Archaeology and rock art science

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Inhaltsverzeichnis
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Carmen Díaz Alayón & Francisco Javier Castillo:
Estudio de la lista de voces prehispánicas de
Juan Bautista Lorenzo Rodríguez ................................................................... 7
Robert G. Bednarik:
Archaeology and rock art science ............................................................... 57
Hans-Joachim Ulbrich:
Bibliographie der Ilhas Selvagens (Portugal) – Addenda II ......................... 73
Rudolf Franz Ertl:
Neue Donaureiter-Bleivotivtafeln entdeckt ................................................. 99
Arnaud F. Lambert:
Megaliths and the Early Mezcala Urban Tradition of Mexico .................... 135
Xavier Li Tah Lee Lee:
Canarias: destino didáctico de la expedición
de Martin Rikli y Carl Schröter .................................................................. 147
Alain Rodrigue:
The rock engravings of Tighremt n'Ouazdidene
(High Atlas, Morocco) ................................................................................ 167
Andoni Sáenz de Buruaga:
Grabados rupestres de hachas de "tipo Metgourine" en el
entorno artístico de Lejuad (Tiris, Sahara Occidental) ................................173
Marcos Sarmiento Pérez:
La estancia de Nikolay Nikolajevitsch Mikloucho-Maclay
en Lanzarote en 1866-67 .............................................................................203
Franz Trost:
Der Nil als Grenze zweier Landmassen ......................................................223
Hans-Joachim Ulbrich:
Die kanarischen Ureinwohner in der Cosmographia (1544)
des Sebastian Münster .................................................................................249
Hartwig-E. Steiner:
Zeichen des Vogelmann-Kultes der Osterinsel
in den Höhlen auf Motu Nui / Polynesien .................................................. 269
•
56MMALMOGAREN 44-45/2013-2014
Bednarik, Robert G. (2014): Archaeology and rock art science.- Almogaren 44-45
/ 2013-2014 (Institutum Canarium), Wien, 57-72
Zitieren Sie bitte diesen Aufsatz folgendermaßen / Please cite this article as follows:
ALMOGAREN 44-45/2013-2014MM57
Almogaren 44-45 / 2013-2014 Wien 2014 57 - 72
Robert G. Bednarik
Archaeology and rock art science
Keywords: Rock art research, archaeology, epistemology, interpretation,
motif identification, dating, vandalism, neuroscience
Abstract:
This critical review of the relationship between the scientific study of rock art and
mainstream archaeology considers the epistemological and procedural limitations of the
latter discipline and defines its limited relevance to the former field. It particularly focuses
on the archaeological practice of interpreting the meaning of rock art and then applying
such opinions to other aspects, such as the age estimation of rock art. The basis of rock art
interpretation is examined and found to be neuroscientifically unsound and logically faulty.
Zusammenfassung:
Diese kritische Überprüfung der Beziehung zwischen der wissenschaftlichen Studie von
Felsbildern und Mainstream-Archäologie erwägt die erkenntnistheoretischen und ver-fahrensrechtlichen
Einschränkungen der letzteren Disziplin und definiert ihre begrenzte
Relevanz für den ersteren Bereich. Sie konzentriert sich insbesondere auf die archäologi-sche
Praxis der Interpretation der Bedeutung von Felsbildern und die Anwendung sol-cher
Stellungnahmen für andere Aspekte, wie die Alters-Schätzung der Felsmalereien.
Die Basis von Felskunst-Interpretation wird untersucht und es wird festgestellt, dass sie
neurowissenschaftlich unsolide und logisch fehlerhaft ist.
Résumé:
Cette revue critique de la relation entre l'étude scientifique de l'art rupestre et l'archéologie
traditionnelle considère les limites épistémologiques et de procédure de cette dernière
discipline et définit sa pertinence limitée pour l'ancien champ. Il se concentre en particulier
sur la pratique de l'archéologie de l'interprétation du sens de l'art rupestre, puis à appliquer
ces opinions pour d'autres aspects, tels que l'estimation de l'âge de l'art rupestre. L'in-terprétation
de l'art rupestre est examinée et jugée malsaine neuroscientifique et
logiquement défectueux.
