Archaeologies of Art

Time, Place, and Identity

Inés Domingo Sanz, Dánae Fiore, Sally K May

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781598742657
• eBook ISBN: 9781315434315
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

This international volume draws together key research that examines visual arts of the past and contemporary indigenous societies. Placing each art style in its temporal and geographic context, the contributors show how depictions represent social mechanisms of identity construction, and how stylistic differences in product and process serve to reinforce cultural identity. Examples stretch from the Paleolithic to contemporary world and include rock art, body art, and portable arts. Ethnographic studies of contemporary art production and use, such as among contemporary Aboriginal groups, are included to help illuminate artistic practices and meanings in the past. The volume reflects the diversity of approaches used by archaeologists to incorporate visual arts into their analysis of past cultures and should be of great value to archaeologists, anthropologists, and art historians. Sponsored by the World Archaeological Congress.

CHAPTER 1

Archaeologies of Art: Time, Place, and Identity in Rock Art, Portable Art, and Body Art

Inés Domingo Sanz, Dánae Fiore, and Sally K. May

Time, place, and identity are some of the main issues archaeologists try to confront through the empirical and analytical study of visual arts (rock art, portable art, and body art). The classical view of these archaeological remains as art for art’s sake, created by a gifted individual or having a specific/unique aesthetic quality (for example, Reinach in Ucko and Rosenfeld 1967) is no longer supported in the academic arena. Just as with any other archaeological remains, visual arts are filled with significance and encode many levels of information about the identity of the artists and their sociocultural context. This information can be more or less successfully decoded through different ways of doing archaeology, understood as the study of past societies through the analysis of their material culture. Archaeological evidence is usually debris of human activities, often scattered fragments resulting from abandonment or destruction. However, the three particular artistic endeavours analysed in this book – rock art (images painted or engraved on rocks), portable art (decorated artefacts or artefacts shaped with specific forms), and body art (images painted or tattooed on the body) – are more than discarded fragments of human activity. They are both a reflection of, and a constructing force behind, human culture. Likewise, even if it is internationally accepted that the meaning of the message of past art traditions (particularly when they are prehistoric) is inaccessible in the present, there are enough data hidden in the motifs to place them in cultural, spatial, and temporal contexts.

Considered within this context, this book unites international case studies to explore questions of time, place, and identity through the archaeological and ethnoarchaeological analysis of rock art, contemporary Aboriginal art, and body art. The long and ongoing debate about the misuse and in/appropriateness of the term ‘art’ for past and non-Western images is not central to this book (see Anati 2002; Conkey and Hastorf 1990; Fiore 1996; Layton 1991; Leroi-Gourhan 1964; Ucko and Rosenfeld 1967; among others), and the term is broadly used throughout the chapters as a common denominator of the wide realm of images created and viewed by past and present human groups in different parts of the globe.

The chapters in this book reflect this openness in attitudes to art and of its relationship to time, place, and identity within an archaeological framework. There is a great diversity of frameworks and analyses reflected in these eleven chapters, and these archaeologies (plural) of art show that there are several viewpoints to the issue of how time, place, and identity can be explored through art. At the same time, this selection of chapters shows the limits of each of these viewpoints which, in turn, relates to the nature of the archaeological questioning and to the low visibility of many factors in the archaeological record. In line with this, tackling the issue of, for example, identity in art does not involve imagining situations but rather tying interpretations and theories to material correlates. Archaeology can contribute considerably more to the study of art than picture books and pseudoscience.

Archaeologies versus Archaeology

Plurality is one of the main notions this book embraces, and connotations of this are invoked by each of the concepts tackled in this volume.

The word ‘art’, even if singular, involves the wide range of visual forms in which artistic creations can be shaped, including the three main artistic endeavours analysed through this volume, rock art, body art, and portable art.

Time is conceived in different ways by different cultures, be it lineal, cyclic, spiral, or simply disregarded as a factor affecting reality (Bailey 1983; Garcia Canclini 1986; Gosden 1994; Ridley 1994; Rowlands 1993; Shanks and Tilley 1987). Approaching such variety of conceptions about time through a contemporary perspective is clearly a challenge. The picture becomes even more complex when it is considered that archaeologists deal with fragmentary pieces of material culture. The eleven chapters in this book represent a small selection of the wide range of temporal phases or periods recognizable in world artistic production. These include the Palaeolithic and the current practices of engravers in Foz Côa (Portugal); the precontact and postcontact artistic traditions of different American populations (Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, Puerto Rico), the Neolithic art of Mediterranean Spain and the Saharan groups; and the current artistic practices of three distinct Australian Aboriginal cultures. In all these cases, time has been conceived more as an external analytical framework to plot a specific artistic phenomenon or stylistic sequence (that is, from an ‘etic’ perspective) than as an internal constituent of art traditions (that is, from an ‘emic’ perspective).

