New research on ancient images: rock art studies in Argentina (2010-2014)

FIORE, DANAE; BASILE, MARA

Rock Art News of the World 2010-2014

Oxbow

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2016; p. 329 - 347

This chapterreviews 123 publications (papers, book chapters and whole books) that containinformation about the advances of rock art research in Argentina published from2010 to 2014. The data about new discoveries, analyses, interpretations andmanagement of rock art sites or localities are presented in three sections,each focused on one of three broad areas of Argentina: I) Northwest andWest-Centre, II) Pampa, III) Patagonia. A fourth section summarises informationabout papers published by Argentinean authors which deal with theoretical and methodological issues and/or with the history of rock art research at anational or international scale. Finally, the concluding section outlines the major trends found in this period, and makes a comparison with the previously observed trends in the 2000-2004 period (Fiore 2008) and the 2005-2009 period (Fiore 2012). Such trends include: a) the frequen tuse of the notion of site, which is the most commonly used spatial scalein rock art studies; b) the use of the term style in fewer cases, mostly in quotations of previous works which referto already known styles which facilitate image recognition and inter-colleaguecommunication; c) the little analysis of rock art production techniques, which reflects a little attention to its materiality and should be developed in the future; d) the relatively frequent references to the visibility of rock art sites and/or views from them, addressed mostly in qualitative manners; e) the identification of represented referents of figurative/iconic motifs, and the admission that non-figurative/abstract/non-iconic motifs are subjectively defined by researchers using current notions of a supposed lack of representedreferent; f) the fact thatrock art chronology is not being tackled with archaeometric techniques butmostly using relative dates; g) the use ofqualitative information is less frequent than the combined use of qualitative plus quantitative information, but in the latter case such information isreduced mostly to counts of motifs. Other quantifications such as percentagesor statistical tests is still very scarce. It is stressed that such information is extremely useful in a twofold manner: 1) it provides a panorama of thewhole sample under study, within which each specific trend can be properly weighted and assessed, and 2) it helps to create an empirical basis to asses theconservation conditions of rock art at the time of publication, thus making itpossible to monitor further deterioration in the future;h) very few publications mention explicitly the recording methods used by the authors duringfieldwork and during data-processing in the lab - this is a shortcoming thatshould be improved in the future both by making the method explicit and bygenerating a consensuated sampling protocol;i) finally, we stress the high quality of popular works on rock art and the increasing dedication given to management plans and conservation practices: these are reflections of a greater commitment of archaeologists to their rolein the protection of cultural heritage and to their communication with the community.