2024. Animals of the Serranía de la Lindosa: Exploring representation and categorisation in the rock art and zooarchaeological remains of the Colombian Amazon (with Robinson, Osborn, Aceituno, Morcote-Ríos, Ziegler, and Iriarte)
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 75, 2024
The Serranía de la Lindosa in the Colombian Amazon hosts one of the most spectacular global rock ... more The Serranía de la Lindosa in the Colombian Amazon hosts one of the most spectacular global rock art traditions. Painted in vibrant ochre pigments, the artwork depicts abstract and figurative designs – including a high diversity of animal motifs – and holds key information for understanding how Amazonians made sense of their world. We compare a zooarchaeological assemblage with painted depictions of animals at the Cerro Azul site, and utilise relevant ethnographies and ethnohistories. A lack of direct proportional relationships between the animal representation in the art and zooarchaeological remains alludes to the complex socio-cultural interconnection between Amazonian communities and their ritualised environments. We discuss the benefits and limitations of quantitative categorisation and explore Indigenous ontologies, highlighting Amazonian perspectives on human-animal relationships.
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Papers by Jamie Hampson
Many years before the so-called ontological and materialist ‘turns’ in archaeological and anthropological theory, ideational cognitive archaeologists in several parts of the world – southern Africa in particular – made progress towards understanding at least some of the motivations behind the creation of rock art. Working closely with Indigenous groups, and tacking back and forth between ethnographic, neurological, and material data, researchers were able to challenge the nihilist assertion that ‘we will never know anything about the motivations behind, or indeed about the meanings of, Indigenous art’. In this chapter, I consider historiography, theoretical developments, and in situ case studies from southern Africa, North America, and Australia. I show that hermeneutic and cross-disciplinary research into rock paintings and engravings is one of the most effective and compelling ways of understanding cognitive archaeology, numerous ontological outlooks, and what happened in the past.
Aboriginal art in Australia.
challenges, and unforeseen events that can impact rock art recording projects, paying attention to site context and the motifs themselves. It also explores the use of photography, video recording, computer enhancement techniques, and digital modeling in documenting rock art sites; the most common forms of damage that recorders may inflict; where and how records of sites and motifs are stored; and who should be able to
access these records and how. The chapter concludes with a future outlook for documenting rock art sites.
If you are interested please send a 200-word (max) abstract, 5 or 6 keywords, and 2 jpg or tiff images (min resolution 300dpi) before 30 November to:
ifrao2018@ccsp.it
Histories of archaeology (e.g. Willey & Sabloff 1974; Fagan 1995; Murray & Evans 2008) often imply that, until recently, there were no systematic studies of rock art. Some studies (e.g. Trigger 1989; Kehoe 1998) devote two or three pages to rock art studies; others do not mention rock art at all. This bias has many roots, one being the lack of incorporating personal and institutional archive materials into rock art studies; indeed, most archaeological research before the Modern Era of Christian Jürgensen Thomsen and others did not end up in printed books. Implicit theoretical biases within the discipline of archaeology have also led to the privileging of stratigraphic excavation in describing the history of archaeology. Ironically echoing the famous notion that ‘American archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing’ (Willey & Phillips 1958: 2), the implication in these histories is that without stratigraphy, archaeology is nothing.
Rock art researchers have in fact successfully married data collection with theory for more than 300 years. Indeed, some researchers were pioneers in defining the intellectual concepts and frameworks that are still used in cognitive, heuristic, and problem-oriented research today (see, e.g., Whitley & Clottes 2005; Hampson 2015). We do not suggest that there is a single factor that unites or united rock art researchers; nor do we claim that there is a neat evolutionary tale running through the history of rock art research. In this session, however, we invite speakers to concentrate on the aims and successes of both famous and less well-known rock art studies, both chronologically and thematically, and show that rock art researchers helped to shape the discipline of archaeology. We aim to demonstrate that rock at research did and does matter.