Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T07:06:50.051Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Seeing visual narrative. New methodologies in the study of prehistoric visual depictions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2014

Liliana Janik
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to establish how visual narratives can be used in the social context of storytelling, enabling the remembrance of events and those who participated in them in prehistory around the White Sea in the northernmost part of Europe. One of the largest complexes of fisher-gatherer-hunter art is located here, dating from the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age (ca 6000–4000 B.P.). A number of methodological strands are brought together to aid in the interpretation of the art, combining Western art-historical and non-Western visual traditions that challenge our modern ways of seeing. The paper proposes an unconventional interpretation of this rock art, in which the prehistoric imagery is ‘translated’ via two short films creating the visual link between past and the present.

Keywords

prehistoric artperception of visionrock carvings
Type
Articles
Information
Archaeological Dialogues , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , June 2014 , pp. 103 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arnheim, R., 1984: Art and the visual perception, Berkeley and Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Gjerde, J.-M., 2010: The location of rock pictures is an interpretive element, in Barndon, R., Innselset, S.M., Kristoffersen, K.K. and Lødøen, T.K. (eds), Samfunn, symboler og identitet. Festskrift til Gro Mandt på 70-årsdagen, Bergen, 197–209.Google Scholar
Gombrich, E.H., 1995: The story of art, London.Google Scholar
Hagen, M.A., 1986: Variety of realism. Geometries of representational art, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Helskog, K., 1999: The shore connection. Cognitive landscape and communication with rock carvings in northernmost Europe, Norwegian archaeological review 32 (2), 73–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Helskog, K., 2010a: From the tyranny of the figures to the interrelationship between myths, rock art and their surfaces, in Blundell, G., Chippindale, C. and Smith, B. (eds), Seeing and knowing. Rock art with and without ethnography. Johannesburg, 168–87.Google Scholar
Helskog, K., 2010b: Reindeer corrals 4700–4200 BC. Myth or reality?, Quaternary international 238, 25–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Helskog, K., 2012: Bears and meanings among hunter-fisher-gatherers in northern Fennoscandia 9000–2500 BC, Cambridge archaeological journal 22 (2), 209–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Janik, L., 2009: Interpreting visual narrative. From North European rock art to shamanic drums of northern peoples, in Seglie, D., Otte, M., Oosterbeek, L. and Remacle, L. (eds), Prehistoric art. Signs, symbols, myth, ideology, IFRAO – Global state of the art, Lisbon (Proceedings of the XV International Union for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences World Congress, 27) and Oxford (British Archaeological Reports, International Series, 2028), 79–85.Google Scholar
Janik, L., 2010: Time and space. The chronology of White Sea rock carvings, Acta archaeologica 81, 83–94.Google Scholar
Janik, L., 2012: ‘Noble death’. Images of violence in the rock art of White Sea, in Cochrane, A. and Jones, A. (eds), Visualising the Neolithic. Abstraction, figuration, performance, representation, Oxford, 39–49.Google Scholar
Janik, L., Roughley, C. and Szczęsna, K., 2007: Skiing on the rocks. Experiential art of prehistoric fisher-gatherer-hunters from northern Russia, Cambridge archaeological journal 17 (3), 297–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Livingston, M., 2002: Vision and art. The biology of seeing, New York.Google Scholar
Lobanova, N.V., 2007: Petroglyphs at Starya Zalavruga. New evidence – new outlook. Archaeology, ethnology and anthropology of Eurasia 29 (1), 127–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Savvateev, Y.A., 1967: Risunki na skalah, Petrozavodsk.Google Scholar
Savvateev, Y.A., 1970: Zalavruga, petroglify, Leningrad.Google Scholar
Shanks, M., and Hodder, I., 1998: Processual, postprocessual and interpretative archaeologies, in Whitley, D.S. (ed.), Reader in archaeological theory, London and New York, 68–98.Google Scholar
Zeki, S., 1999: Inner vision, Oxford.Google Scholar