Saturday 6 August 2011

What does it all mean?

The 'rock-art' of the British Isles and Ireland during the Neolithic has historically been subject of many studies which are a little like gazeteers - lists of sites (with accompanying photographs and black-and-white illustrations). These represent lifetimes spent by individual researchers (such as Stan Beckensall) whose passion for the phenomenon has driven them to obtain as much information as possible as they attempt to understand 'what it all means'.

We describe these rock carvings as 'rock-art' but the reality is they are carvings - describing them as 'art' makes a number of presumptions based on a post-modern art-history perspective which may not be appropriate given their antiquity.

For Britain and Ireland, there is an important question concerning their form. Why no figurative art? The rock-carvings of Britian and Ireland are composed entirely of abstract motifs. There is a mere handful of questionable specimens (such as the deer from Glen Domhain) which are almost certainly recently created and therefore not part of the corpus.



The big question I am thinking about today is, how is it that motifs we have here in Britain and Ireland are found replicated almost exactly in the Iberian peninsula (for example). It seems entirely implausible that such a complex abstract motif could serendipitously self propagate at two distant locations in the Neolithic unless their meaning was widely understood. In other words, people in Portugal and Spain knew exactly what People in Britain and Ireland knew - the real meaning behind these fantastic carvings.

No comments:

Post a Comment