Weapons and Tools in Rock Art

A World Perspective

Ana M. S. Bettencourt, Manuel Santos-Estévez, Hugo Aluai Sampaio

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781789254914
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: Social Sciences

Weapons and tools are frequently found depicted in rock art in many parts of the globe and different periods and in varying social contexts. This collection of papers by leading rock art specialists examines the subjective and metaphorical value of weapons and tools in art, the actions that created them, and their contexts. It also takes into account that such representations incorporate and transmit some kind of understanding about the world and the relationship between objects and humans. Contributors analyse objects and weapons as status symbols, as evidences of cultural contacts, as ideological devices, etc. Divided into regional sections which, for once, do not focus on Scandinavia, chapters deal with the representations of weapons and certain kinds of tools (such as axes and sickles) in different prehistoric, protohistoric and traditional community contexts all over the world. Attention focuses on rock art, but also looks at stelae and statue-menhirs, as well as other kinds of 'container' or vehicle for this kind of depiction. The major concern is to discuss the possible meanings of these embodied signs in different areas and periods, since meanings are permeable both to time and space. Papers either centre their attention in broader approaches based on a specific area, region or people, or focus on particular case studies.

Part 1. The Iconographic Approach

2

The picturing of weapons, tools and other objects at Australian stencilled and painted rock art sites

Patricia Dobrez

Introduction

In order to comprehend what drives the representation of objects in rock art it is necessary to attend to the human body and the manner in which it functions in the world. Indeed, a body-centred approach is suggested by rock art panels whose stencilled images picture the link between bodies and implements through a juxtaposition of hands and objects (Fig. 2.1), and even more emphatically by dynamic figures showing the use of a weapon or tool, as illustrated by this painted example from South Africa of a hunter with his bow and arrow directed towards an eland (Fig. 2.2). Once we begin to focus on images of weapons and tools of one kind or another, not neglecting adornments like headdresses, bags and other items, it becomes clear that paraphernalia of identifiable kinds are ubiquitous in rock art. The opportunities such images present for rock art researchers to compare pictures with dated objects found in the archaeological record are readily taken up with the intention of amplifying our understanding of the identities and cultures of hypothesised societies. With its ecological rather than cultural emphasis, the present chapter takes a different approach by concentrating on what is universally involved in the situation of mark-making. Given the availability of ochre, an instrument, and suitable surface, what comes into play when humans make marks to represent objects? What of a bio-and ecological nature facilitates picture-making and what is the result?

There are of course many considerations, but the one I wish to bring into focus here is the neuro-physiological fact of a sense all healthy humans possess of their own position and movement and how this manifests in both descriptive (as I hope to demonstrate in the case of stencilled objects) and narrative rock art (i.e. dynamic compositions we would label ‘scenes’). This automatic modelling of our body’s relationship with the world is studied by physiologists, neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists under the heading of ‘proprioception’ – as well as numerous other encapsulations of a ‘sensing’ that is not local but ‘distributed throughout the body’ (Tuthill and Azim 2018, 194). These include: ‘body representation’, ‘body schema’, ‘body map’, Aristotle’s ‘common sensible’, ‘body consciousness’, ‘somatopsyche’, ‘body awareness’ (Gallagher 1986, 542–4; de Vignemont et al. 2006, 159–60; Corradi-Dell’Acqua and Rumati 2007, 50).

In an article that sets out to clarify terminology, Gallagher (1986) offers the following definition of his preferred expression ‘body schema’: that it is ‘a non-conscious performance of the body’. Gallagher (1986, 548) further elucidates:

In this performance the body acquires a certain organisation or style in relation with its environment. For example, it appropriates certain habitual postures and movements; it incorporates various significant parts of its environment into its own schema. The carpenter’s hammer becomes an operative extension of the carpenter’s hand, or as Head (1920) noted, the body schema extends to the feather in the woman’s hat (see Gorman 1969, 15).

In other words, it ‘is the way that the body experiences its environment’ (Gallagher 1986, 548). In what follows I shall be employing the terminology of ‘proprioception’ as used in neuro-physiological discussion (for an historical account of the development of the notion see Proske and Gandevia 2012), and ‘body schema’, as defined by Gallagher, and widely encountered in cognitive psychology (see Knoblich et al. 2006a). The relevance of these related concepts to two types of rock art depiction and the way meaning is established through either the imagistic suppression of information about proprioceptive incorporation of an object like a weapon, tool, or some form of adornment (cf. Gallagher’s hammer and hat) or, alternatively, through a celebration of it, will be elucidated in what follows.

Figure 2.1. Milbrodale Shelter panel (near Singleton, New South Wales, Australia), showing stencilled hands, boomerangs, and axes.

Figure 2.2. Detail of San hunter figure, Zaamenkomst panel (image courtesy of Iziko South African Museum, Cape Town, South Africa).

Defining tool use

In recent years discussions of tool use have moved in two directions: 1) tool use by animals (for example, the New Caledonian crow); 2) human body awareness and the incorporation of prostheses, implements, clothes, etc. Both developments are impacting on our notion of a ‘tool’ with our understanding of tool use being given new clarity through explorations of the phenomenon of ‘proprioceptive incorporation’ of external objects or the ‘remapping’ of body representations. All animals have the proprioceptive sense that tells them where they are positioned in the world. Since this sense is organised by body shape, human proprioception is determined sui generis by bipedality and the distinctive functioning of a hand that grasps.