Resumen:
Esta revisión crítica de la relación entre el estudio científico del arte rupestre y la
arqueología convencional considera las limitaciones epistemológicas y de procedimiento
de esta última disciplina y define su relevancia limitada al campo anterior. En particular,
se centra en la práctica arqueológica de interpretar el significado del arte rupestre y luego
aplicar esas opiniones a otros aspectos, tales como la estimación de la edad de arte
rupestre. La base de la interpretación del arte rupestre es examinado y se encontró que
neurocientífica erróneo y defectuoso lógicamente.
58MMALMOGAREN 44-45/2013-2014
Introduction
The scientific study of rock art straddles many disciplines, among them
forensic science, semiotics, neurosciences, cognitive sciences, ethnography,
art history, various sub-disciplines of geology, conservation science, anthro-pology
and archaeology. They address a great variety of aspects of rock art by
a multitude of methods, resulting in many propositions, some of which are
testable and thus scientific, and some of which are not. In its involvement with
rock art, archaeology has traditionally focused on interpretation and recording,
often recording by interpreting, and on endeavours to integrate rock art into
archaeological narratives and chronologies. Here, the usefulness of these
archaeological approaches or methods in contributing to the scientific study
of rock art is considered.
A principal method of archaeology is excavation, and over the course of
more than a century, many thousands of rock art sites have been excavated. In
such cases it was hoped to either find rock art beneath the sediment, or to find
exfoliated fragments of rock art in the strata below the art. In the first case this
would provide a minimum antiquity for the rock art, in the second an
approximate date for the exfoliation event, if the age of the corresponding
sediment layer could be ascertained. However, this approach has only ever
been successful in very few cases globally (Daleau 1896; Lalanne & Breuil
1911; Capitan et al. 1912; Lemozi 1920; Hale & Tindale 1930; David 1934;
Passemard 1944; Ampoulange & Pintaud 1955; Mensan et al. 2012; Mulvaney
1969: 176; de Saint Mathurin 1975; Anati 1976a: 34, 41; Thackeray et al. 1981;
Rosenfeld et al. 1981; Cannon & Ricks 1986; Steinbring et al. 1987; Bednarik
1989; Crivelli et al. 1996; Roberts et al. 1998; Pessis 1999; Bednarik et al.
2005). In all except one of these instances, petroglyphs rather than rock
paintings were involved. But in the process of this mostly futile pursuit
involving thousands of other sites, the chance of securing actual ages of
petroglyphs rather than minimum ages was often literally destroyed. Many
percussion petroglyph sites contain in their sediments the hammerstones that
were used in the creation of the rock art, and their stratified location indicates
the time petroglyphs were made at the site.
An example of these missed opportunities are the over one hundred
excavations in the Côa valley of northern Portugal, where not a single sub-merged
pre-Historic petroglyph was found, yet the stone tools used in the
production of the rock art were discarded because the archaeologists had not
been trained in recognising them (Swartz 1997; Bednarik 2004). The most
important archaeological component of any sediment near a petroglyph panel
are the stone hammers used in the production of the petroglyphs (Figure 1),
ALMOGAREN 44-45/2013-2014MM59
because their stratigraphical position is likely to tell us roughly at what time
petroglyphs were made at the site (Bednarik 1998a). And yet, worldwide there
are only very few reports of archaeologists finding and recognising these tools
(Edwards 1964: 650; Wilman 1968; Anati 1976a: 41, 1976b: 28, 1981: 14–15,
1994: Fig. 40; Kearns et al. 1975: 325; Ives 1986; Wallace & Holmlund 1986:
26; Moore 1992; Arcà 1995: Fig. 112; Bednarik 1998a, 2001: 39–41; Bednarik
et al. 2005). The thousands of other such deposits excavated, usually in the
hope of exposing rock art below ground in order to determine mere minimum
dates for the art, were essentially misguided and counterproductive: in the
vain quest to date the rock art the evidence that would have provided secure
dating was destroyed or discarded.
Figure 1. Hammerstones
used in the production of
petroglyphs at Toro Muer-to,
Bolivia.
This is one indication of the damage archaeological research has done to
the scientific study of rock art, of which many other examples can be cited.
