ROCK ART - ART HISTORY VS. ARCHAEOLOGY (WHO SHOULD STUDY IT?):

I have long maintained that archaeologists are wrong in arguing that they alone should study rock art. After I had been involved in the field of rock art studies for about 20 years a recently graduated archaeologist argued to me that "you have to understand, I am a professional, you aren't." I am an art historian and I have long experience in working backwards from objects and images to try to tease out conclusions about the culture and individual that created it. This is essentially what an Art Historian does - sound familiar? When I began this the dominant position in the archaeological community was that rock art should be recorded but that it was folly to try to understand it in any way. Thank goodness those days are pretty much over.

In 2013, Severin Fowles of the Department of Anthropology, Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, summed it up much better than I ever have: "Boundary maintenance between anthropological archaeology and art history was more complicated. Of course, there has always been a kind of implicit accusation that the art historical gaze indirectly, and sometimes directly, encourages the growth of the antiquities trade and, in turn, the further looting of sites. However, the more fundamental accusation had to do with the archaeologist's (generally unwarranted) assumption that art historians succumb to the fetishistic power of the artifact itself, losing sight of the broader network of social forces out of which the artifact is but a momentary crystallization. Explanatory truths, for the archaeologist, do not reside in the artifact itself, it was said, but in "the Indian behind the artifact" or, more properly, in the system behind the Indian behind the artifact as Flannery (1967) suggested during the heyday of archaeology's scientific revolution. Such worries over the dangers of becoming fixated on artifactual things sound almost theological in retrospect. Artifacts, very much like religious icons, were said to be mere tools for reaching deeper truths and hidden organizations.

Perhaps this partly explains why late twentieth century archaeologists focused so much of their energy on the analysis of large assemblages of humble object fragments drawn from middens, fragments that do not easily enchant and that only became meaningful once they had been typologized, quantified, and transformed into percentages. Commentary on singular aesthetic objects - the mainstay of art historical writing - tended to be deemphasized precisely because material singularity interrupted the development of increasingly abstract models. This was especially true in North America where it continues to be the case that the extraordinary "museum-quality" pieces recovered from archaeological sites are often surprisingly little discussed in comparison with fragments of utilitarian pottery and other mundane remains. Somehow it came to be assumed that bits of charcoal and chipped stone debitage are inherently more scientific than murals or masks." (Fowles and Arterberry 2013: 67-8)

What Fowles is so eloquently saying is essentially that we both were wrong. Art historians focused too much on objects of "beauty" or impressive value, overlooking possible clues from less impressive items, while archaeologists tried to ignore those and skewed the record to the minute and mundane that they could "scientifically" quantify. In this way neither discipline actually could see a whole culture in all of its complexities. I have to admit that, while I know all the marks on the rock are data, I do gravitate to Fowle's objects of "beauty." Some rock art just appeals to me more than other rock art - guilty as charged.

In the end it comes down to the fact that each discipline has valuable contributions to make to the study of rock art. The real question should be who should not study rock art? That is easier to answer; UFO believers, spiritualists who psychically commune with rock art, and anyone who comes to it with a preconceived bone to pick (and I have met examples of them all at rock art conferences).

REFERENCE:

Fowles, Severin, and Jimmy Arterberry

2013 Gesture and performance in Comanche Rock Art, pages 67-82, in World Art 2013, Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, UK.