Abstract
Rock art is unusual in the hunter-gatherer archaeological record inasmuch as it is commonly visible on natural landscape surfaces. This contributed to a kind of physical and cognitive durability, persisting on the landscape and serving as a reservoir for collective memory. Yet rock art is also dynamic and could serve as a nexus for contestation and change. Three topics highlight the dialectical tension between rock art’s art contribution to cultural conservatism and its importance as an avenue for change. I first discuss the place of rock art in culture following Huebner’s (Macrocognition: a theory of distributed minds and collective intentionality. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014) theory of macro-cognition, which involves distributed minds and collective intentionality, promoting group-wide meta-representations that are foundational to collective memory. I turn next to the question of dynamism versus stability. As the archaeological and ethnographic records show, rock art was far from static, even beyond the performative aspects of its creation. It was likely the dynamic, affective outcomes of rituals associated with rock art that helped inculcate the emotional commitments to collective memory that are keys to group identity formation and cultural transmission. I finally discuss rock art as an indicator of changes over time in collective memories. These include both changes between and within ethnic groups, illustrating that rock art could in some cases mark territory but, in others, be deployed to support emergent systems of dominance.
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Whitley, D.S. (2022). Culture, Memory and Rock Art. In: Zubieta, L.F. (eds) Rock Art and Memory in the Transmission of Cultural Knowledge. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96942-4_2
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