For instance in the recording of rock art, the research potential of countless
sites around the planet has been compromised by inappropriate recording
methods (see e.g. critiques in Bock 1981; Leen 1981; Bednarik 1987, 1990;
Genge 1990; Chaffee et al. 1993: 71; Bednarik & Devlet 1993; Francis et al.
1993; Bahn et al. 1995; Löfvendahl & Magnusson 2000; Loendorf 2001).
Similarly, innumerable rock art sites were excavated without protecting the
rock art panels above the sediment, which in the process suffered from dust
and human contact (Morwood 1994). An academically more pernicious
problem is that so many archaeologically inspired but untestable claims about
the meaning of rock art have become so deeply entrenched in the archaeo-lore
disseminated by the discipline that it seems impossible to correct them. It is
therefore essential to consider the usefulness of archaeology's involvement in
exploring rock art.
60MMALMOGAREN 44-45/2013-2014
Epistemological issues in archaeology
Essentially, there are only two viable connections between rock art and
archaeology. One is that both relate to the distant human past – although much
archaeology no longer does, it relates to recent history or present. Secondly,
rock art can only be integrated into archaeological narratives if its age is
known. Without that common denominator time, the two entities lack a
legitimate connection. This is because without it, rock art cannot be slotted
into the chronology and narrative of archaeology. Unfortunately, there is very
limited scientific information available about the age of any rock art, while
there is a profusion of false claims in the literature. For instance numerous
archaeologists claim that rock art of recent centuries is of the Pleistocene (for
examples of corrections see Bednarik 1994a, 1995a, 1995b, 1998b, 2002, 2005,
2006a, 2009a, 2009b; Bednarik & Devlet 1993; Watchman 1995, 1996), just as
there have been claims, in the past, that Pleistocene rock art is either modern
or fake (consider Altamira). With the exception of the minimum age claims
derived from the few instances of excavated rock art (as noted above), all others
offered by archaeology derive from stylistic contentions and catenulate
reasoning that lacks a sound epistemology. To complicate matters further, in
inventing a taxonomy of pre-Historic cultures archaeology has not used
cultural data, such as palaeoart, but has chosen purported technological vari-ables.
This applies particularly to the Pleistocene, where combinations of tools,
especially stone tools, have been used to define 'cultures'. Yet tools obviously
do not differentiate cultures; cultural variables do. Moreover, even these tool
types are not real entities, they are etic, 'institutional facts' (Searle 1995); they
are invented mental templates of specialists. In other words, archaeology
applies made-up classes to collectively designate technocomplexes, then uses
these to invent cultures, which in turn are attributed to equally invented groups
of people, be they nations, tribes, ethnic groups or language groups. This is an
indication of the depth of the problem: by relegating rock art to subsidiary
roles in establishing a cultural history of hominins, conventional archaeology
has invented a human past that should be expected to be in many ways false.
When it is considered that minimum dating of rock art by archaeological
excavation has only been possible in about twenty cases globally since the late
19th century, and that it is in any case of limited utility in establishing true
antiquity, it becomes necessary to examine the value of archaeology to rock
art research. In particular the damage archaeology has inflicted on world rock
art needs to be considered. There are countless cases of the involvement of
archaeological consultants in the deliberate destruction of rock art and other
cultural sites, such as stone arrangements. This has occurred in all continents
ALMOGAREN 44-45/2013-2014MM61
except Antarctica. Outstanding examples can be cited from Portugal, where
whole valleys containing hundreds of sites were destroyed with the colla-boration,
acquiescence and even advancement of archaeological agencies
(Bednarik 1995a, 2004; Gonçalves 1998; Arcà et al. 2001). In Chile (Busta-mente
2006), Australia (Bednarik 2006b) and many other regions, archaeo-logical
consultants are generously rewarded by developers to destroy rock art
and other cultural sites, sometimes on an industrial scale (Figure 2). In
countries where much of the human past refers to indigenous or traditional
societies, their descendents object vigorously to this cultural vandalism, but
usually with little effect. Indigenes also object to the archaeological interpre-tation
of their past, and to its usurpation by the occupying states and their
archaeologists (Bednarik 2013).
Figure 2. Rock art de-struction
on an industrial
scale: Dampier Archipe-lago,
north-western Aus-tralia,
February 2007.
