Making rock art under the Spanish empire: a comparison of hunter gatherer and agrarian contact rock art in North-central Chile

Abstract

The production of rock art was a recurrent practice in pre-Colombian America and continued after the arrival of Europeans in AD 1540 and conquest by the Spanish Empire. Contact rock art associated with this historical moment is known in various regions of the Andes. The main focus of study has been through characterisation, defining relative chronologies and assessing which rock art images are attributable to Indigenous communities. In this work, we explore the contact rock art of north-central Chile through two complementary lines of discussion. On the one hand, we assess how the manufacture of rock art in colonial times articulated with earlier production dynamics. On the other, the co-existence of agrarian and hunter gatherer groups in this region in the 16th century AD allows us to compare how the rock art of these two groups reacted to the imposition of Spanish colonisation. The results enable us to identify similarities and differences in the dynamics of contact rock art in the two groups, related both to Spanish policies and to the historical traditions of native communities. Despite the differences, the new visual productions were incorporated into the ancestral spaces of both the agrarian and hunter gatherer communities.