Prehistoric Art Research Articles

Ecological Mapping for the Preventive Conservation of Prehistoric Mural Paintings in Rock Habitats: the Site of Filiano (Basilicata, Italy)

Biodeterioration phenomena are of great relevance in rock settlements, due to favourable environmental conditions, such as the infiltration of rainwaters, condensation phenomena and abundance of salts and organic nutrients. Rinaldi’s rock shelter in Filiano, which is located in a natural forest of mixed oaks is of great value due to the important traces of prehistoric paintings. It is an emblematic case of the delicate balance, achieved throughout the centuries, between the environment and artwork. During the plurimillenarian history of the site, a portion of the ceiling that covered the shelter collapsed, leaving signs that are still visible today, together with traces of blackening left by the fires of ancient settlements. Several of the biodeteriogens typical of rocky habitats have already been detected and include algae, cyanobacteria, mosses, lichens, vascular plants and fungi, which form macroscopic communities. Each community has an ecological preference and the mapping of their distribution is a suitable tool for understanding variations in the environmental factors that most affect them. Relating ecological data to the taxonomical characterization of the species and to the spatial distribution of each community, a site map of the humidity and of the nutrients was obtained. Among the various communities, microcolonial fungi (MCF), which appear as little black spots, here, represent the most critical risk factor, due to their low water needs. An evaluation of the biological risk for the possible future attack of such a biological community was made, suggesting indirect mitigation measures, through modification of the microclimatic and local ventilation conditions.

Noaidi drums from Sápmi, rock paintings in Finland and Sámi cultural heritage – an investigation

ABSTRACTA new, extensive examination of figures with horns and triangular shaped heads in prehistoric rock paintings in Finland reveals remarkable parallels with similar attributes on the Radien and Akka groups of spirits, pictured as male and female powers of the sky, earth and underworld, painted on the heads of indigenous Sámi noaidi drums from Swedish and Norwegian Sápmi during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What makes this particular study of interest is that the cultural context or origins of rock paintings in Finland remains ambiguous. They are contextualised as being ‘Finnish’ according to academic literature. This paper explores these theories further and presents the findings of this investigation. In light of these findings, a re-examination and re-interpretation of the cultural context of rock paintings in Finland concerning Sámi pre-Christian religion and cultural heritage is prompted.

Red and yellow ochres from the archaeological site Pedra do Cantagalo I, in Piripiri, Piauí, Brazil

The archaeological site Pedra do Cantagalo I is a sandstone shelter displaying rupestrian inscriptions. It is located in the rural area of the municipality of Piripiri, in the northern region of the Piaui state, Brazil. The site was found as being originally decorated with more than 1,900 prehistoric rupestrian paintings, along with engravings, lithics, ceramic fragments and mineral pigments forming reddish and yellowish ochres. Materials of these ochres, collected from recent excavations in this archaeological site, were analyzed by energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (EDXRF); backscattering and transmission 57Fe-Mossbauer spectroscopy at 298 K and 25 K and powder X-ray diffraction (XRD), in an effort to assess the chemical and mineralogical characteristics of these sources of pigments that composed the ancient paint materials of the site. The iron contents (expressed as Fe 2O3) for the reddish ochres were found to range from ∼60 to ∼68 mass%; for the yellowish ochres the corresponding content was ∼34 mass%, as determined by EDXRF. From the Mossbauer spectra for these red ochre samples, hematite (αFe 2O3) or a mixture of hematite and goethite (αFeOOH) were identified. Actually, the spectra at room temperature for the yellow ochres are rather complex, as it is usual for most soil clay materials. At least part of the intense central doublet was assumed to be from superparamagnetic iron oxides in very small particles. The Mossbauer patterns at 25 K allowed confirming this assumption, as the superparamagnetic relaxation effects were virtually suppressed; the spectral contributions due to goethite could be thus more easily separated.

The Art of Assemblage: Styling Neolithic Art

The art of Neolithic Britain and Ireland consists of a variety of curvilinear and geometric motifs pecked into stone (in open-air rock art or passage tombs) or carved into portable artefacts of chalk, stone or antler. Because of its abstract nature the art has proved problematic for archaeologists. Initially archaeologists assumed the art was representational; now most scholars have abandoned this view, and simply approach the art stylistically. Here I argue that stylistic analysis is insufficient to understand this art: instead the process of making provides a fuller understanding of this art. It is argued that the practice of assemblage is a key aspect of the process of making.

