Integration of natural stone features and conservation of the Upper Palaeolithic Côa Valley and Siega Verde open-air rock-art

Fernandes, António Batarda; Reis, Mário; Remírez, Cristina Escudero; Marcos, Carlos Vázquez

doi:10.1080/1751696x.2017.1341246

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…A particular interesting question concerns so-called palimpsest landscapes of early rock art, that is, art-making contexts where individual motifs were added to already existing panels of motifs over shorter or more extended periods of time, creating complex superpositions and difficult-to-disentangle shape configurations. An enigmatic case is the largely figurative open-air rock art of the Coâ valley in modern-day Portugal dated to the Gravettian and Solutrean (c. 25,000-18,000 years ago, Aubry et al, 2012;Batarda Fernandes et al, 2017;Zilhão et al, 1997). A key question in this context is whether and to what extent the cognitive affordances of the art-bearing panels change as more and more motifs are added over time.…”

Section: Examples Of Early Parietal and Figurative Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Honing Tools of the Mind: A Dynamic Framework for the Study of Symbolic Behavior in Early Human Evolution

Tylén,

Hussain,

Velliky

et al. 2024

Preprint

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The emergence of symbolic behavior is often considered a hallmark development in hominin evolution, ultimately giving rise to the complex communicative practices, abstract reasoning patterns, aesthetic discourses and religious institutions surrounding us today. In recent years, archaeologists have provided substantial evidence for the remarkable time-depth of symbolic artifact utilization and have made groundbreaking methodological advances (e.g, with respect to dating techniques, microscopy and 3d modeling). However, a systematic and rigorous framework for the investigation of the symbolic function of past artifacts is still lacking, that is, what kind of purpose these tools may have served and what kind of symbolic work they were designed or co- opted to do. This paper responds to this lacuna and outlines a new conceptual framework for the investigation of early symbolic artifacts. Symbolic artifacts are special in the sense of being mind- directed as they do their work primarily in the social and cognitive domain. That is, they support their function only to the extent that their structural properties affect relevant cognitive processes related to symbolic cognition (including e.g., attention, memory, and discrimination). To inform our understanding of past symbolic behavior, we therefore introduce the concept of cognitive affordances, defined as the capacity of symbolic forms to support such relevant cognitive processes. The cognitive affordances constitute a mediating layer of analysis between the observable, structural traits of symbolic artifacts and their hypothesized role in past social and pragmatic behaviors of hominins, related to, for instance, aesthetic, communicative, or ritual/cosmological practices. We show that by studying the cognitive implications of variation and change in the structural properties of symbolic artifacts recovered from the archaeological record, we can inform inferences and test new hypotheses about what pragmatic functions they may have served in past Paleolithic society.

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Section: Examples Of Early Parietal and Figurative Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Honing Tools of the Mind: A Dynamic Framework for the Study of Symbolic Behavior in Early Human Evolution

Tylén,

Hussain,

Velliky

et al. 2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Unlike Palaeolithic images in the open air (e.g. Portugal's Côa Valley; Spain's Siega Verde; Germany's Hunsrück (Bahn 1995; Baptista 2009; Batarda Fernandes et al 2017; Welker 2016), where colouring might not necessarily have been an essential element as multiple carving techniques were employed to highlight images, probably to achieve long-standing visibility in open landscape where pigments would otherwise fade (see Zilhão et al . 1997), these images can be preserved remarkably well in the relatively stable microclimates of deep caves.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Upper Palaeolithic Installation Art: Topography, Distortion, Animation and Participation in the Production and Experience of Cantabrian Cave Art

Sakamoto¹,

Pettitt²,

Ontañon-Peredo³

2020

CAJ

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The physical nature of cave walls and its impact on Upper Palaeolithic image making and viewing has frequently been invoked in explanations about the function of cave art. The morphological features (convexities, concavities, cracks and ridges) are frequently incorporated into the representations of prey animals that dominate the art, and several studies have attempted to document the relationship between the cave wall and the art in a quantitative manner. One of the effects of such incorporation is that undulating walls will distort the appearance of images as viewers change their viewing position. Was this distortion deliberate or accidental? Until now, the phenomenon has not been investigated quantitatively. We address this here, analysing 54 Late Upper Palaeolithic animal images deriving from three Cantabrian caves, Covalanas, El Pendo and El Castillo. We introduce a novel use for photogrammetry and 3D modelling through documenting the morphology of these caves’ walls and establishing the specific relationship between the walls and the art created on them. Our observations suggest that Palaeolithic artists deliberately placed images on very specific topographies. The restricted nature of these choice decisions and the fact that the resulting distortions could have been avoided but were not suggest that the interaction between viewer, art and wall was integral to the way cave art functioned.

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Marks, Pictures and Art: Their Contribution to Revolutions in Communication

Davidson

2020

J Archaeol Method Theory

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Integration of natural stone features and conservation of the Upper Palaeolithic Côa Valley and Siega Verde open-air rock-art

Cited by 5 publications

References 8 publications

Honing Tools of the Mind: A Dynamic Framework for the Study of Symbolic Behavior in Early Human Evolution

Honing Tools of the Mind: A Dynamic Framework for the Study of Symbolic Behavior in Early Human Evolution

Upper Palaeolithic Installation Art: Topography, Distortion, Animation and Participation in the Production and Experience of Cantabrian Cave Art

Marks, Pictures and Art: Their Contribution to Revolutions in Communication

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