Museum ethnographic collections, dictionaries, encyclopaedias – and in rock art studies, site surveys and documentation of motifs – have all contributed to an artefacts-centred way of approaching objects, including pictured ones. Classification and description of things, essential for comparative analysis of found objects and the mapping of their distribution, tends to overlook their relationship with agents. But nothing can be clearer than the fact that with no bowman there is no ‘bow’, no axeman no ‘axe’. In the case of weapons and tools, where there is no body to use such objects, there can be no claim that they are weapons or tools. If we accept the management of fluids as an example of tool use allowed by Beck (1980), Duchamp’s urinal (Fountain 1917) may be cited to illustrate the division between an object for use and an object in itself. Once it is in the art gallery, and we cease to manage our fluids by using it, it is no longer a urinal. For the purposes of understanding cultures, a focus on use in addition to appearance enables visualisations of human behaviour otherwise closed.

In the case of weapons and tools images recorded at rock art sites around the world we find both these approaches: an interest in the object for its own sake, separated from use, and a preoccupation with bodies engaged in using weapons and tools – of course, utensils too, such as bags and baskets. It should be remarked by the way that, since we have begun to identify historical gender bias in rock art studies following the reflexive turn in archaeology and anthropology, researchers are currently paying attention to a wider spectrum of stencilled and depicted objects. Of course we also need to acknowledge that the rock art itself is gendered and that in many instances the choice of weapons and tools as subjects will reflect a male warrior culture, although we need to be cautious about such readings, and not assume a cut-and-dried division of labour (Fig. 2.3).

In view of the relationship that exists between weapons and tools and their users, it is not surprising that archaeologists and ethologists have put the emphasis on ‘tools use’, rather than on objects in isolation. This is the approach of the much-quoted foundational theorist, zoologist Ben Beck (1980, 10) who, finding an adequate definition of ‘animal tool behaviour’ to be absent from the literature, famously set out to provide one:

The user must hold or carry the tool during or just prior to use and must establish the proper and effective orientation between the object and the incentive. The incentive includes alteration of the form, position, or condition of another object, or another organism, or the user itself.

When specifically considering objects used in fighting or predation Beck rejects an earlier distinction made by ‘major reviewers’ between agonistic and non-agonistic tool use (Beck 1980, 119–20), arguing that there is no point in separating objects employed in aggression from other kinds of tools where precise descriptions can be made of ‘functions to extend the user’s reach, amplify the mechanical force that the user can exert on the environment, enhance the effectiveness of the user’s display behaviors, or increase the efficiency with which the user can control fluids’ (Beck 1980, 122). An Australian Aboriginal ‘coolamon’ would be an example of this last category since one of its uses is to carry water.

Figure 2.3. Detail from Alexander Schramm (1850), Adelaide, a Tribe of Natives on the Banks of the River Torrens, displaying contact items including the newly introduced steel axe (Public Domain).

Beck’s (1980) definition has been discussed many times since the publication of his book Animal Tool Behavior. In ‘Revisiting the definition of animal tool use’, for example, St Amant and Horton (2008, 1207) see their contribution as focusing on ‘a description of the properties of behaviour that are centrally associated with tool use’. This allows them to take their definition beyond the idea of an extension of a tool user’s control over the environment to interactive communication as described in Beck’s example of a gorilla employing a sapling to repel an intruder (St Amant and Horton 2008, 1204). A broader dimension is opened up in the discussion of tool use in disciplines investigating body awareness ‘from the inside out’, as the subtitle of a major book of essays characterises the new conversation (Knoblich et al. 2006a).

In an environment where cognitive psychology and neurophysiology can make significant contributions to our understanding of the way we process information in managing the world, a new approach has emerged which focuses on the plasticity of visuomotor and visual-haptic coupling in the attainment of effective tool use. In operations involving tools, combined information about one’s own body and the environment enables precise interactions with our environment. The connection between world and agent in such interactions is seamless. Basing their assertion on experiments relating to multimodal perception, Holmes and Spence (2006, 47) conclude that:

the evidence is now mounting on the effects of manipulating tools, which serve as functional extensions of the body, on the integration of multisensory stimuli near to and far from the body …. These effects primarily involve remapping, or linking distal visual stimuli to simultaneous proximal tactile stimuli.

For example, if we are operating a wheelchair our sense of how we are moving in the world will differ from our sense when walking; another example would be using, or not using, a bottle-opener.

The question I wish to ask about stencilled or painted items that can be grasped or worn is this: what kind of relationship between maker and object is displayed in the depiction? The obvious point to be made about weapons and tools in particular is that they are carried around. Humans are the species we see carrying implements around. Few animals are known to do so. When they do, the distances are short (Beck 1980, 239), as illustrated in the example of Ivory Coast chimpanzees moving the hammers they use in cracking nuts (Davidson and McGrew 2005, 797). What is more, humans are unique in making pictures of their tools. The human trait (shared with other species) of transporting offspring and dead prey is registered in rock art in the action of holding babies’ feet and animal parts or carcasses to a surface for pigment spraying. While I shall presently draw attention to a multiplicity of depicted objects, my focus initially is weapons and tools for the reason that that, relative to other items, they are conspicuous in the record, numerous and widespread.

Widespread and numerous occurrences of weapons and tools in rock art imagery

A variety of boomerang types, for example, occur from early periods in the rock art chronology through to recent times, and are encou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction: depiction of weapons and tools in rock art as ambivalent symbols in time and space
• Part 1. The Iconographic Approach
• Part 2. The Contextual Approach
• Part 3. The Ethnographic and Historical Approach