Paths in the landscape: Rock art as a tool to track past information networks

V. SCHEINSOHN; CARIDI, INÉS

Paris

Congreso; XVIII Congres Mondiale de la Union International de Sciences Prehistoriques et Protohistoriques; 2018

Union International de Sciences Prehistoriques et Protohistoriques

One of the main reasons why humans build social networks is the exchange of information.Information is a good as valuable (or even more valuable) than any material good. Informationcirculating by a set of social networks, working through time, generate, like water makesgullies in a landscape, a set of connected paths, what we have termed Cultural TransmissionArchaeological Paths (CTAP see Caridi and Scheinsohn 2016). Information and materials circulateby those opened paths, oering lines of least resistance that leaves patterned materialconsequences. Those materials allow us to track a regional CTAP, a temporal attened imageof the social networks active in a certain area.One of the best ways to track those regional´s CTAP is through rock art.Rock art was one of the most ancient visual communication channels that humans had. Archaeologistshad been aware of the communicative role of rock art and its storing informationcapacity (cf. information storage model). Whallon (2011) argued that this information storagesystem functions only as long as the knowledge of how to retrieve that information is present in asocial group. We think that Information Theory and networks allows us to treat its informationcontent without having to consider its meaning. Given the accretional characteristics of rockart, what we have in a certain landscape is a dierential pattern of motifs distribution which wasaccumulated through time. There are many time spans mixed up since, unless we have detailedradiocarbon dates or other way of chronological control, it is not possible to separate them.But Mutual Information, a measure of the mutual dependence between the two variables thatquanties the amount of information obtained about one random variable, through the otherrandom variable, allow us to reconstruct those "fossilized" CTAPs by formalizing correlationsbetween, in this case, the presence and absence of rock art motifs in archaeological sites andvisualize them in a network dened by a set of nodes (rock art motifs) and a set of links (mutualinformation between them). We will exemplify this proposition by analyzing a set of rock artsites from NW Patagonia (Argentina).