Place can also be culturally conceived and constructed in a number of ways, from its conception as an external, objective, and exclusively material frame for human action to its conception as a subjective, animated being that is an integral part of human existence (for instance, Hernando 2000; Tilley 1994; Ucko and Layton 1999). Again, grasping for the traces of such conceptions in the archaeological remains of art creations is quite a challenge, and this is why most of the chapters in this book have tackled the study of place mainly as a particular position or point in space used for producing, exchanging, or displaying visual arts. Nevertheless, it is also clear that in many chapters, place has been conceived as a sociocultural construction, an active socialization of space that has been brought into cultural life through its visual marking. By selecting case studies from the four continents (Africa/Namibia, America/Argentina/Chile/Guatemala/Puerto Rico, Europe/Portugal/Spain, and Oceania/Australia), we encompasses multiple places and landscapes that have been partly constituted through the creation of artistic expressions.

We also tackle identity plurally in this book: It is conceived at different scales (from individual to group to society to human species; from motif, to artefact or body or site, to region, and so on). Moreover, it involves both past and present identities of art producers/viewers and present identities of the archaeologists who study them (Hernando 2002; Jones 1997). These latter are regarded in this book as active agents in the construction of knowledge, values, and feelings toward other people’s – past and present – identities, and, as the chapters of this book clearly show, their involvement in this process requires a degree of self-awareness in order to develop a critical approach to their own work.

Thus, by discussing Archaeologies, this book aims to draw attention to the connotation of plurality invoked by each of the mentioned concepts. Moreover, the plural use of the word ‘archaeology’ is consciously directed to reflect the plurality of methods available to archaeologists to address the same archaeological questions related to art, time, place, and identity, and the multiple backgrounds of the researchers contributing to this volume.

Time, Place, and Identity in Focus

Archaeologies of Art aims to understand how artists leave marks of authorship in the work of art: through a plurality of methods used by archaeologists worldwide to interpret this information, those marks of authorship are attributable to specific times, places, and identities. The ethnoarchaeological studies in this book provide the framework to observe through informed methods how artists negotiate and construct their individual or group identities through the creation, display, and consumption of rock, portable, and body art (see chapters by Smith; May; Taçon, Kelleher, King, and Brennan; and Fiore). The archaeological studies of rock art illustrate how the material evidence provides the tools to reconstruct the identities of societies in the past (see chapters by Lenssen; Gallardo and De Souza; Domingo Sanz; Robinson) and in the present (see chapters by Luís and García Díez; and Roe and Hayward). Far from suggesting the use of ethnographic examples as direct analogies to interpret art, this book aims to combine ethnography and archaeology to create a more critical and scientific methodology for the archaeological study of visual arts. The ethnoar-chaeological chapters in this book also avoid the use of ethnography as a source of ‘cautionary tales’, since these serve mainly to pinpoint ambiguous factors in material culture patterning but usually do not provide methodological tools to break down such ambiguity and move forward toward the systematic interpretation of such patterns. Ethnography is then viewed both as a way of constructing knowledge about the material correlates of creating and displaying visual arts and as a medium to test archaeological methods for studying visual arts: Both aspects help to create awareness about the depth and the limitations of archaeological knowledge.

The marks of authorship left by ancient or recent artists are also combined with the marks of authorship left by archaeologists when studying them: this book aims to develop a sense of awareness about the fact that social identity is not just a past process fixed in time and space but that it is also rather a malleable process influenced by the archaeologists who are researching it. The different manners in which the issue of art and identity are tackled through the eleven chapters of this book are, indeed, a tangible way of demonstrating that social identity is also inextricably involved in each author’s way of doing science.

Within this framework, the unity of the book is given by a series of key questions addressed by the contributors from their different archaeological or ethnoarchaeological perspectives and case studies:

■ How is social identity constructed and/or reproduced by art?

■ What are the scopes and the limitations of the use of this concept in the archaeologies of art?

■ What type of evidence is relevant, and which kind of analyses are required?

■ To what extent do we as archaeologists create an identity for past and present-day people who create/d rock art, portable art, or body art?

■ What is the role of living art producers and/or people related to ancient art producers in the current construction of these identities?

To address these questions, the material aspects of identity are the main source of information. It is accepted that these material aspects of identity will have a certain spatial and temporal distribution (which may or may not be archeologically recognisable) and will be liable to change in place and in time. Furthermore, the material aspects of social identity are not only distributed through time and space; the ways in which space and time are conceived, perceived, and manipulated are constitutive of identity, too.

