An Animate Landscape

Jones, Andrew Meirion; Freedman, Davina; O’Connor, Blaze; Lamdin-Whymark, Hugo; Tipping, R. H.; Watson, Aaron

doi:10.2307/j.ctv13gvfsw

Cited by 44 publications

(17 citation statements)

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“…In prehistory, power took radically different forms than it did in the urban, class-stratified societies visual culture studies typically deal with, but this general line of inquiry—examining art to see what it tells us about the act of seeing—is worth extending to prehistoric worlds. Archaeologists have rarely adopted a visual culture approach to prehistoric art, but some pioneering efforts have yielded important insights (Bradley 2009 ; Jones et al 2011 ; Skeates 2005 ; Robin 2009 ; García Sanjuán et al 2006 ; Wells 2012 ; Garrow and Gosden 2012 ; Helskog and Olsen 1995 ; Fredell et al 2010 ; Fahlander 2012 ; Cochrane and Jones 2012 ; Primitiva Bueno Ramírez and Bahn 2015 ). It has often been pointed out how art made creative use of the physical features of its settings; for instance, Palaeolithic art sometimes utilises the 3-dimensional topography of cave walls to define imagery, and Swedish Bronze Age rock art may have used water running naturally over surfaces to appear animated.…”

Section: Concepts and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Wells ( 2012 ) has identified aesthetic patterns across genres of material culture in Iron Age Central Europe, relating them to social changes in the mid-late 1st millennium BC. Most relevant for this study, Jones (Jones 2012b , 2012a ; Jones et al 2011 ) has interpreted British Neolithic rock art and material culture as reflecting an animated world view, and Ranta et al ( 2019 ) have used art theory to identify narrative characteristics in Bronze Age Scandinavian rock art. We return to these studies below.…”

Section: Concepts and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But, as colleagues have pointed out (Jones 2017 ), representation may be the wrong way to understand Neolithic art. A representational paradigm implies that the material signifier is arbitrary or unimportant, but Neolithic art was demonstrably concerned with material, light and location (Cochrane et al 2014 ; Jones 2012a ; Jones et al 2011 ). The minimalism of Neolithic art suggests that, once something is specified enough to define what it is, there is actually very little further concern with representation.…”

Section: Visual Culture and Societymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Art (Pre)History: Ritual, Narrative and Visual Culture in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe

Robb

2020

J Archaeol Method Theory

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Can we reconstruct how prehistoric people perceived things (their "ways of seeing" or visual culture)? This challenge is made more difficult by the traditional disciplinary assumptions built into prehistoric art studies, for instance focusing narrowly upon a single body of art in isolation. This paper proposes an alternative approach, using comparative study to reveal broad regional changes in visual culture. Although prehistoric art specialists rarely work comparatively, art historians are familiar with describing continent-wide general developments in visual culture and placing them in social context (for instance, the traditional broad-brush history from Classical to medieval to Renaissance systems of representation). This paper does the same for Neolithic (6000-2500 BC) vs. Bronze Age (2500-800 BC) and Iron Age (800 BC-Classical) rock and cave art from sites across Europe, uncovering broad patterns of change. The principal pattern is a shift from a Neolithic iconic art which uses heavily encoded imagery, often schematic geometric motifs, to a Bronze/Iron Age narrative art, which increasingly involves imagery of identifiable people, animals and objects. Moreover, there is also an increasing tendency for motifs to be associated in scenes rather than purely accumulative, and with contextual changes in how art is used-a movement from hidden places to more open or accessible places. Underlying all these changes is a shift in how rock and cave art was used, from citations reproducing ritual knowledge to composed arrays telling narratives of personhood.

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Section: Concepts and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Concepts and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Visual Culture and Societymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Art (Pre)History: Ritual, Narrative and Visual Culture in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe

Robb

2020

J Archaeol Method Theory

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“…Rock art is notoriously difficult to date, though dates of 2920–2860 cal. bc were obtained for primary activity associated with rock-art making at Torbhlaren, Kilmartin, Argyll, Scotland (Jones et al 2011, 115), while pitchstone artefacts which firmly date to the Neolithic (Ballin 2009) have been discovered at rock-art sites in Ben Lawers, Strathtay (Bradley et al 2012).…”

Section: The Mark-making Traditions Of Neolithic Britain and Ireland:...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Making a Mark: Process, Pattern and Change in the British and Irish Neolithic

Jones¹,

Díaz-Guardamino²

2021

CAJ

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This paper presents key results of the Making a Mark project (2014–2016), which aimed to provide a contextual framework for the analysis of mark making on portable artefacts in the British and Irish Neolithic by comparing them with other mark-making practices, including rock art and passage tomb art. The project used digital imaging techniques, including Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), and improved radiocarbon chronologies, to develop a new understanding of the character of mark making in the British and Irish Neolithic. Rather than considering this tradition in representational terms, as expression of human ideas, we focus on two kinds of relational material practices, the processes of marking and the production of skeuomorphs, and their emergent properties. We draw on Karen Barad's concept of ‘intra-action’ and Gilles Deleuze's notion of differentiation to understand the evolution and development of mark-making traditions and how they relate to other kinds of social practices over the course of the Neolithic.

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“…Although its chronology is somewhat disputed and its development had regional variations, ARA is widely considered to have been created during the fourth and third millennia BCE (e.g. Alves 2003;Bradley 1997;Fábregas-Valcarce & Rodríguez-Rellán 2012;Jones et al 2011;O'Connor 2006;Shee Twohig et al 2010; for a detailed discussion on ARA chronology, see Valdez-Tullett 2019, 17-24). In Iberia the circular motifs are often accompanied by figurative representations of animals (notably horses and deer) (Fig.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revealing the Earliest Animal Engravings in Scotland: The Dunchraigaig Deer, Kilmartin

Valdez-Tullett¹,

Barnett²,

Robin³

et al. 2022

CAJ

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The recent discovery of animal carvings in the Early Bronze Age burial cairn at Dunchraigaig (Kilmartin Glen, Scotland) prompts a re-evaluation of current knowledge of rock art in Britain. The deer and other quadrupeds represented in the monument are the first unambiguous depictions of prehistoric animals of prehistoric date in Scotland, and among the earliest identified in Britain and Ireland. This contrasts with the well-known abstract carvings of rock art in this region, characterized by cup-marks and cup-and-rings. The discovery also reinforces the special character of Kilmartin Glen as one of the most original and remarkable Neolithic–Bronze Age landscapes of monumentality and rock art in Britain. This article describes the process of authenticating the Dunchraigaig carvings as part of the Scotland's Rock Art Project (ScRAP) and discusses their implications for our understanding of prehistoric rock art in Scotland, Britain and Atlantic Europe more widely.

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An Animate Landscape

Cited by 44 publications

References 0 publications

Art (Pre)History: Ritual, Narrative and Visual Culture in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe

Art (Pre)History: Ritual, Narrative and Visual Culture in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe

Making a Mark: Process, Pattern and Change in the British and Irish Neolithic

Revealing the Earliest Animal Engravings in Scotland: The Dunchraigaig Deer, Kilmartin

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