that all sites in his survey are essentially similar and he did not use ethnographic case studies of motif distribution as a baseline. Hartley's (1992) analysis of motif frequencies in the rock art of the Colorado Plateau was more successful. Hartley found that there was a greater diversity of art motifs on isolated boulders than in rock shelters. He argued (drawing on local and comparative ethnography) that the difference probably arose through prolonged use of rock shelters by the same or related groups, while isolated boulders were probably visited by members of more diverse local groups. A similar method is used here to locate Upper Palaeolithic Europe in a field of ethnographically defined cultural variation. Like Hartley (1992, 64), we are not seeking to construe the meaning of individual motifs, but rather the cognitive structures of which the use of motifs is symptomatic. By 'cultural context' we therefore mean the relationship between aspects of behaviour, material culture and the system of ideas characteristic of a particular community. A high proportion of the identifiable figures in the Upper Palaeolithic art of France and Spain are animals. Following Lévi-Strauss's (1962, 89) dictum that 'animals are good to think with', we analyse the cultural context of animal figures in various recent rock-art traditions and ask what light this can throw on the cultural context of the animal art of the Upper Palaeolithic.Almost as soon as archaeologists realized that the Upper Palaeolithic rock art of southwest France This article develops a novel method for assessing the cultural context of rock art, and applies it to the rock art of the Upper Palaeolithic of France and Spain. The article relies on a generative approach, assuming that artists have the potential to choose which motifs to select from the repertoire or vocabulary of their artistic system, but that appropriate choices at any place are guided by the location of that site within the culturally-mediated geography of the region. Ethnographic studies of rock art depicting animal species produced in the contexts of totemism, shamanism and everyday life are used as reference points in an analytical framework, which is then applied to a number of ancient traditions.

No abstract

No abstract