Making Scenes

Global Perspectives on Scenes in Rock Art

Iain Davidson, April Nowell, Iain Davidson, April Nowell

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781789209211
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Archéologie

Dating back to at least 50, 000 years ago, rock art is one of the oldest forms of human symbolic expression. Geographically, it spans all the continents on Earth. Scenes are common in some rock art, and recent work suggests that there are some hints of expression that looks like some of the conventions of western scenic art. In this unique volume examining the nature of scenes in rock art, researchers examine what defines a scene, what are the necessary elements of a scene, and what can the evolutionary history tell us about storytelling, sequential memory, and cognitive evolution among ancient and living cultures?

1. SCENES AND NON-SCENES IN ROCK ART

Iain Davidson

The Problem of Scenes in Rock Art

One of the constant descriptors of Paleolithic cave art¹ has been that there was little or no representation of scenes. The purpose of this chapter and of those by other authors in the book is to examine that proposition and explore the implications of the presence or absence of scenes in both the Paleolithic art of Western Europe and rock and cave art elsewhere in the world. It will be important, in considering this, to understand that we are dealing only with images on rock surfaces produced before written accounts could record any description of what the producers of the art may have intended. The issue becomes one of how we observers can interpret sets of images without either the benefit of experience of the production of those images or a cultural connection to the traditions within which the art was produced.

This book will present a number of approximations to what is meant by a scene. The first requirement will be a definition of “scene” relevant to rock or cave art (or its mobile equivalents), particularly in the context of the absence of any account contemporary with the production of the art. None of the obvious dictionary definitions is quite suitable, but the closest one seems to be related to works written for the theater or cinema; Merriam-Webster² defines a scene as “a division of an act in a play during which the action takes place in a single place without a break in time.” The important part here is that action takes place. For the purposes of this chapter, a scene can be identified from a set of images in spatial proximity to each other from which, without any knowledge other than the images themselves, an observer can infer actions taking place among the actors represented in the images.

Much of the discussion of the presence or absence of scenes in Paleolithic cave art has not had the benefit of such a definition and has relied instead on intuition (but Villaverde’s Chapter 15 makes productive use of distinctions defined by Delporte). Moreover, the general statements about absence of scenes as a characteristic of the art belies the knowledge that some scenes have been recognized. Some Paleolithic scenes are in fact very famous, including those from Parpalló in eastern Spain (Pericot García 1942) (Figures 1 and 2 in Chapter 15), which were executed on small slabs or plaquettes of stone (and one on bone), and those from Lascaux in southern France, which were produced on the walls inside a deep cave. Contrary to the popular image beloved of cartoonists who show stick figure humans hunting herds of animals, scenes were not an important part of Paleolithic cave art, or so it has been said. Yet the same is not said about rock art elsewhere. One of the most famous examples of a hunting scene (in the post-Paleolithic Levantine Art of eastern Spain) is discussed by Villaverde in Chapter 15 (and his Figure 5).

Without undertaking an exhaustive study, it is possible to find some statement by leading authorities about absence of scenes from cave art in almost every decade since the 1950s. This is the more remarkable since Parpalló and Lascaux were both published in the 1940s and these are two of the sites with the best known scenes. According to Ucko and Rosenfeld (1967: 41), citing Maringer and Bandi from fourteen years earlier: “It has been commonly stated that one of the distinctive characteristics of this art was that it was not concerned with scenes of grouping.” Two decades later, Bahn and Vertut (1988: 120) pointed out that “‘scenes’ are very hard to identify in Paleolithic art, since without an informant it is often impossible to prove ‘association’ of figures rather than simple juxtaposition.” The key words here are grouping, informant, association and juxtaposition.

In 1996, Clottes and Lewis-Williams (1998: 52), with their combined expertise in Paleolithic cave art and South African rock art, were able to say: “Given such a naturalist approach to the fauna, one might expect to find in the caves a multitude of scenes representing wildlife. Yet this is not the case, though narrative scenes including two or more animals are no doubt more numerous than has been recorded.” The emphasis had shifted somewhat to naturalism and narrative and a concession that there are probably more scenes than the stereotype would allow.

Guthrie (2005: 61), concerned with a literal interpretation of the images, noted that “while there are few actual ‘scenes’ in Paleolithic art, large mammals are sometimes portrayed in groups. Interestingly, these group scenes are of animals that are social today, so we can take this portrayal as literal.” To complete this brief survey, Clottes (2011: 239), writing principally about the reasons behind cave art in France and Spain, described the panel that includes images of a person in front of a bison in the Well at Lascaux (Davenport and Jochim 1988) as follows: “Le Puits de Lascaux est célèbre par la présence d’une des rares scènes évidentes, même si elle reste mystérieuse, de l’art pariétal paléolithique.”³ In reality, many panels contained at Lascaux have elicited suggestions that the arrangements of individual animal images seem to go beyond association or juxtaposition, but they do not seem to form scenes as modern Western observers would like them to be.

