Teaching and Learning About Rock Art in Argentina.

AGUSTÍN ACEVEDO; MARIANA OCAMPO; DÁNAE FIORE

Relating to Rock Art in the Contemporary World. Navigating symbolism, meaning and significance.

University Press of Colorado

Lugar: Boulder, Colorado; Año: 2016; p. 275 - 306

The current values and uses given by the general public to archaeological remains in general and to rock art sites and images in particular are influenced, among other factors, by the contents provided to them by formal education through primary and secondary school. Therefore, the aim of this chapter is to present a panorama of the quantity and quality of such contents in Argentina, via the systematic analysis of the school textbooks used from 1910 to 2010. To do so, we have analysed the available books held in the Biblioteca Nacional de Maestros and Biblioteca Nacional del Docente, in Buenos Aires, and have focused on:a) the date in which books were published;b) the publishing company (private or state);c) their national or provintial (local) circulation;d) the identification of the authors (books written by only one author versus books written jointly by several specialists on different disciplines);e) the presence/absence of rock art information;f) the type of chapter in which the information appears (history, geography, social sciences, etc.), and the relation of rock art information to the archaeology of prehistoric groups and/or to the history of contemporary native peoples;g) the types of language and terms (descriptive, value-laden, scientific, etc.) used to provide the information;h) the types of written contents regarding rock art: facts, values, concepts, methods, etc. and their degree of detail;i) the images included in the books (drawings, photographs), their uses (as illustrations, as documents, etc.), the presence/absence and contents of image captions;j) the kinds of main didactic strategies underlying the book contents (behaviouralist, constructivist, etc.) and the types of learning processes they favour (acritical repetition, active construction, critical reflection, etc.).Diachronic analyses show changes in the contents and forms in which the information was/is presented to the students. This provides a thorough panorama of the history of teaching rock art contents to the general public in Argentina, as well as of the current state of the art on this matter. In turn, this will be potentially useful for archaeologists when assessing the current attitudes of the public towards rock art, as well as for teachers, authors and archaeologists when planning the production of new school textbooks in the future.