Behind the Scenes - Did Scenes in Rock Art Create New Ways of Seeing the World?

Abstract

<p><b>Introduction </b></p><p>One of the motivations for this collection of papers was articulated by one of us in an earlier publication that was an exploration of Paleolithic images of animals (Davidson 2017a, 22):</p><p> It seems likely that there is an argument to be developed here about the emergence of the 'Western' styles of scene representation (which is by no means confined to Western rock art traditions). Just as the emergence of naturalism through the application of perspective is said to have created new ways of representing and seeing the world during the European Renaissance, so changes in the ways images of animals were represented with other animals probably testify to changes in the ways people saw the world.</p><p> The initial intent was to explore the question of scenes in the Paleolithic broadly, but then the question was expanded to include rock and cave art from later periods. It has been traditional to state that there are few representations of scenes in the Upper Paleolithic Cave art of Western Europe. Davidson (Ch. 1) reviews some of the ways the absence of scenes in Paleolithic art has been represented in textbooks over the last sixty years or more. In general, it has persistently proved to be true that scenes do not appear to be common in the art on the cave walls. On the other hand, Davidson ( Ch. 1), Culley ( Ch. 12) and Villaverde ( Ch. 15) demonstrate that the view is distorted by the concentration on cave art to the neglect of portable art that is contemporary with it. Van Gelder and Nowell ( Ch. 13) show also that the distortion derives from emphasizing representations of animals at the expense of other markings on the cave walls. When attention is turned to images engraved on bones or on plaquettes of stone or to more nuanced understandings of what constitutes a scene, scenes are not so rare. This suggested that the presence or absence of scenes might help reveal how the image making was used by the societies of the artists. Importantly, recent work by Fritz, Tossello, and Lenssen-Erz (2013) has addressed the problem of the lack of conventional scenes in cave art, identifying some instances where animals seem to have been represented with the ground on which they would be seen. </p>