Hearing rock art landscapes: a survey of the acoustical perception in the Sierra de San Serván area in Extremadura (Spain)

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the augmented audibility of distant sounds that is experienced in some rock art sites. We propose a method developed in acoustical physics to measure this acoustic phenomenon, the Transmission Loss (TL) analysis. We have assessed the validity of the method in our study area, the Sierra de San Serván in the region of Extremadura (Spain), an area where from the hundreds of shelters only sixty five were decorated with Schematic art during prehistory. The analysis undertaken in it has provided unequivocal data that indicate that augmented audibility of distant sounds seemed to be a factor considered by the prehistoric artists for the selection of rock art shelters to paint in. This is especially made clear when a comparison between the results obtained in shelters with rock art and others in the same area without it is made. From all the sites one stands out, that of Las Palomas 2, with the best results. This site is also special for other features that no other site in the area has in terms of difficult access and high visibility.

Body Topographies and Health Geographie: e-Health, Intercultural Medicine, Legal Chorology

The essay examines the anthropological, legal, and semiotic implications of a new method for healthcare, precisely, “e-Health.” In many respects, telemedicine constitutes an extraordinary improvement that could solve many of the problems resulting from geographical distance between patients and doctors. Despite the benefits of providing medical assistance through an intensive use of e-Health, however, there are potentially serious pitfalls. These primarily stem from the apparent immediacy of the images transmitted and displayed by IT devices. Seeing the body of the remote patient synchronically represented on the desktop conveys the idea of an actual proximity. In other words, the visual representation could be (mis)taken for a real presence, as if the patient were “here and now” before the doctor’s eyes. However, geographical distance often includes a cultural remoteness between the two sides of the medical relationship. The patient’s body and its disease are not mere empirical data, but rather epitomes of a web of experiences; they are constituted by a multifaceted relationship with life environments. These relations move through experiential landscapes, projected across space and time, and are semiotically summarized and translated in the phenomenon of “disease,” the object of healthcare. Gaining knowledge of the “semiotic clouds” underlying the patient’s bodily conditions is a very difficult task which doctors usually accomplish through their cultural continuity with the universe of sense and experience lived by the people asking for their assistance. While telemedicine can annihilate physical distances through the immediacy of its remote images, unfortunately it is not equally efficacious in bridging cultural distances. On the contrary, its immediacy could lead to a false conviction that what the doctors see on the desktop is all that they need to understand about the patient’s conditions. This assumption could, however, lead to dangerous diagnostic mistakes due to the doctor’s belief that his environmental and cultural imagery is the same as that of the patient.The idea that images, taken in their iconic appearance, can convey a whole empirical reality is to be radically confuted, precisely to enable a positive exploitation of all the possibilities potentially offered by telemedicine. To illustrate the pitfalls encapsulated in the presupposition that seeing is synonymous to understanding, I trace a sort of brief history of the iconization of concepts. My cognitive journey begins with prehistorical cave paintings and unfolds to include contemporary comics. The path of the representative function through the ages demonstrates the relationship between the textual and figurative elements of communication, and at the same time, the human tendency (gradually increasing) to transform the semiotic/graphemic representational sequences into symbolic/conceptual synthetic images. This process accompanied the creation of bounded cultural circuits of communication by Neolithic man, which corresponded to settled agricultural civilization, and the social transmission of implicit semantic basins that people held and used to understand each other.If e-Health is to achieve its goals, an awareness of the landscapes of semantic implicitness that each cultural and spatial circuit of experience provides must be cultivated. Doctors and patients involved in the telemedical relationship will have to consider the body as a sort of border between geo-cultural spaces, to avoid the massive dangers hidden in the overlooking as well as the misinterpreting such implicit landscapes. This means that the empirical visibility of the body should be reinterpreted as an interface of translation between the different spaces of experience and signification which telemedicine puts in proximity, despite their geo-cultural distance. Within this new semiotic and experiential inter-space drawn by the sextant of the human body, different anthropological and legal considerations are to be trans-duced so as to coherently and pragmatically support the representational synchrony supplied by IT devices. Linguistic, experiential, and legal discrepancies could break that apparent conceptual unity of image, and make semantically asynchronous what only appears to be empirically represented in its whole immediacy. The risk is that this asynchronism could fuel deep cognitive biases stemming from the superimposition of the doctor’s implicit knowledge and spatio-temporal framework over the patient’s imaginative and experiential semiotic landscape. Should this occur, an anthropological ignorance of close-and-remote Otherness could induce the ultimate danger: diagnostic errors that poison the waters for Telemedicine.

