Research on rock art around the world takes for granted the premise that rock art, as a product of the Upper Palaeolithic symbolic revolution, is a natural behavioral expression of Homo sapiens, essentially reflecting new cognitive abilities and intellectual capacity of modern humans. New discoveries of Late Pleistocene rock art in Southeast Asia as well as recent dates of Neandertal rock art are also framed in this light. We contend in this paper that, contrary to this essentialist non-interpretation, rock art is a historical product. Most human groups have not made rock art. Rock art's main characteristic is its inherent territorial/spatial dimension. Moreover, or probably because of it, rock art is fundamentally associated with food-producing economies. The debate between the cognitive versus social and historical character of rock art is rarely explicitly addressed. In this paper we explore this historical dimension through examples from rock-art corpora worldwide: they provide key case studies to highlight the relevance of addressing the different temporalities of rock-art traditions, their interruptions and, therefore, their historical qualities.

中文翻译：

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岩石艺术的历史维度：“外围”的视角


世界各地的岩画研究理所当然地认为，岩画作为旧石器时代晚期象征革命的产物，是智人的自然行为表达，本质上反映了现代人类新的认知能力和智力能力。东南亚晚更新世岩石艺术的新发现以及尼安德特人岩石艺术的最新发现也都是从这个角度出发的。我们在本文中主张，与这种本质主义的非解释相反，岩石艺术是一种历史产物。大多数人类群体都没有创作过岩石艺术。岩石艺术的主要特征是其固有的地域/空间维度。此外，或者可能正因为如此，岩画从根本上与粮食生产经济联系在一起。岩画的认知特征与社会历史特征之间的争论很少得到明确的解决。在本文中，我们通过世界各地岩石艺术语料库的例子来探索这一历史维度：它们提供了关键案例研究，以强调解决岩石艺术传统的不同时间性、它们的中断及其历史品质的相关性。