Rock Art as Secondary Agent? Society and Agency in Bronze Age Bohuslän

Ling, Johan; Cornell, Per

doi:10.1080/00293652.2010.489800

Cited by 21 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Parts of them were re-painted regularly by clans to secure a continuous supply of animals (Layton, 1985). This engagement of people with the rocks to secure outcomes in the real world has been attributed to the secondary agency with which rocks and petroglyphs are imbued (Mowaljarlai 1988; Ling & Cornell, 2010). In Scandinavia, it has been argued that this is directly linked to the depiction of real-life activities and objects (Ling & Cornell, 2010).…”

Section: Meeting the Past On The Rocks – Interpretationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transforming the Rocks – Time and Rock Art in Bohuslän, Sweden

Horn¹,

Potter

2017

Eur. j. archaeol

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Human representations are one of the most important groups of depictions in rock art in southern Scandinavia. These humans have long been discussed as complete, stable, and temporally-fixed images. The results of a new survey challenge this view. Recording rock art with Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) enabled us to discern a possible sequence of production of individual human representations, their bodily features, and associated objects. Figures from a rock art site in Finntorp (Tanum, Sweden) will be used as an example. Differences in the dimensions of the engraved lines, the chronology of the depicted objects, and the placement of body parts suggest that several individuals may have been involved in making human representations on the rocks, and that their appearance as complete figures is the result of repeated transformations. The results presented demonstrate that Scandinavian rock art is not stable in time. We suggest that rock art is best understood as the creation of communities over time, which enables them to engage with the past by transforming the rocks.

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Section: Meeting the Past On The Rocks – Interpretationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transforming the Rocks – Time and Rock Art in Bohuslän, Sweden

Horn¹,

Potter

2017

Eur. j. archaeol

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“…But in all these cases, in visual narratives, the warrior has arrived. Indeed, as Ling and Cornell (2010) have argued powerfully, such visual narratives may have been the means by which warriors were produced.…”

Section: The Bronze and Iron Ages: The Birth Of Narrative Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

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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“…This is quite clearly the aim of most studies applying an agency approach to the material world (e.g. Bille 2013; Bille and Sørensen 2007; Byrne et al 2011; Harper 2010; Ling and Cornell 2010; Pollard 2008; Sørensen 2009; Van Oyen 2015; Verbeek 2005; Williams 2004), or the Latourian-inspired symmetrical archaeology, pursuing an appreciation of the alterity of actants in the world (e.g. Olsen 2010; Olsen et al 2012).…”

Section: Stop! Hammer Time!mentioning

confidence: 99%

Hammers and nails. A response to Lindstrøm and to Olsen and Witmore

Sørensen¹

2016

Arch. Dial.

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Two contrasting arguments on the merits of symmetrical archaeology and an associated discussion of object agency appeared in a recent issue of Archaeological dialogues (Lindstrøm 2015; Olsen and Witmore 2015). While Torill Christine Lindstrøm extends a thorough, yet hardly new, criticism of the notion of object agency and of symmetrical archaeology, Bjørnar Olsen and Christopher Witmore provide a clarification in its defence (even though their article is oddly categorized by Archaeological dialogues as a ‘provocation’). In this reaction article, I take issue with a number of arguments by Lindstrøm and by Olsen and Witmore: first of all, I challenge Lindstrøm's representation of object agency, which I believe is in need of corrections. Second, I contend that Lindstrøm fails to identify a number of fundamental contributions within the framework of symmetrical archaeology, thus allowing her to caricature symmetrical archaeology as ‘old wine in new bags’. Third, even though Olsen and Witmore's defence offers helpful clarifications, I believe that their contribution invites us to discuss the vocabulary of symmetrical archaeology, scrutinizing why there is an apparent tendency to misunderstand its arguments and merits. Lastly, I take issue with Lindstrøm's dismissal of ‘different ontologies’ as a result of political correctness.

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Rock Art as Secondary Agent? Society and Agency in Bronze Age Bohuslän

Cited by 21 publications

References 7 publications

Transforming the Rocks – Time and Rock Art in Bohuslän, Sweden

Transforming the Rocks – Time and Rock Art in Bohuslän, Sweden

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

Hammers and nails. A response to Lindstrøm and to Olsen and Witmore

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