Ritual and Duality: Early Agricultural Period Figurines from the Tucson Basin

Archaeologists working along the Santa Cruz River in the Tucson Basin have found numerous small figurines dating to the San Pedro and Cienega phases of the Early Agricultural period (1500 B.C.–A.D. 150). Excavations at a large multi-component site (the Dairy Site) have added to this assemblage. Previous researchers believed that the most common type of Early Agricultural period figurines depicted human females and functioned in household ceremonies related to ancestor veneration. Although the figurines have human traits, it has been suggested that they also depicted human male genitalia. If this is the case, then the figurines might display duality, a common theme in prehistoric art and religion in the New World. In those figurines, both male and female traits are displayed in a single object. These depictions suggest symbolism related to sexuality or fertility. Rather than functioning in ceremonies of ancestor veneration, the Early Agricultural figurines may have played a role in puberty or fertility rites.

Dating of fossil human teeth and shells from Toca do Enoque site at Serra das Confusões National Park, Brazil.

This work reports the dating of a fossil human tooth and shell found at the archaeological site Toca do Enoque located in Serra das Confusões National Park (Piauí, Brazil). Many prehistoric paintings have been found at this site. An archaeological excavation unearthed three sepulchers with human skeletons and some shells. Two Brazilian laboratories, in Ribeirão Preto (USP) and Recife (UFPE), independently performed Electron Spin Resonance (ESR) measurements to date the tooth and the shell and obtain the equivalent dose received by each sample. The laboratories determined similar ages for the tooth and the shell (~4.8 kyBP). The results agreed with C-14 dating of the shell and other samples (charcoal) collected in the same sepulcher. Therefore, this work provides a valid inter-comparison of results by two independent ESR-dating laboratories and between two dating methods; i.e., C-14 and ESR, showing the validity of ESR dating for this range of ages.

An exploratory study on cultural and health significance of traditional tattooing practices among tribal community in Chhattisgarh state, India

This explorative study carried out from four districts of Chhattisgarh state namely Surajpur, Surguja, Balrampur and Jashpur. From each district, four villages were selected and from each village 25 tribal respondents were selected thus 300 respondents were selected for this study. About 65.33 percent of the tribal were between 36and 50 years of age group, more than one fourth (34.67%) of the farmers were educated up to primary school level, about half (49.00 %) of the respondents were at the income range of Rs. 25,001 to Rs. 75,000 and about 80% of the population of the state is rural and the main livelihood of the villagers is agriculture and agriculture-based small industry. Tattooing is one of the livelihood option for the tribal community in the study area. Tattooing has been practiced across the world since at least Neolithic times (7000 BCE), as confirmed by mummified preserved skin, prehistoric art, literatures, poetry, proverbs and the archaeological records. In Southern India, permanent tattoos are called pachakutharathu. In northern India, permanent tattoos are called Godna. Tattoos have been used as cultural symbols among many tribal populations, as well as the caste-based Hindu population of India. These tattoos have also been used as integral part of the tribal’s lifestyle Chhattisgarh state of India.

Influence of moisture content on colour of granular materials. Part I: experiments on yellow ochre

The water is suspected of remobilizing pigments of prehistoric painting into small worm-like heaps named vermiculations. To preserve these artworks, the moisture content of pigments must be monitored. Due to the fragility of the paintings and the technical constraints on the in-situ measurements, colour measurement is proposed as a non-invasive way to access humidity. This study aims at characterizing more precisely the influence of the moisture content on the optical behaviour of yellow ochre. The light reflected by the surface of drying ochre is measured with a gonio-spectroradiometer. A scenario is proposed: the water saturation at high moisture contents is connected to the presence of a specular radiation which brings a loss of chromatic information. The evaporation of water brings the disappearance of the specular radiation and the augmentation of the diffuse radiation. These first results are promising for the development of a non-destructive in situ method of moisture measurement.

