Iconographic changes through time in Upper Paleolithic parietal art

Abstract

Art traditions reflect beliefs, practices, customs and unconscious factors. If it is relatively easy to study these features in historic art traditions, the same is not true for prehistoric times. Archaeology has to rely on multidisciplinary approaches in order to counterbalance the deficiencies in documentation. In the case of Upper Paleolithic parietal art, the large quantity of images permits a quantitative study of different iconographic features and their change through time. In recent work, I created a statistical database with the program SPSS containing more than 2,000 images of parietal art from the Upper Paleolithic. The study of correlations between different discrete variables provides the possibility of finding specific cultural “markers.” This represents an alternative to the study of stylistic features, a qualitative and valid methodology that is sometimes criticized for its lack of objectivity. In the following, I present the change through time of the preferential profile orientation of figures in order to confirm or cast doubts about the cultural boundaries in Upper Paleolithic Europe.