The materiality of rock art. Image-making technology and economy viewed from Patagonia.

FIORE, DANAE

Interpreting Rock Art: A South American Perspective

Routledge

Año: 2018; p. 23 - 57

This chapter develops a theoretical framework focused on the materiality of rock art: it argues that image-making techniques have affordances which shape numerous features of art images, and that the creation of these images is underlied by work processes which need to be studied in order to understand the economic factors involved in their production. These, in turn, shed light on the conditions under which the materiality of art has continued and/or changed in space-time due to the practices and choices of people within their environmental and social contexts. This framework is developed in the chapter by presenting a series of concepts, variables and criteria that can be used to study labour division and labour investment in the production of rock art images.This theoretical framework is applied to the analysis of three case-studies of Patagonia: 1) a comparison between two regions from Santa Cruz province: Extremo Sur del Macizo del Deseado (ESMD), where more than 50 sites with rock art have been recorded by our team; and Margen Norte del Rio Santa Cruz (MNRSC), where rock art has been recorded on more than 4000 lineal metres of bedrock), in order to show the differential use of engraving and painting techniques that can be partly related to differential availability of raw materials, both in terms of pigment quarries and of bedrock types; 2) the previous trends are placed in a much broader macro-regional context, provided by a database of 611 sites, which shows the existence of clear trends in terms of the technical choices (painting vs. engraving) at the locality scale, in relation to the types of bedrock; 3) an analysis of the differential rates of spatio-temporal change of rock art techniques versus motif designs, which show that in spite of the fact that designs have a higher potential for spatial-temporal change than techniques, some specific designs have been reproduced in space and/or time due to their potential informative/symbolic/aesthetic contents, and thus can be labelled as "pragnanz images" due to their effective replication in different sites, using different techniques, and even on different media (lithic plaques, eggshell, pottery, leather cloaks, etc).