The frequent clashes between the 'octopus of archaeology' (Lorblanchet
1992) and rock art science need to be viewed in this light, but the causes of
these discords also need to be considered. They inevitably derive from the
incommensurability between the epistemology of a non-scientific, humanistic
pursuit and that of a science (Bednarik 2012a). All archaeological propositions
lack internal falsifiability, which accounts for the countless false datings and
interpretations of rock art. Archaeology, especially Pleistocene archaeology,
has a distinctive history of rejecting heresies of its dogma, extending back to
the mid-19th century, and this tendency continues today. Any scientific
corrections of dominant models are vigorously resisted, even though modern
archaeology could not possibly operate without the data provided by a range
of sciences.
Therefore the nexus between archaeology and rock art science is charac-terised
by unease. Archaeology needs the support of various sciences pro-
62MMALMOGAREN 44-45/2013-2014
foundly (e.g. nuclear science, chemistry, palynology, sedimentology), but
objects to its own interpretations of scientific evidence being critically assessed
by any outsiders. It presents the profile of one of Kuhn's (1962) disciplines of
'pre-paradigmatic state'. Rock art science, which is dominated by forensic
methodology, is therefore suspicious of archaeological interpretations, such
as those of the meanings of rock art, its perceived styles and its claimed
chronologies. In fact it perceives only one utility of archaeology: in the
excavation of sediment-covered petroglyphs. Archaeology's de-facto univer-sal
theory, marked by uniformitarianism and ethnographic analogy; its
arbitrary imposition of etic taxonomies; its treatment of rock art as art; its
restrictive practices and its destructive methods and ethical impairments are
all anathema to scientific rock art research.
Interpretation of rock art: an ethnography of archaeologists
The most pervasive human reaction to rock art, irrespective of the age,
ethnicity or mental conditioning of the beholder (such as academic training),
is to try to figure out what it depicts and what it means. If adequate clues are
spotted in a motif to invite an 'identification', it is considered to be figurative
or iconographic, and it is then interpreted on the basis of such perceived
diagnostics. Clearly, then, this process reflects the values, mental constructs
and visual responses of the beholder rather than the producer of the rock art
motif. Moreover, it is a form of circular reasoning: because one believes to
detect interpretable details in an image, these details must have been placed
with the intention of rendering them interpretable. The underlying notion is
that the interpreter of rock art somehow 'communicates' with the 'mind' of the
rock art producer.
Vision of the type used by primates derives from a complex neural system
involving the eye, the optic nerve and chiasm conveying the information to
the thalamus (lateral geniculate nucleus), and the primary visual cortex in the
occipital lobe, from where it is disseminated through the cortical hierarchy of
the visual cortex and visual association cortex. According to the two-streams
hypothesis (Mishkin & Ungerleider 1982), the ventral stream, connecting to
the medial temporal lobe, limbic system and dorsal stream, is involved in
recognising, identifying and categorising visual information.
However, the effectiveness of this process of detecting meaningful patterns
in the visual data and interpreting them is determined by the state of
interconnectedness of the various brain regions involved as well as other
factors, such as the degree of integration between the left prefrontal cortical
areas and memory. The level and volume of prefrontal cortex activity is widely
ALMOGAREN 44-45/2013-2014MM63
variable among human brains and, depending on the amount of integration it
facilitates, degrees of constellated psychic contents are more or less available
for conscious analysis. Having evolved in a patterned world, the brain
inevitably has the stamp of patterns built into its structure, and it is patterns it
seeks. This can result in apophenia, the experience of seeing meaningful
patterns or connections in random or meaningless data, a Type 1 error.
(Archaeology, obviously, is very much preoccupied with detecting patterns in
data.) Of particular relevance here is a special form of it, pareidolia, in which
iconographic patterns are detected in random phenomena. It is most strongly
developed in individuals whose brains are sub-optimally integrated and
provide limited sophistication of their cause and effect reasoning.
