Rock Art and Mutual Information Networks

V. SCHEINSOHN; CARIDI, INÉS

Valle de Uco

Congreso; 4th Southern Deserts Conference; 2014

Laboratorio de paleoecologia humana-UNCu

Rock art has been one of humans? most ancient visual communication channels. Archaeologists have always been aware of the communicative role of rock art and its information storage capacity. The formalization of this idea was established by the ?information storage model,? which established that rock art is an adaptive process facilitating the storage and communication of information. When studying information stored in rock art, our main problem is that we have lost the meaning of rock art designs. But Information Theory allows us to treat content without any concern for specific meaning. In his classic 1948 paper on Information Theory, Shannon defined the information content of a message in terms of the entropy of the message source, something not related to its meaning. So, concepts such as entropy, information content, and mutual information can play an important role in analyzing rock art information.