated example of representational art. Indonesia’s previously little-known rock art has been propelled to the global stage. Here, we examine how scholars are grappling with the implications of ‘ice age art’ in Indonesia and its integration, for the first time, into models of early human artistic culture in other parts of the world. In particular, we discuss the seemingly close stylistic parallels between Late Pleistocene figurative animal art in Indonesia and early representational depictions of animals in the Arnhem Land and Kimberley regions of northern Australia. We consider scenarios that could explain these similarities, including the idea that a single figurative rock art style spread into Australia from Wallacea during the early movements of our species in the region.

An archaeological survey of Tasouj district, Kavar County in eastern Fars province was conducted by Parsa Ghasemi in March 2012. The survey resulted in the identification of 34 archaeological sites. Two sites – a cave and a rock shelter named Pir-Barreh – contained rock paintings. The two sites are located 10km north of Kavar, about 1km northeast of the village of Anjireh on the eastern flank of the Pir-Barreh gorge. The rock art is predominantly composed of paintings in ochre red, depicting designs that may be dendromorphs (tree forms), geometric/abstract patterns (square, fingertip decorations, cross-like motifs, a possible image of the sun, filled circular images and other unidentified forms), and positive hand prints. These works were probably created by dabbing fingers in a moistened red pigment which is likely to have been hematite. The style used in these paintings is similar to those discovered in eastern Fars. The existence of paintings of a similar style in eastern Fars province may indicate that a specific style of rock art culture was prevalent across a wide area of the southern Zagros Mountains region. This painting style bears a strong resemblance to the style of motifs on potsherds dated to the Chalcolithic era found in the region, including some from Tall-e Gap (5000-4200 BC), from Bakun A (4200-3800 BC) and potsherds of the Late Susiana 1 phase (4800-4300 B. C). This style and motif repertoire appears to have had remarkable continuity into the recent past in the tattoo art of some nomadic groups in the region.