In the scanning of rock art imagery by human vision, much the same neural
structures as those causing pareidolia are involved. The neurophysiological
limitations of rock art interpretation are somewhat different, but there are
also parallels. The low connectivity between the hemispheres responsible for
what neuroscientists call 'magical thinking' (association-based causal
reasoning) contributes to susceptibility to pareidolia. In rock art interpretation,
it is the susceptibility to autosuggestion that contributes to the conviction that
the modern beholder's visual perception is capable of extracting emic meaning
from pigment traces or petroglyph marks made in pre-History. This miscon-ception
seems to be attributable to the view that modern mentality and
behaviour can be attributed to all humans since about 30 or 40 millennia ago.
That error is so ingrained in orthodox archaeology that it seems almost im-possible
to correct, and yet it is self-evident that practically all rock art was
created by non-literate people. They most certainly had no 'modern minds'
(Bednarik 2012b). Helvenston (2013) has masterly explained that the brains of
literates and of people with oral-aural traditions are very differently organised
and connected. Those of non-literates operate largely through magical
thinking, whereas the operation by cause and effect reasoning is acquired
ontologically. Therefore the most reliable modern interpreters of rock art
should be infants, followed by illiterates. The least qualified are modern
academic sophisticates, especially archaeologists. And yet it is the latter who
keep telling us what rock arts mean (Chippindale 2001).
In the history of rock art research there has only been one blind test of an
academic's determinations of what had been depicted in rock art. But he was
much better qualified than archaeologists to present these; he was a distin-guished
professor of anatomy. Macintosh (1977) had become aware that the
makers of a large Australian painting site of biomorphs he had twenty years
previously recorded were still alive, so he asked them to identify each motif at
64MMALMOGAREN 44-45/2013-2014
the site he had earlier 'identified'. He found that about 90% of his expert
interpretations had been false. Thus Macintosh demonstrated that his intimate
understanding of anatomy was no help in establishing the correct identities of
a large series of human and other animal images. Since then, the Australian
rock art researchers have universally adopted the convention of placing all
rock art motif determinations in quotation marks to indicate that they are
merely fictional names. This has not yet been understood by many of those
working elsewhere, which is unfortunate when one considers that it is only in
Australia that substantial and comprehensive ethnographic and emic meanings
of rock art are readily available. This wealth of reliable information about
rock art interpretation has shown in countless examples that the perception of
cultural aliens is not capable of interpreting any rock art reliably.
Elsewhere archaeologists continue the practice of telling everyone else what
the rock art means and depicts, in the safe knowledge that their pronoun-cements
cannot be tested, cannot be falsified, being fundamentally unscientific
propositions. This has led to thousands of claims that range from the likely to
the nonsensical and the absurd. Not only do these self-appointed interpreters
of rock art tell us what is depicted, they even claim to know that the subject is
running, falling, swimming, pregnant, praying, dead or whatever else they
happen to perceive in the biomorph motifs.
Some motifs in China were interpreted as
depicting giraffes (Figure 3), and since this
species became extinct there before the
Pleistocene, the petroglyphs in question
were dated to the Tertiary period. And why
not, there are countless precedents where
archaeologists have dated rock art through
their 'identifications' of objects depicted. An
Australian example of apparent giraffes in
rock art (Figure 4) has been contributed only
recently, but without yielding claims of
giraffes in the Antipodes. The astute resear-cher
in question, David Welch, looked into
the ethnography and determined the correct
interpretation of these enigmatic figures
(Welch 2012). Thousands of other examples
of unsubstantiated and absurd claims of this
kind, ranging from zoomorphs to 'shamans'
to the purported attitudes of biomorphs
Figure 3. 'Giraffe' petroglyphs in
China 'of the Tertiary'.
ALMOGAREN 44-45/2013-2014MM65
could be cited in the archaeological literature. And all too often they are
somehow interwoven with chronological contentions or connotations.
Figure 4. Australian 'giraffes'. For correct identification see Welch (2012).
Provided that all these interpretations are offered for the purpose of creating
an entertaining folklore about the art, a new mythology, one could not possibly
object to them. Indeed, such interpretations may even be useful to the
neuroscientist, because from them s/he can learn about the perception of the
person seeking to interpret the palaeoart. If the rock art interpreter speaks her/
his language and is capable of analysing her/his own responses to the palaeoart
(to tell, for instance, very precisely why s/he thinks an animal figure is of a
dying individual), an analysable example of an ethnographic reaction to an
alien art becomes available. Indeed, an ethnographic or neuroscientific
examination of archaeological claims seems to hold a great deal of promise in
learning why archaeologists engage in rock art interpretation. An ethnography
of archaeologists is long overdue and this is where it could begin usefully.