These extracts show that the ideology about the lack of scenes has been very strong for at least fifty years, although commentators have hedged the way they say it. People express their caution in different ways. They were “not concerned with scenes of grouping,” scenes are “very hard to identify, expectations of scenes are wrong, and there are “few actual scenes.” Through this use of language, the problem has been displaced onto “grouping,” ease of identification, our expectations, or definitions of what an actual scene might be. In making these statements over at least sixty years, the successive authors revealed some of the expectations of what a scene might be and some of the features that might assist in recognizing one. We have an expectation that informants whose lives intersect with the context of production of the art would disambiguate its “scene-iness.”⁴ This chapter and the whole book aim to clarify some of these issues about scenes in rock and cave art.

The belief that scenes are relatively rare has probably inhibited the discussion of cases that quite likely involve recognizable scenes. As Villaverde shows in his chapter, there are scenes from different periods on several other plaquettes from Parpalló, but they have rarely been emphasized, perhaps because there is so little expectation that scenes existed. In Chapter 12, about European Paleolithic Art, Culley discusses a difference between the conventions for scenes in wall art and mobile art in the Upper Paleolithic of Western Europe.

Recent Discoveries in Scenes

There is no doubt that the situation of Paleolithic art is changing. For example, Fritz, Tosello, and Conkey (2016) suggested that it may be possible to identify some images in European Paleolithic art as representing the land surface on which animals were standing, and that this might establish the conditions for representing both the figure and the ground. Nomade and colleagues (2016) also offered an interpretation of marks in Chauvet Cave as representations of a volcano that erupted during the period of use of the cave. Several parts of the cave have walls marked in a variety of ways that do not seem representational: most obviously in the Alcove of the Lions (Fritz and Tosello 2007: Figure 18), some of which seems related to preparing the rock surface for painting. I am skeptical, given that there is so much other modification of the cave wall surfaces at Chauvet Cave, that particular sets of marks could be singled out for interpretation in this way.

In Spain, Utrilla and colleagues (2009) suggested that the combination of images on two engraved blocks from Abauntz Cave (in Navarra) could be interpreted as a map of the landscape of the site where they were found, and that the superimpositions of the animal images constitute a scene. Utrilla et al. discuss these and other examples of “maps” in Chapter 14. Historically, the idea that old art might include both animals and elements of their environments, in particular water, was discussed at length by Marshack (1977). A further example of images that might be interpreted as a representation of environmental context is the plaquette from Molí del Salt (in Tarragona) that has been interpreted as representing a camp of seven huts (García-Diez and Vaquero 2015). Given the breakthrough in interpretation of the representation of huts in the art, it would be possible to point to the half circles on the Abauntz image as similarly representing camps.

In these four examples there is at least an indication that the tide has turned toward interpreting Paleolithic images as scenes. In light of these examples, we may suppose that representations of the landscape and of scenes are not as scarce as they have been said to be, and that one of the impediments to our ability to recognize them has been the expectation that landscapes and scenes are absent. In reality, it may be that the poverty is in the way Paleolithic art has been looked at, rather than in its content.

The issue is important because, as we shall see (in both this and many other chapters in the book), scenes are well known in other examples of rock art, and one question is whether there is a contrast between an impoverished Paleolithic cave art and a far richer rock art elsewhere, and if so, why. Did practice about the depiction of scenes change through time, or can we work out whether (1) there were cultural rules that determined whether scenes were ever produced, or (2) sometimes scenes were appropriate and other times not, depending on the cultural context, or (3) quite possibly, there was some mix of these options?

How can we identify scenes? What were the conditions of production of rock and cave art images, and how might they be construed to constitute a scene? Is it indeed no more than “grouping?” What are our expectations? Once we have thought about these questions, it may be possible to consider the implications of the presence or absence of “scenes that meet our expectations” and maybe ask whether there are other groups of images that constitute scenes that do not meet our expectations.

The Composition of Panels of Images in Rock Art

Some of the elements of the definition introduced earlier appear straightforward, but they need some elaboration. First, there is an assumption that the elements of a panel and hence of the scene on that panel can be separated into almost independent images; that is, that it is possible to discuss the individual animals represented and hence the relations between them. This would clearly not always be true of, for example, nineteenth-century Impressionist landscapes, where the whole picture has to be considered together, but it probably does often apply to rock and cave art. Studies of the modern production of art within the market economy are not straightforwardly relevant to what we are talking about here (Davidson 1995), not least because the function of the picture is to be transferred from studio to saleroom to gallery or home. One of the genuine scarcities in rock and cave art is representation of landscapes (but see Utrilla’s chapter on maps), so the question of independent images may not generally be a problem. Moreover, the panels stay where they were executed.

Second, it would be desirable to define what is meant by spatial proximity, though it might be different for each situation. The chapters in this volume make various attempts to deal with that issue. The image of a lone elk at Warrior Ridge in Nine Mile Canyon (see Spangler and Davidson in Chapter 18) is situated about two meters below a small panel of small human and animal figures that represent a scene apparently unrelated to the elk. Intuitively, there is no relation between the large elk and the small figures, and the only reason for saying so is the absence of spatial proximity.

