ISES   20394
INSTITUTO SUPERIOR DE ESTUDIOS SOCIALES
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
capítulos de libros
Título:
Semiotics and Meaning of Rock Art
Autor/es:
ALVARO MARTEL
Libro:
Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology
Editorial:
Springer Nature
Referencias:
Lugar: Basilea; Año: 2020; p. 1 - 8
Resumen:
The problem of the meaning of past societies´ material culture has been one of the main concerns of archaeology since its origins as a scientific discipline. Such interest in the meaning of things led archaeologists to make the first classifications, which were based primarily on utilitarian criteria. In this way, it was possible to differentiate between those objects with some functional meaning (an arrow, a pot, a plough, etc.) from those whose meaning was less obvious or could not be assigned a specific function, these were associated with the ambiguous sphere of the symbolic (a lithic statuette, a decorated rib, the ochre scattered on a buried body, etc.). Within this last group, rock art was ? and still is ? one of the cultural productions that has received most attention from researchers, precisely because of the difficulties involved in accessing its meanings. Even in ethnographic cases, where there was the possibility of working with aboriginal communities that continued to produce rock art beyond the middle of the twentieth century (Sanz et al. 2017), the problem of meaning continued to persist, mainly, because the different representations were liable to different readings according to gender, age, or social position of the community member who officiated as an informant in that occasion. The meaning of rock art, and the meaning of archaeological objects in general, was always slippery, or inaccessible. However, archaeology, throughout its history, sometimes with greater and sometimes with less intensity, sought to develop theoretical and methodological tools that facilitate some approximation to meanings. Many times these tools were borrowed from other disciplines. From the 1960s, archaeologists found in semiotics a theoretical framework that provided various methodological and analytical resources that enabled systematic approaches to problems not even considered by traditional archaeology. Rock art studies were, possibly, the ones that benefited most from the encounter between semiotics and archaeology, fostering the development of special interest areas: analysis of the structure of rock designs, syntax of images and use of support, typology of representations and stylistic correlation, social aesthetics, cognitive studies of image-interpreter relationship, and analysis of interpretive habits in the context of the use of images, among other topics. In this opportunity, we will focus on the contributions of semiotics to the study of meanings in rock art, perhaps, the most controversial and interesting of the contributions.