Building new Neolithic connections through chalk art: the value of the archaeological collections of John Pull and James Park Harrison

ABSTRACTThis article aims to bring to life the collecting strategies of two archaeologists who both excavated at the same British Neolithic flint mine site, seventy-five years apart. The site of Cissbury, Sussex, where flint extraction took place in the Neolithic between 4000 and 3000 cal. bc, produced evidence of flint-tool production in the form of axes and flint debitage, but also human burials and marks incised both on the chalk walls of the mines and on smaller detached pieces of chalk. Due to their interpretations of the worked chalk material these archaeologists were both subject to some derision from their colleagues during their lives. Neither individual had formal or thorough archaeological training but they made efforts to understand and retain this unusual worked chalk material that, at the time, was seen as problematic. Their collections, when viewed together in the light of contemporary research, indicate both a historically situated problem of the acceptance of prehistoric art and the value of revisiting their findings. By integrating known work with new archival research, it is possible to conclude that their acknowledgement of chalk art in flint-mining contexts allows for a greater breadth of interpretation in the present and the value of curation today.

The role of the cave in the expression of prehistoric societies

Abstract One of the major characteristics of prehistoric arts is that they belong to a very specific spatial context, be it open air, rocks, shelters or caves. The presence of these images in these particular places is a mark of their identity and of the heritage left by these ancient societies and their beliefs, ever since the first cultural manifestations of the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe. The specific choice of a wall or of a particular background, of a location in the cave can thus be just as significant as the image that one chooses to represent or the way in which they choose to represent it. This is why the present research intends to study the links between the images and their supports, through a family which has already shown a particular affinity with the space: the family of signs. The example of the signs highlights the fundamental role of the supports in the construction of images and the important and sometimes radical influence of the cave on their graphic identity. They illustrate thus “ways of expression” of the prehistoric men, expression of their developed and complex reasoning.

Raman microscopy of prehistoric paintings in French megalithic monuments

Remains of pictorial decorations in a series of six representative megalithic monuments of Brittany (France) and two French stelae have been studied by micro‐Raman spectroscopy for the first time. Fungal colonies on the painted orthostats made it difficult to obtain in situ Raman spectra of the paint components. Nevertheless, paint micro‐specimens studied in the laboratory by micro‐Raman spectroscopy, X‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy and scanning electronic microscopy combined with energy dispersive X‐ray spectroscopy have made possible to characterise the materials present. The minerals α‐quartz, albite, microcline, muscovite, phlogopite, celadonite, beryl and anatase have been identified in the granitic rocks supporting the paintings, while dolomite and calcite are dominant in the calcareous rocky substrata. Haematite is the main component of the red pictographs, whereas amorphous carbon and manganese oxides/oxihydroxides have been used in the black ones. Calcite, gypsum and amorphous carbon have been detected as additional components of the paint in some cases. Contamination with modern tracing materials (polystyrene and ε‐copper‐phthalocyanine blue) has been detected in several cases. The presence of pigments as decorative elements in megalithic monuments of Western France and its possible relation with those of the Iberian Peninsula create interesting expectations for the knowledge of the European megalithic culture. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In Search of Lost Time. Dating Methods for Prehistoric Art: the Example of Aurignacian Sites

The need for an accurate chronological framework is particularly important for the early phases of the Upper Paleolithic, which correspond to the first works of art attributed to Aurignacian groups. Carbon-14 is the only method used for the direct dating of organic pigments, but indirect methods are used to date subsequent deposits on rock art (thermoluminescence, OSL, Uranium/thorium, etc.). All these methods are based on hypotheses and present interpretative difficulties, which form the basis of the discussion presented in this article.

Characterising pigments on 30 000-year-old portable art from Apollo 11 Cave, Karas Region, southern Namibia

As an unambiguous indication of complex cognitive capacity, representational art presents explicit evidence for modern and symbolic human behaviour. The only examples of African figurative art dating to the Late Pleistocene comprise seven stone plaques recovered from Apollo 11 Cave in the Huns Mountains, southern Namibia. The plaques derive from a single anthropogenic layer dated by radiocarbon (14C) accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) and optically simulated luminescence (OSL) methods to c. 30000years ago. We present the results of digital (CIE) L*a*b* colourimetric and portable energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (ED-XRF), Raman spectroscopic and Fourier transform infrared reflectance (FT-IR) analyses of the pigments present on the plaques. These results provide the earliest direct evidence, in Africa, for the preparation of pigment-based paint-like mixtures and their application to create prehistoric art. Our research shows that in the creation of the depictions on the plaques, the artists used black pigments derived from manganese and charcoal, red pigments likely derived from ocherous shale and white pigments possibly derived from ostrich eggshell. Additionally, these plaques provide unique evidence for the combined use of mineral- and carbon-based pigment ‘crayons’ during the African Middle Stone Age.