Constructing Time Frames, Revealing Time Conceptions

As noted above, time can be addressed in archaeology from an ‘etic’ perspective, that is, centred on the archaeologist’s own concepts, and from an ‘emic’ perspective, which intends to grasp some of the implications of other people’s conceptions of time which are usually different from those held by the researcher. The chapters in this book conceive time mainly as an external framework to locate art diachronically and are thus based on an ‘etic’, western perspective. Yet this does not mean that the concept of time has remained unchallenged – measuring time and placing art forms within a chronological context has been a concern for archaeologists worldwide. From the very beginning, relative sequences for both portable and rock art have been proposed on the basis of stratigraphic superimpositions, stylistic comparison, and depicted content (extinct animal species, depicted weapons, and so forth). Radiocarbon dating brought about a revolution between 1940 and 1970, and one could argue that obtaining absolute dates for some archaeological remains initially degraded the role of rock art as a valuable source of information about past cultural systems. Especially in North America, only a few archaeologists, artists, and avocationalists kept some interest in rock art while most archaeologists largely abandoned rock art studies on behalf of other datable archaeological remains (Keyser 2001:117). But the interest in relative sequences of rock art and portable art was kept in Europe, South Africa, Australia, and South America, providing useful analyses reflecting the changing identities of the artists in time and place (Chaloupka 1993; Domingo 2005; González 1977; Leroi-Gourhan 1964; Schobinger and Gradin 1985; Villaverde 1994; and so on).

A second crisis for the relative dating of art forms (especially rock art) occurred in the 1990s, with the first direct dating of pigments and engravings (see Lorblanchet and Bahn 1993; Rosenfeld and Smith 1997). The use of style as a chronological marker was then called into question owing to inconsistencies between absolute dates and stylistic sequences. However, whereas some suggested the revision of stylistic sequences (Valladas and Clottes 2003), others demonstrated that radiocarbon dates also have limitations owing to the contamination of samples, the use of old woods and charcoal for painting, and so forth (see Fortea 2002; Pettitt and Bahn 2003; Rowe 2001; Steelman et al. 2005). In this context, relative methods of dating art forms are still useful to provide an order of styles and traditions. And, despite the difficulties in establishing their chronometric duration, the validity of relative methods for the archaeological interpretation of temporality and the role of visual arts for studying the evolution of past societies cannot be denied. Time – absolute and relative, scientific and social – is one of the necessary frames to conduct an archaeological study of social identities. Therefore, more than keeping the opposition between absolute and relative time, the perspective developed in this book suggests that both systems should be complementary to address the long- or short-term dynamics involved in artistic traditions.

This predominant concept of time as a chronological framework does not provide direct information about the ways in which it was conceived by other peoples in the past, nor of the manner in which it was involved in art creation and use. This situation is probably due to the fact that the archaeological visibility of past and/or foreign time conceptions is considerably low, particularly when one is dealing with prehistoric contexts. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that some subtle inferences about ‘emic’ time conceptions have been drawn by some authors by linking temporality to the actual actions of creating art that entail marking and re-marking space – the bedrock, the artefact, the body – through visual art (see Luís and García Díez; Domingo Sanz; Robinson; Gallardo and De Souza; Fiore). The bedrock, the artefact, the body, can be visually marked only once, but they were often revisited or reused and repainted or reengraved annually, seasonally, or with some other periodicity. Such actions are visual appropriations and constructions of space – be it a place, an object, or a person – that entail a certain conception of time. Thus, art spaces always imply a sense of time: short or long, lineal or cyclic, mythical or mundane. It is clear that these conceptions are still ambiguous in terms of their archaeological visibility, but the fact that time conceptions can be related to space through the display of visual – and visible – art opens a window of interesting – and challenging – analytical possibilities.

Locating Place: Spatial Distribution and Enculturated Landscape

Mapping the geographical continuities and discontinuities between different types of artistic evidences has also been central to establishing the boundaries of cultures and the social interactions among neighbouring groups (see Barth 1969; Carr and Neitzel 1995; among others). This is especially achievable through rock art studies, sinc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Archaeologies of Art: Time, Place, and Identity in Rock Art, Portable Art, and Body Art
• 2 Space and Discourse As Constituents of Past Identities – The Case of Namibian Rock Art
• 3 Rocks of Ages: Petroglyphs, Pictographs, and Identity in Puerto Rico
• 4 Rock Art, Modes of Production, and Social Identities during the Early Formative Period in the Atacama Desert (Northern Chile)
• 5 From the Form to the Artists: Changing Identities in Levantine Rock Art (Spain)
• 6 Memoried Sacredness and International Elite Identities: The Late Postclassic at La Casa de las Golondrinas, Guatemala
• 7 Same Tradition, Different Views: The Côa Valley Rock Art and Social Identity
• 8 Learning Art, Learning Culture: Art, Education, and the Formation of New Artistic Identities in Arnhem Land, Australia
• 9 Eagle’s Reach: A Focal Point for Past and Present Social Identity within the Northern Blue Mountains World Heritage Area, Australia
• 10 Panache and Protocol in Australian Aboriginal Art
• 11 Body Painting and Visual Practice: The Creation of Social Identities through Image Making and Display in Tierra del Fuego (Southern South America)
• About the Contributors
• Index