Provided archaeologists indulge in interpretation without physical interference
with the rock art it is a perfectly harmless pastime, and there can be no objection
to it. Rock art interpretation is highly stimulating, it has been practised for
millennia, it enriches our experience and it can embellish our own art, culture
66MMALMOGAREN 44-45/2013-2014
and existence. It can help us create more myths about the past; we can invent
our own favoured story of what happened in that past. Provided that in the
process we do not belittle any other culture or inflict any damage on the rock
art, there can be no objection to such quests – as long as we make no attempt
of presenting them as science.
Discussion
One of the many false assumptions made in archaeology is that Pleistocene
hominins that created the Franco-Cantabrian cave art must have had a 'mo-dern
mind' because we can understand what they intended to convey with
their imagery. Indeed, the latter assumption is the basis of interpreting this
palaeoart corpus. But both assumptions are unsupported: the 'mind', whatever
this word is meant to refer to, of contemporary people differs significantly
from the mental processes and neural structures of humans 30,000 years ago;
and the surviving body of their engravings and paintings cannot be scien-tifically
interpreted. Apparently iconic rock art motifs are abstractions of the
visual characteristics of real objects rather than faithful likenesses of them. It
is then essential to decide which attributes of an image are diagnostic for its
identification, and which are not. The strategy of the beholders is to scan the
image for clues they think they can identify, and these are then assumed to be
diagnostic in identifying what the figure depicts. Needless to say that the
conventions of selecting categorising attributes are culturally and ontogeni-cally
determined, which means that there is no reason to assume that modern
people share them with ancient societies.
Certain rock art traditions, such as the Upper Palaeolithic cave art or the
southern African paintings attributed to the San Bushmen, are more likely than
others to be confidently interpreted by modern, westernised conspecifics, but
even this assumption is probably a self-deception. The appearance of graphic
naturalism does not warrant the conjecture that the cognitive or perceptive
strategies of the artist are shared by the modern beholder. Lack of falsifiability
of these beliefs renders them unreliable and scientifically irrelevant.
It follows from these observations that in focusing on interpretation and
recording of rock art, traditional archaeology has contributed little of scientific
value to rock art research. These two approaches are intimately entwined, in
that much recording amounts to interpretation. Even when the marks on the
rocks are faithfully recorded – which is frequently not the case – any
quantification of the documentation is susceptible to misinterpretation. In
particular, any such record can only be of a present state of the evidence, it is
not a representative sample for defining aspects of the living system that
ALMOGAREN 44-45/2013-2014MM67
produced the rock art in question. To generate a viable sample requires the
application of taphonomic logic (Bednarik 1994b) to the documentation,
otherwise whole fictional traditions of rock art can be invented. For instance
if a small portion of major art traditions of the Pleistocene were executed in
deep limestone caves, where it could survive, but none of the arts of these
traditions survived anywhere else, precipitate interpretation would tend to
view this as evidence of traditions executed exclusively in caves. Archaeology
then tends to reinforce such misconceptions by basing on it catenulate
construals, such as the contention that the exclusive occurrence in caves
implies religious functions, which then invokes shamanistic and similar
derived interpretations. From an epistemological perspective, this chain of
misconstructions began with the misidentification of the 'common crucial
denominator of the phenomenon category' (Bednarik 1990/91): the CCD of
Franco-Cantabrian 'cave art' is probably not location; more likely it is selective
survival (taphonomy).
Similar forms of reasoning can be applied to many other forms of
interpretation in archaeology. The epistemological discrepancies between an
unfalsifiable humanistic pursuit and the sciences are too great to expect a
reconciliation between the two, just as there can be no connection between
science and religion. One system of understanding is based on confirmation
and faith (and the reasoning of magical thinking), the other on disconfirmation
and scepticism (and on cause and effect reasoning). Archaeology and rock art
science have no choice but to pursue different paths to understanding.
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