Third, the combination of an “observer” and “any other knowledge” goes to the heart of what rock and cave art is about. Nobody in the present day has any of what I will call “knowledge untainted by time” about what was intended by the people who made the images. With or without knowledge of the circumstances of production, we cannot escape the fact that an artist or artists made the images, and, being cultural actors, they had some cultural constraints about how they produced them. Although there may have been restrictions about access to the images, there were also contemporary observers who may or may not have been privy to the thoughts of the artists. Even in the absence of those observers contemporary with the production, the art is viewed by present-day people whose cultural backgrounds differ from those of both the artist and other observers. What present-day people of educated Western background might require for the identification of a scene might be quite different from what people from a different or an earlier culture might have required. This inevitably shifts the emphasis away from both the performance of the production of the images and the relationships between the artist and the audience, and onto the art as an object and its contents. Finally, as this chapter strongly emphasizes, there are important questions about how it is possible to infer interactions among the individual images within what may be a scene.

The fundamental question concerns how panels of cave or rock art were composed. Every panel must have begun with a single image. Perhaps, if several artists were involved, there was more than one in a very short period of time, but even that extension is limited by the physical requirements for making marks on a panel of restricted size. Probably some panels were more often accumulated over longer periods of time, sometimes within an ongoing cultural practice, sometimes not. The most detailed study of this sort of composition is from the Panel of the Horses at Chauvet Cave, where it has been possible to disentangle a sequence of image making, rock surface modification, and successive image production and superimposition in meticulous detail (Fritz and Tosello 2007). Unfortunately, the resolution of radiocarbon dating is not precise enough to be sure of the length of time from the beginning of creation of the panel to the final phase visible today.

Were the successive images of animals produced as additions to a rock panel by artists of a single culture in a relatively short time, or were they made at different times by people from different cultural situations? Villaverde addresses the question of additions to pre-existing panels in Chapter 15. We know from the situation of panels of petroglyphs with different states of weathering that images were sometimes added to a panel in actions sufficiently separated in time to allow weathering of the rock surface. There is a significant difference between the length of time required to allow weathering and that required to make a panel into a scene. That would suggest that less extreme separations in time could have existed, such that combinations visible today were not necessarily intended at the time of the first image. Or were panels initially planned and produced as a composition of animals and other signs? These fundamental questions are often overlooked by many approaches to rock and cave art. The answers are crucial to the assumptions involved in studies that consider whole sites using structural (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction. Behind the Scenes: Did Scenes in Rock Art Create New Ways of Seeing the World?
• Chapter 1. Scenes and Non-Scenes in Rock Art
• Chapter 2. The Possible Significance of Depicted Scenes for Cognitive Development
• Chapter 3. Event Depiction in Rock Art: Landscape-Embedded Plan-View Narratives, Decontextualized Profile “Scenes,” and Their Hybrid Instances
• Chapter 4. Defining “Scenes” in Rock Art Research: Visual Conventions and Beyond
• Chapter 5. Putting Southern African Rock Paintings in Context: The View from the Mirabib Rock Shelter, Western Namibia
• Chapter 6. Scenic Narratives of Humans and Animals in Namibian Rock Art: A Methodological Restart with Data Mining
• Chapter 7. Between Scene and Association: Toward a Better Understanding of Scenes in the Rock Art of Iran
• Chapter 8. Music and Dancing Scenes in the Rock Art of Central India
• Chapter 9. Hunting and Havoc: Narrative Scenes in the Black Desert Rock Art of Jebel Qurma, Jordan
• Chapter 10. Making a Scene: An Analysis of Rock Art Panels from the Northwest Kimberley and Central Desert, Australia
• Chapter 11. Scene but Not Heard: Seeing Scenes in a Northern Australian Aboriginal Site
• Chapter 12. A Comparison of “Scenes” in Parietal and Non-Parietal Upper Paleolithic Imagery: Formal Differences and Ontological Implications
• Chapter 13. Scene Makers: Finger Fluters in Rouffignac Cave, France
• Chapter 14. Maps in Prehistoric Art
• Chapter 15. Scenes in the Paleolithic and Levantine Art of Eastern Spain
• Chapter 16. New Insights into the Analysis of Levantine Rock Art Scenes Informed by Observations on Western Arnhem Land Rock Art
• Chapter 17. Rules of Ordering and Grouping in the Pitoti, the Later Prehistoric Rock Engravings of Valcamonica (BS), Italy: from Solitary Figures through Clusters, Graphic Groups, and Scenes to Narrative
• Chapter 18. Finding Order out of Chaos: A Statistical Analysis of Nine Mile Canyon Rock Art
• Chapter 19. Interpreting Scenes in the Rock Art of the Canadian Maritimes
• Chapter 20. The “Black Series” in the Hunting Scenes of Cueva de las Manos, Río Pinturas, Patagonia, Argentina
• Epilogue. Is There More to Scenes than Meets the Eye?
• Index