Prehistoric Art in Europe: A Deep-Time Social History

Although many researchers have studied prehistoric European artthere has been virtually no attention paid to the broad prehistory of art as a specialized form of material culture: virtually all studies focus narrowly on single bodies of art. This paper presents a new approach to analyzing prehistoric art: quantitative deep time study. It analyzes a database of 211 art traditions from across Europe and from 40,000 B.C. to 0 AD.to identify changes in the amountnatureand use of prehistoric art. The results reveal clear long-term trends. The amount of art made increased sharply with the origins of sedentary farming and continued to rise throughout prehistory. New forms of art arise in conjunction with new ways of life: “period genres “ are closely tied into patterns of social change. There are also long-term shifts in aesthetics and the uses of art (such as a gradual shift from arts of ritual and concealment to arts of surface and display). These resultsthough preliminaryshow that a deep-time approach familiar from topics such as climate change is applicable to art; the resulting social history can illuminate both art and its social context.

Case studies of soil in art

Abstract. The material and symbolic appropriations of soil in artworks are numerous and diverse, spanning many centuries and artistic traditions, from prehistoric painting and ceramics to early Renaissance works in Western literature, poetry, paintings, and sculpture, to recent developments in film, architecture, and contemporary art. Case studies focused on painting, installation, and film are presented with the view of encouraging further exploration of art about, in, and with soil as a contribution to raising soil awareness.

Documenting the light sensitivity of Spanish Levantine rock art paintings

Abstract. A case study to evaluate the use of microfading spectrometry (MFS) for the study of colored systems found in prehistoric rock art paintings was conducted in the Cova Remígia rock-shelter, Castellón (Spain). This rock shelter is part of the rock art sites of the Mediterranean basin on the Iberian Peninsula included in UNESCO’s World Heritage List. Some of the paintings belonging to this group are exposed to environmental factors including natural daylight, wind and rain, depending on the time of the day and the season of the year. Therefore, their preservation is a major concern to stakeholders and researchers responsible for protecting and studying these prehistoric paintings. The experimental work in Cova Remigia focused on measuring the reflectance curves (400-700 nm) and determining the photostability of various areas containing red and black pigments on the rock art paintings. The preliminary results indicate that MFS is a suitable technique for studying the response to light of rock/pigment systems found in rock art sites. The advantages and limitations of the technique are discussed.

AN ANTHROPOMORPHIC HORN FIGURINE FROM THE NORTHERN FOOTHILLS OF THE KUZNETSKY ALATAU, SOUTHERN SIBERIA

The article introduces an unusual anthropomorphic horn figurine, found out of context in the foothills of the Kuznetsky Alatau and owned by the Tisul local museum, Kemerovo Region. The iconographic and stylistic analysis of the figurine suggests an Okunev attribution (early 2nd millennium BC). Given the archaeological situation in the Kuznetsky Alatau at that time, an Okunev migration is possible. Certain artistic devices have not hitherto been described in the prehistoric art of Siberia.

Relations between rock art and ritual practice: a case study from eastern India

The ability of making art or artistic objects is one of the most important features of human being. The earliest evidence of artistic objects can be dated back to the Acheulian tradition of lower Paleolithic culture. Ethnographic evidences on the present day communities suggest that hunting, magic or ritual practices are the major causes behind the production of prehistoric arts. The present work attempts to find out relations between ritual practices and rock art production in a recently discovered prehistoric rock art site of eastern India. The supportive ethnographic data for the analysis of this rock art assemblage were largely unavailable. Due to this reason this study solely concentrates upon the arrangement, composition and context of the archeological assemblages and rock art itself to find out interrelations in between rock art and ritual structure. The outcome of the present work, with all its limitations, reveals that archaeological assemblages and context of a rock art site can give necessary information regarding the motives behind production of rock art.